blog☆
tied up 1: frantic basslines
26 jun 2026
this is post #1 from the tied up series, where i try to tie together a group of things that i love for the same reason. hopefully i can persuade you to love them too!
i'm obsessed with a specific style of bassline, but i'm not sure that it has a name. it's frantic, jumpy, faster than the rest of the song, and usually (but not always) synthesised. i can't get enough of it and it makes me grin like a little freak and i need to know where it came from.
it's all over japanese video games, here are some examples: the course select theme from mario kart wii; gentle breeze from under the knife. but it's in western games too: deep into the caribbean from monkey island 2 stands out as a great one.
in most examples, the song is relatively laid back, with only the bass going bananas. but there are some faster songs that have more aggressive basslines that i consider to be in the same family: the rival theme from pokemon bw2; rude buster from deltarune. this fast bass is so synonymous with tension in video games that it's sometimes used as shorthand for a boss fight outside of video games, like the solo in unite synchronization from homestuck.
where did this style of bass come from?
i assumed that this must have originated somewhere in pop music, so since this style seems to be the most popular in japan, i went back to city pop. the chorus of safari night by junko ohashi is a decent example of this bass in a pop song, but it's really not that old. we'll have to go back further.
what about some western pop? la isla bonita by madonna sounds strikingly like the monkey island track i showed, but while the bass has the same punchy, synthesised sound, it chugs along in a laid-back manner. not what i'm looking for. you spin me right round is more like it, but while the bass is undeniably funky, it still hangs around on one note; it's the other instruments that are jumping around like a child on sherbert. we're still a way off.
then i got inspired. what about one of the earliest electronic musicians? axel f by harold faltermeyer is getting pretty close. this is from 1984 and could easily be a 90s DS game track.
i still felt like i was missing something obvious, though. axel f feels already well-developed, like it's using ideas that are already well-established. am i... am i just looking for like, the concept of funk?
jamiroquai is pretty close, canned heat has a chorus like this, but again, much too new. i was pretty sure that older funk was a lot slower, like word up and september, with basslines that savoured every note rather than flitting between them, but i decided to look through some "funk classics" playlists until i got a hit.
i was not disappointed. listen to this from tower of power! a song from 1974 that sounds almost exactly like mario kart in style. exactly what i was after!
it's not got that synthesised punchy sound, but the speed is there. i can't find any information about what influenced this song, so this is a dead end for now, but at least it's fire.
here's one final example: a relatively new song that has this incredible solo. i'm fairly sure a. r. rahman isn't a gamer, so this gives me hope for more leads.
at the end of all this, i still think there probably isn't a name to whatever style i'm vaguely gesturing at here. but please, if you have any more songs with bass like this, send them my way.
until next time,
mzw☆
comments? questions? leave a note or email me!☆