The Singles Jukebox

Frank brings us the first, and probably only, Brazilian Mario funk track featured on the Jukebox…

[Video]
[6.17]

Frank Kogan: The videogame original rolls and rocks and rolls some more, while this favela funk version adds vocals that roll along in double-time, inviting a young woman to “bounce hard and shake it, girl” and declaring one’s intention to smoke weed.
[9]

Ian Mathers: Sometimes I just love human creativity. I think I felt a surprisingly high fraction of every possible emotion in just under two minutes listening to this.
[8]

Alfred Soto: I lasted 50 seconds!
[3]

Iain Mew: DRAM already mined Koji Kondo’s Super Mario World soundtrack spectacularly for “Cha Cha” (and therefore, indirectly, so did Drake for “Hotline Bling“). DJ Yuzak and co get some mileage out of the same chunky SNES brightness, and punctuate it with sound effects from the game. They even do a bit more to add to their sample, but their specific choice from the soundtrack is weaker. “Wandering the Plains” lacks the funk of “Star Road,” and the rapping doesn’t cut against it hard enough to compensate. On the plus side, though, it did lead me to the rich strangeness of “Ritmada do Zelda.”
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Super Mario World overworld themes, ranked by suitability to rap over: Vanilla Dome > Star Road (as we know) > Bowser’s Castle > Special Zone > Donut Plains (you are here) > Yoshi’s Island > Forest of Illusion. Shame this came out too late to be in the romhack “Mario Goes to Brazil.”
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: The other day I watched a YouTube video titled “How can I Mourn Mario when he’s still Alive“; the character is so much a part of the collective firmament that it only somewhat came across as a non sequitur. Internet remixes of Mario music are so ubiquitous that any new remix will end up harkening back not to Mario, but to earlier eras of the internet, and this will likely remain the case for the foreseeable future. Utilitarianism, not nostalgia, is the operating logic here — how can I have nostalgia for Mario when he’s still alive?
[6]

Jel Bugle: I like the blippy computer game simplicity of it, and the rapping is pretty cool. Imagine playing this from your car. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Dope raps, but what’s with the Germany jacket, MC BN? Why does MC BF loop his refrain? Why does DJ Yuask place chiptune synths over flimsy funk kicks? Why is this so good?!?
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Bulletproof concept. Easy [10]. But they should have used anything from Koji Kondo’s oeuvre other than the overworld loop from Super Mario World.
[4]

Dave Moore: Brazilian funk is so prolific and difficult to follow that I just accept that the 50 songs I did write about and the 450 I didn’t write about this year are all a mere drop in an enormous bucket. So it’s heartening when I find something so concretely novel that it stands a bit outside of the deluge. Here, the animating funk trick — finding the hard clave rhythm in a surprising location — is distilled down to its sample. As DRAM also learned, you can really let Super Mario World do a lot of heavy lifting for you. But another animating funk trick is how you never really care that it’s so easy to identify the trick. There’s not much to it, but there’s everything in it. 
[8]

Leah Isobel: Honestly, I think this could stand to be less polite.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I just think they should’ve leaned into the Mario thing a little more.
[4]