05.12.23: Notes on Shoji Meguro

Everyone's dancing furiously!

What if your track coach was a pedophile and also a deformed cognitive incarnation of the lustful Talmudic demon Asmodeus? What if Lucifer had a pimp cane and some valid points? And what if his theme music fucking ripped?

This is a newsletter about music and musicians, I promise, but first: video games.

Megami Tensei, a.k.a. Megaten, is a long-running franchise of Japanese role-playing games. There’s the mainline series, Shin Megami Tensei, and several spinoffs, chiefly Persona. Shin Megami Tensei and Persona share some fundamental aspects in gameplay and mythology, but they’re otherwise quite different in structure and tone. They’re also both very anime but in very different styles. Shin Megami Tensei is a grim and unforgiving post-apocalyptic, choose-your-own-morality play that often culminates with you killing your friends and challenging some all-powerful embodiment of the divine will and/or Lucifer. Persona, on the other hand, is a vibrant and groovy pre-apocalyptic high school drama about anxious teens confronting a variety of adolescent pressures and social ills as they work up the power and courage to kill God. Furthermore Persona has its own spinoffs, including a series of — see above — dancing games! The only one of those that really matters is Persona 4: Dancing All Night because the remixes for it are fucking incredible.

The music of Megaten is very special indeed.

Shoji Meguro is the most famous composer for Megaten and one of the most notable figures in video game music of recent years. The developer Atlus hired Meguro to score Revelations: Persona in 1995, and he’s since made his name scoring the modern entries — Persona 3, 4, and 5 — with some of the most popular and exciting music of the past few console generations. As someone who first picked up a saxophone because I wanted to learn how to play Nobuo Uematsu's big melodies from Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII, I'm telling you, Meguro's Persona soundtracks have likely sparked something similar in many younger gamers. A couple years ago Meguro left Atlus to make his own games, though he says he’ll still be working closely with Atlus as a freelancer for the foreseeable future; I assume he’ll still be a major player in the presumably forthcoming Persona 6. Here I’m looking back at his musical legacy as split into distinct pieces across the subseries of this sprawling franchise. He’s not the only composer credited on these soundtracks, but he worked on all the songs linked in this post.

Meguro is one of a few key composers on the non-Persona titles. Shin Megami Tensei is very metal and electronic, and its soundtracks tend to bit dirtier and screwier, e.g., the final boss of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne pulls some techno out of nowhere. Meguro was the lead composer for Nocturne. That game is a tremendous collection of songs, though a few of its musical themes, such as “Ginza” and “Puzzle Boy,” are pulled from the original Shin Megami Tensei, scored by Tsukasa Masuko, on the Super Nintendo. Nocturne, Digital Devil Saga, and Strange Journey are Meguro’s big contributions to this part of the catalog. The music of Shin Megami Tensei and the non-Persona spinoffs is very synthetic, loop-driven, hypnotic. These games are often long, masochistic ordeals designed to get you hopelessly lost in a drab dungeon or furiously re-attempting a boss fight for several hours at a time. (This is more fun than it sounds.) The music is accordingly designed to keep the player vibing in and out of battle. This is true of the music in many JRPGs, of course, but Meguro is especially bold and dare I say a bit mischievous in his compositions. His eclecticism almost always suits these games extremely well, though I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of his extremely generic string-driven JRPG operatics in Strange Journey.

In contrast to the mainline series, Persona is a catchy, crowd-pleasing mix of hip-hop, R&B, acid jazz, lounge music, pop rock, a bit of funk, and a splash of J-pop for good measure. Catherine, another game published by Atlus and scored by Meguro, is musically similar to Persona but with a distinct emphasis on classical music and piano pieces. These soundtracks are pulsing and childish in the best way. The games themselves can be quite dark, e.g., Persona 3 is a game very largely about death and grief, and these soundtracks often serve as a sort of tonal counterbalance. Persona is also notable for its heavy use of vocalists on songs, such as battle themes and overworld themes, where other titles would typically use instrumentals. Lotus Juice writes a lot of the lyrics for the lead singers — Yumi Kawamura in Persona 3, Shihoko Hirata in Persona 4, Lyn in Persona 5 — and also, iconically, he raps. Lotus Juice is certainly one of the Asian rappers of all time. These are Japanese games, mind you, with Japanese vocalists often performing in English, and this gives a lot of these songs a sort of lost-in-translation quality that enhances their mystique to some (read: weebs, such as myself) and makes them sound goofy as hell to others. The larger themes in the lyrics are legible and effective, don’t get me wrong, these songs are great, but the wordplay is often jumbled and mumbled and dream-like. On these points Lotus Juice somewhat reminds me of G-Dep.

Reasoning about Meguro’s musical influences is a bit tricky. I’d say this about so many Japanese video game composers, honestly. Years ago I watched Diggin’ In the Carts, and I remember scratching my head at Uematsu trying to explain how Elton John¹ inspired “One-Winged Angel.” (Uematsu is getting his own post here sooner or later. So is Shimomura. Don’t worry.) Meguro’s music is all very him and yet his taste is all over the place. Plus there’s some refraction in his outlook on Western music. In an AMA a few months ago he said Persona 4 was pop rock, which is a crazy pronouncement to me since half of that OST sounds like TLC and JoJo. Though admittedly the other half is stuff like “Reach Out to the Truth,” “I’ll Face Myself,” and “The Fog,” so I suppose I get what he means. In any case I’d say Persona is much more in tune with pop conventions and thus much more likely to make immediate sense to a naive listener who isn’t coming to this post with a pre-existing passion for Japanese video game music. Put another way: of all the soundtracks in this franchise, only the Persona OSTs are on Spotify.

Different soundtracks for different moods. Overall I prefer the soundtracks for Persona 4, with its bittersweet mall music; and Nocturne, with its sleazy growling and thrashing. Persona 5 is obviously great but perhaps leans a little too hard on acid jazz — though I love this one mix, “Megaten Acid Jazz 2-24-21,” by the late Megaten enthusiast KDA. The so-called future pop themes of Persona 3 are great, and unlike KDA, I love Lotus Juice, but the overall integration of pop, hip-hop, and rock is a bit rough in that game.

Lastly I’ll note that Megaten is one of many great VGM web communities, full of musicians doing cool covers and impressive interpretations. I’ll link a few of those below and send you on your merry way. I really do hope readers will spend some time clicking through these songs — I could sit here rambling for a few thousand words longer without even beginning to do them justice. Rest in peace, KDA.

1. I’ve possibly gotten this mixed up. Ian Cory of Lamniformes Cuneiform notes Stravinsky and Hendrix as the named influences on “One-Winged Angel,” and now that I think about it I do recall Uematsu talking about Hendrix as well as Elton John in the RBMA doc.