"Vacant Lives" from 1080° Snowboarding on the Nintendo 64 (1998)
Composer: Kenta "gon" Nagata
Vocals: Wataru Yamaguchi
Label: Nintendo of America
Developer: Nintendo EAD
I landed on "Vacant Lives" partly because of how much time Dr. Potts and I (and the rest of our household) put into playing 1080° Snowboarding back in the early 2000s. It is also because there is still a pile of snow outside of our house here in the Portlandia area more than a week after it dumped just about a foot of snow in less than 24 hours. To note, we typically only receive one to two inches of snow each year.
I thought I would showcase "Vacant Lives" by Mr. Kenta "gon" Nagata because it is the opening/menu theme that plays when you first turn the game on, and honestly, aside from the "Let's Go!" at the beginning of the song, my brain never registered the rest of the lyrics, presumably because they are sung in Japanese. Except that is isn't "Let's Go!" and it's not sung in Japanese after all. This could be an artistic choice by illustrator Wataru Yamaguchi, it could be the type of distortion used on the vocals, or it could be that the Nintendo 64 sound chip just didn't want to digitize the sound of the human voice into something that would be perceptible to the human ear. Except I do not believe that last one.
So in these final days of snow covered city streets, I would like you all to enjoy "Vacant Lives." Or don't, it's not everybody's bottle of Tequila, but it does really wish that my N64 was still in working condition.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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