Inherent Racism in VGM’s Underrepresentation of Black Musical Cultures
“Baba Yetu”, the theme song to Civilization IV, released in 2005, is one of the most widely-acclaimed pieces of videogame music, and still the only piece written for a game that has won a Grammy Award.
A Swahili translation of the Lord’s Prayer, the song perfectly illustrates what happens when video game music diverts from prevalent musical cultures and structures and promotes diversity. It’s generally acknowledged as a rich, uplifting piece of music, and it has attained such popularity that not only has it been widely performed for entertainment, it’s also been a part of the signing of the Mozambique peace accord.
“Baba Yetu” is of course meant to represent the intention of the Civilization franchise at large, which celebrates human achievement by letting players engage in history through interactive means. However, “Baba Yetu” inadvertently highlights the unavoidable bias in Civ itself—the black cultures represented by the music, in this case peoples of South Africa and smaller parts of North Africa, aren’t available to play in the base game. The music video, too, layers this version of the Lord’s Prayer, ostensibly meant to stand for the unity of men, over images of conquest and war, notably by driving colonial forces. This doesn’t take away from power of the track itself, but it does show that the existence of it and other game music tracks with similarly rare influences, are easily overshadowed by predominant Western forces.
Videogame music uses Western and Japanese culture as a blueprint. For one, that’s because most games as a whole do, too. The influence of both cultures has potentially even heightened with heightened realism—more games based on and around real social constructs and places mean music will have to fit the time periods and styles we associate with what we’re shown. If a game isn’t set in Africa, music played in sub-Saharan African harmony or using African instruments will feel out of place to many. Since there are nearly no games exclusively set in a real African country; however, the only opportunities for music from black traditions to be played come from game franchises with a global environment like Civilization, Total War, Call of Duty, or the Africa stage in Street Fighter IV.
Musical association persists in fantastical games that are either implicitly or explicitly not set on Earth too because these games are of course made by humans who extrapolate from their own cultural understanding. In this category, there is quite a large number of games with tracks that use instruments, harmonies and rhythms of African origin. However, there’s again one troubling association—these pieces, from games like Donkey Kong Country, Mario and Luigi, Zelda, and Sonic immediately associate the music with the jungle as its one, overarching theme. It’s so pervasive that it’s more notable to play a game with a jungle level without this kind of music than with it. The same is true for any kind of desert level using oriental music, often prominently featuring the Arabic oud, a type of lute.
It’s not inherently problematic to make African music with the jungle in mind, but ‘jungle music’ is connected to the persistent racist idea of Africans as uncultured savages, and of course there is no one jungle. To mix everything from Polynesian, Mayan, African, and Arabian music into one landscape shows that developers and composers have a casual disregard for these cultures, while the many different European and American musical genres are finely separated. This isn’t malicious, but a result of educational focus. Even one of the best soundtracks incorporating African music not just in one or two tracks, but across almost the entire game, Yoku’s Island Express (composed by Jesse Harlin), was still written for a game set in a jungle.
Videogame music also carries with it the associations between narrative genres and music. Take the L.A. Noire soundtrack, written by Simon and Andrew Hale. It uses blues, itself an African-American invention, to accompany a film noir-inspired narrative. The association of blues with film noir can be traced back to a single instance—the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Its usage of blues is a testament to the genre’s persistent popularity, nothing else. Now, blues is eponymous with film noir. The case of Cuphead’s great soundtrack by jazz musician Kristopher Maddigan is similar, using a style of music linked to a certain style in animation. As Yussef Cole writes in his article on the racist history of the game’s visuals, the history of jazz in the animation industry, which also began due to the music’s acclaim and usefulness in scoring animation, is also one of barely concealed ridicule.
The first game in the Mafia franchise, uses jazz and blues in a historically much more accurate way, by portraying the listening habits of people at the time. Here, only the in-game soundtrack via the radio contains jazz and blues songs, which shows that people of all races enjoyed the music itself for entertainment, mostly without acknowledgement or even awareness of the subjects they reference. You can hear Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang”, for example, inspired by Cooke and his brother coming across a group of prisoners who were chained together by the ankle. While Cooke makes no direct reference, the chain gang is a racist spectre of the Old South, having originated there.
With the gaming industry being predominantly white, including composers educated mainly on principles of Western classical music, there is no one straightforward way to introduce more diverse musical traditions to videogame music. “Baba Yetu” was itself something of a happy accident. Christopher Tin had been inspired by performances of The Stanford Talisman, an a cappella group which at that time specialized in African music. Ape Out, with its jazzy drum soundtrack by Matt Boch, is completely inspired by “You’ve Got to Have Freedom” by Pharoa Sanders. Sometimes all it takes it coincidence.
Better than coincidence is the willingness to leave a musical comfort zone. This applies to developers, composers, and ultimately players. There’s little hope of full games being set in Africa anytime soon, but it is possible to uncouple the music from images like the jungle to use it in a broader sense. Humans made those associations, and they can correct them by using different musical genres more widely. Musical fusion is also a possible avenue—no one bats an eye at a hip-hop or metal track in a Final Fantasy game anymore for example, and the principle is the same. This requires willingness to learn. Western classical music is predominant because it’s an accepted, widely-taught standard with a well-documented history, unlike African music, much of which has only been passed on orally. But, the opportunities to learn more are better than ever. Not every base can be covered that way, and ultimately games are required to tell more diverse stories to allow for more diverse…everything, from characters to visuals to music, but you have to start somewhere, and the first step can be taken anytime.
Malindy Hetfeld
Malindy Hetfeld is a full-time freelance writer and translator specializing in game narrative, Japanese games, and, of course, music. You can find her work on Eurogamer.net, Unwinnable.com, Official Playstation Magazine and more.
