A few weeks ago, I discovered something about myself: I’ve been a fan of J-pop for years, and I didn’t even know it.

Typically, I’m very systematic about the music I listen to. I keep my songs in carefully sorted genre playlists, sorted further alphabetically by artist, and I have a pretty involved vetting process for those songs. Even my favorite music from games or movies is included, if I can find it on Spotify.

So I was delightfully surprised when, upon revisiting a rhythm game from my high school years, I re-stumbled upon a treasure trove of music not accounted for in my web of playlists which I nevertheless remembered vividly.

The game in question is called osu! and it’s a rhythm game like any other. You might be familiar with the Guitar Hero franchise, and it plays along those same lines. You choose a song, and you interact with the game in time with the song. Where Guitar Hero has several tracks of notes that slide toward you, which correspond to buttons on the guitar-like controller, osu! presents you with circles that must be clicked with the mouse—and both games will end the song prematurely if you fail to keep up, forcing you to start over.

In Guitar Hero, the songs chosen are typically rock ’n’ roll classics of some type or another—songs that fall in line with the “rock star” aesthetic of the game, and the note tracks you play along with are pre-packaged into the game by the developers. In osu!, though, you start the game with something like five built-in songs, and the rest you have to download manually from community sites that host fan-made “maps”. Among the 50,000+ maps to choose from, every single one is made by creative fans who receive no compensation and are approved by a separate community panel. Consequently, the songs available are simply a result of any given mapper’s taste in music. There are playable maps for pretty much every primary music genre, and including songs in at least 11 languages.

In terms of sheer numbers, though, the maps lean very heavily toward J-pop, K-pop, and “anime-adjacent” music, such that even songs that are, say, metal or classical will still usually be accompanied by a simple visual from an unrelated anime. In addition to creating a surprisingly consistent aesthetic, this also serves to somewhat obscure songs from their original context. There is no way to link directly from a map in the game to an original source for the song, and seeing as I am only fluent in one (1) language, I often get mixed up simply distinguishing between the title of the song and the name of the artist.

As a result, even though I was never especially skilled at osu!, I played my way through hundreds of songs and grew intimately familiar with the contours of songs that I couldn’t so much as remember the title for. In coming back to the game, I remembered most of my favorite maps simply by how they looked on the song selection page.

So I made a decision. I didn’t want to just forget these songs all over again, so I set to work with the game open on one monitor and Spotify on the other, and I started searching for songs to save. Some songs were easy to find, some only showed up on YouTube, and some seemed to be available on Spotify but not in my region.

Still, I managed to find most of the songs I looked for, and it didn’t take long for me to start noticing some patterns. Some of the same few artists began showing up repeatedly in my searches, and slowly but surely it dawned on me that I had unwittingly developed a strong attachment to whole collections of songs by the same artists without even knowing they had been connected at all.

Of course, if I had been paying closer attention, I would’ve noticed that certain names featured repeatedly among my most played songs, but because I had never seen them together in one place, it had never occurred to me. As it stands, I’ve only gone through a small portion of the total songs I have saved, but what I’ve done so far has already given me the knowledge that for years now I’ve been a huge fan of artists like Fhána and Yui, even if I myself didn’t know it yet.

Many of these songs have managed to evoke arguably unprecedented levels of emotional response in me, given that I don’t know what the lyrics are saying, but I think—even as good as the songs are—I’d have to give some of the credit to the way osu! asks me to engage with the songs. Alongside dancing or playing an instrument, playing a rhythm game is the only other activity I can think of that requires such active engagement with music, compared to the relatively passive engagement music usually gets. And between the near-unblinking attention osu! requires and the dozens of times you might have to replay a song to finally complete it, it’s likely that instead of growing to hate the song you’ll fall in love with it, as I have, over and over again.

Philip Rienstra

Philip Rienstra (‘21) majored in writing and music and has plans to pursue a career in publishing. They are a recovering music snob, a fruit juice enthusiast, and a big fan of the enneagram. They’re currently living in St. Paul with their spouse, Heidi.