Ayo Technology by 50 Cent isn’t the usual song I’d listen to but, nothing remarkable about that in itself, however the one thing that is remarkable is that if I’m not very mistaken there’s a SID involved in that tune.
For those not in the know the SID is a chip that was used in the Commodore 64 to produce its music, it’s got a very distinctive sound that hardcore gamers or those into the retro scene would instantly recognise and is widely regarded as the best sound chip of the 8-bit era. It is almost certainly a SID making those noises, listen to the instrumental version yourself.
Now if I’m not mistaken Timbaland produced Ayo Technology in conjunction with Danja, so presumably one of them’s either ripped the music from a C64 game or has got a SidStation on the go.
So if it is the case that there is a SID behind the sounds on that song, which I’m certain there is, I’m not sure how I feel about it. On one hand it vindicates my feelings on the whole SID music scene, in as much as that the mainstream can accept the sounds as part of popular music. On the other though it feels that I no longer belong to a secret little club!
Anyway I’m fairly certain the majority of the people that listen to it won’t even notice!
It has to be seen as a bit of a vindication of my views in my early teenage years, that computer music would become mainstream. I was right, the evidence is here. That said it’s not quite how I envisaged it would be but I’m sure with a bit more digging more examples of the use of the SID outside of pure chiptunes could be found. Irrespective I’m chalking this up as a win!
Lovin’ your references to the ‘ye olde’ Commodore 64! Unfortunately we only had a VIC 20 – the poor relation to the Commodore 64. The ‘rich kid only child’ across the road had a Commodore 64 much to our annoyance!!
I too had a VIC20, complete with a 16k RAM pack! This, of course, made it super powerful it’s interesting to think that my mobile phone has over 60,000 times that amount of memory. Ah, progress.
Later of course I would receive a ‘rich kid only child’ Commodore 64 and then my life would truly begin!
Ah yes, the RAM pack! Funny really ‘cos you still had to wait half an hour for each game to load up! And when it did the graphics were on a par with Teletext! Kids these days don’t know they’re born!
(God, did I just say that?! How middle-aged!)
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