Composer: Justin Scharvona
“Right about now. It’s time to rock. With the biggity. Buck. Bumble.”
Despite this song’s status as a meme track, I have to clarify that I’m not entering this in the series of “great” music as a joke. The Buck Bumble theme has been quoted alongside the DK Rap as a “bad” video game track due to its silly lyrics, its unrelenting tempo, and an admittedly silly game that it happens to represent. But whether you find it catchy or just annoying, the Buck Bumble theme will work its way into your brain at some point, and whether you find it a pest to be shooed away or a welcome addition to the ecosystem, composer Justin Scharvona of Argonaut Software should be commended for capturing a rather wonderful snapshot of a trend and genre that offers a nostalgia even greater than the game it’s featured in.
The late ’90s saw a tremendous growth of the techno and house music genres, and video games latched onto these genres quite heavily as the hardware of the PlayStation and N64, et. al, advanced and the audio quality paired well with the advanced power and aesthetic of newer titles. These genres were especially popular in Argonaut’s home country of the United Kingdom, where Scharvona was inspired by the speed garage subgenre of drum and bass music to come up with the up-tempo track that opens the game. The fact that Buck Bumble is set in the English countryside being poisoned by industrial pollution further ties this all together as an appropriate place to feature this hard-driving, heavy-bumping track.
The other key feature of this track that I think really separates it and makes it stand out to people as a meme, along with the relative obscurity of the game itself, are the vocals. Repetitive, often silly vocals that repeat only a few lines, some of which feature nonsense lyrics, definitely stick out the first time you hear the track, particularly with the delivery of the vocalist. The way he delivers the last “hey!” in what would best be referred to as the “C” section of the song always pops so much it’s hard not to laugh a little bit if you haven’t heard it in a while. It’s also the fact that it has any vocals at all that separates it from some of the other most famous examples of video game jungle/drum and bass from the era, including tracks from Ridge Racer and Bomberman.
