🏎️ What Genre is Mario Kart Music?

Grab a pair of headphones, because this article has a soundtrack! Check out the first song in this Youtube playlist: does it remind you of anything?

If your formative years were later than 1990, your first thought was likely “Mario Kart”. You wouldn’t be alone - more and more people seem to be finding (and even writing!) music they can only describe as “Mario Kart Music”. But why? How does a single game seemingly define an entire genre? And what makes “Mario Kart Music” different from established genres like Jazz or Funk? Well, I and my three nonconsecutive semesters of Jazz Performance 201 have a theory. So buckle up as I tackle yet another universal question: “What Genre is Mario Kart Music?”

Note: I realized about halfway through writing this that some really talented people have already discussed this topic. I wanted to do my own thing here, so I’ve decided not to watch that video before publishing this article. Maybe we ended up with the same conclusions? Who knows!

Quantifying Mario Kart Music: History

To get the full picture, we need to contrast the evolution of Jazz Fusion in Japan vs. the United States.

Fusion (the musical genre) has existed in some form since at least the 1960’s. I’d broadly define Fusion as music combining elements of Rock and Funk (energetic, driving rhythm) with Jazz (extended instrumental solos, more complex melodies and chords). But once the 70’s rolled around, Fusion had competition: Disco. Fusion pioneers in the U.S. saw Disco’s pitch-perfect recordings as “pre-fabricated” or “soulless”, and in response pushed their music in a less commercial direction. Herbie Hancock’s 1973 album Sextant is a textbook example of this. Herbie is a legend, but it’s not something I’d put on at a party. ¹ Across the Pacific, however, this stigma didn’t seem to hold. In Japanese Fusion bands, seriously talented Jazz musicians embraced Disco’s dance-able rhythms and accessibility, creating an entirely new genre in the process.

But to reach worldwide audiences, Japanese Fusion (J-Fusion) would need some help from Japan’s other major entertainment industry - Video Games. According to Nintendo’s first in-house composer (Koji Kondo), J-Fusion and Video Games have been linked since the beginning. Kondo often cited J-Fusion bands like T-Square and Casiopea as his major influences. Give T-Square’s 1983 hit Sister Marian a listen and see if a certain plumber comes to mind! It wasn’t just Nintendo, either. Throughout the late 80s, J-Fusion (and its mellower cousin genre, City Pop) became a sort of “tonal lingua franca” for Japanese video game music. Once Nintendo and Sega exploded in popularity, millions of people labeled this new genre not as “Fusion” or “Pop”, but by their method of introduction: “Video Game Music”. Or, (if we substitute a chart-topping franchise), “Mario Kart Music”!

OK, enough history - what actually makes certain songs sound so Mario Kart-y? I think there are 2 main components: Energy and Instrumentation.

Quantifying Mario Kart Music: Energy through Rhythm

Do you remember the first song in this article’s playlist, (Time Limit by Casiopea)? Go ahead and compare it to Mario Kart Wii’s Moonview Highway - City Theme, paying special attention to the rhythm.

Even though the instruments differ, the rhythms here are actually pretty similar. No time for melody here - instead, both songs are built around short, high-speed riffs. (Listen for the trumpets / horns in Time Limit, or the sax in Moonview Highway). The bass and drums are just as loud as these riffs, both seeming to compete for center stage. The result is a song that eggs you on, pushing you to step on the gas - perfect for Mario Kart!

OK, one more example from the same album. Give 1:03-2:00 of Space Road a quick listen. Notice how the tension just keeps building and building? In this case, tension comes from a musical technique called a key change. A key is just a specific set of notes that sound good together - every song is written with one in mind. While most songs only use notes in one key, some composers shift to another key mid-song to create tension. So when Casiopea shift keys not one, but five times (!!!), we the listeners naturally feel a heightened urgency. And so it is in Mario Kart - the soundtrack (famously) increases the pressure on the final lap by shifting keys and speeding up the music. You can hear this fanfare which is essentially a key change that signals the start of the lap.

Quantifying Mario Kart Music: Instrumentation

Energy is only one piece of the puzzle, though. Metal music is energetic, but hardly screams Mario Kart. What is our formula still missing?

Instruments are definitely part of the picture. In a video game, it’s common to base different levels on different biomes. Whether swamp, desert or anything in between, the level’s music has to match the theme. Instrumentation is the traditional way to do this (i.e. banjo music for the swamp, Egyptian-style music in the desert, etc). But the challenge of video game music is taking all of these different instruments and themes and making them feel like part of a cohesive whole.

This is where Fusion comes in. Even before video games were invented, artists were using J-Fusion to introduce unfamiliar genres in a familiar way. Case in point: guitar virtuoso Masayoshi Takanaka. Despite his jazz-rock roots, Takanaka used his solo project to explore the crossroads of J-Fusion and Brazilian Samba. At a certain point, Takanaka even began traveling to Brazil just to cut his records! Takanaka was successful, too; combined with J-Fusion’s infectious grooves, Samba and Mambo became wildly popular a hemisphere away from home. Mario Kart music is actually pretty similar! While most Mario Kart songs are based on Fusion rhythm and structure, each track has its own instrumentation and identity. This makes each song sound “Mario Kart”, despite the wide range of instrumental and genre-level influences.

Now for some examples! Takanaka’s phenomenal cover of Mambo No. 5 is essentially a piano-driven Mambo track with some J-Fusion sprinkled in. Even if the rest of this song differs, Takanaka’s cover has an intro that screams Mario Kart Wii’s Coconut Mall. For a more clear A/B , I’d compare Takanaka’s Ready to Fly with GBA Shy Guy Beach from Mario Kart Wii.

The Present

Of course, none of this is hard and fast rule. The soundtrack for the upcoming Mario Kart World sounds more Lynyrd Skynyrd than Herbie Hancock. Even the games I grew up with broke this mold: Tracks like the Nintendo WFC Menu were equal parts Brecker-style Fusion and Stereolab breakbeat drumming. But regardless of how Mario Kart evolves, I think the energy and experimentation of Japanese Jazz Fusion will continue to be a major influence on Mario Kart soundtracks for years to come.

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1. One exception to this claim is saxophonist Michael Brecker. Another Jazz Fusion great, his American group Steps Ahead embraced a more commercial sound than his contemporaries. But Steps Ahead was always more popular in Japan than in the US, and Brecker even recorded with Japanese Fusion bands like Casiopea and T-Square. So his work is arguably more representative of Japanese than American Fusion. ↩︎