Eclectic Tennō: Japanese Video Game Soundtracks as Agents of Postmodernity

Among all new media, Japan especially excels in producing video games. If we take a listen to the musical aspects of those products, we can easily notice some consistencies, for instance when it comes to their frequent eclecticism – horizontal (different styles in different moments of the soundtrack) and vertical (different style flags acting at the same moment of the soundtrack). Basing my argumentation on case studies taken from different video games series, I will try to give an interpretation to the persistence of such a phenomenon, that is not that frequent in Western counterparts. Why Japan, and why video games? Is it something that we can find in Japanese anime and live action movies, too? What role could Western instances of eclecticism have had on such an approach? And what about Japanese-based genres such as Visual Kei or J-pop, which were apparently often interested in eclecticism? What is the role of Japan’s postmodern culture in all of this, and what about the technologies involved in the creation of those soundtracks? Different paths can be taken to understand this phenomenon, situated as it is at the crossroads between local and global, but I especially aim at understanding why and how new technologies and media have in this case worked as agents of postmodernity, by fostering hybridization and eclecticism, and by spreading them to a very wide and popular audience, that was previously most likely not very much into similar kinds of music – and, possibly, making such an approach even more popular.