PARANOiA

(Headnote: For those who have played DDR before, I’m going to sound like a fool with the following explanation… and to those who haven’t, well… I’ll still sound like a fool.)
You know those kinds of songs that you sorta really hate when you hear them for the first time, then after a while they start to grow on you? Well if you really think about it, ANY song could be like that if you listen to it long enough. I mean, I even started liking some industrial hardcore techno songs after a while. But in this case, the song is PARANOiA, by Naoki Maeda, originally created for DDR.
PARANOiA is some sort of “jungle techno” song, with an annoying siren and and an even-more-annoying backup singer, although the beat is pretty nice. It was originally made not for listening pleasure, but to be the hardest DDR song. And since other songs continue to surpass it in difficulty every time a new version of DDR comes out, PARANOiA continually gets remixed so it can continue to be the hardest song.
PARANOiA is also cute because its “artist” is attributed not to Naoki, but to the song’s own BPM.
The following is a list of the official versions of the song:

Mix Artist Name Composer BPM Difficulty
1stMIX 180 PARANOiA Naoki Maeda 180 8/10
2ndMIX 190 PARANOiA MAX -DIRTY MIX- Naoki Maeda 190 8/10
2ndMIX 2MB PARANOiA KCET (CLEAN MIX) 2MB 190 9/10
3rdMIX 190′ PARANOiA Rebirth Naoki Maeda 190 9/10
4thMIX 200 PARANOiA EVOLUTION Naoki Maeda 200 8/10
5thMIX STM 200 PARANOiA ETERNAL STM 200 9/10
EXTREME 270 PARANOiA Survivor Naoki Maeda 270 10/10
EXTREME 290 PARANOiA Survivor MAX Naoki Maeda 290 10+/10
Party Collection .3k PARANOiA -Respect- Sota Fujimori 300 10+/10

Yup. The real reason I posted this, though, is because I think four remixes of PARANOiA have actual musical merit. Two are official, two are not… and none of them are by the original composer.

2MB – PARANOiA KCET (CLEAN MIX) – 2MB’s got great remixes of a lot of Naoki’s songs. I like this one mostly because it has fun steps in DDR.
.3k – PARANOiA -Respect- – I’m pretty sure that Sota Fujimori remixed this one, because it has a lot of effects that can also be found in his song, Look to the Sky.
TaQ – PARANOiA (bounce connected Mix) – I love TaQ! This version of PARANOiA was stuck right in the middle of a continuous mix of TaQ’s other songs, and it fits perfectly.
onoken – P8107 – This is my favorite, by far. onoken has turned PARANOiA into a compeltely different song, and best of all, he created it to be played on beatmania sims.

Enough with my too-much-free-time knowledge about insignificant crap… but I thought I’d just share with you those remixes. They’s cool.

6 comments

  1. badly written woo
    Hey now, how many of the people reading your journal are also going to have similar “knowledge about insignificant crap”? Most, seeing that it’s LJ. :p
    Give yourself some credit, the people who understand DDR will probably enjoy this post (hey, I did), the ones who don’t but are still your friend won’t really think much of it. It’s not “sad” to be well versed in a certain topic, however meaningless it may seem…maybe if you devoted much more than a post on LJ to it, you might get some funny looks, but even so, why should you be any less than anyone else?
    The ones who actually take the time to look down on/make fun of you for knowing stuff about PARANOiA – they ain’tcho friends, girlfrien…and they need a life, to boot.

    1. Re: badly written woo
      Yeah… I take pride in what I write, but, like a lot of people, I write “don’t mind me, har har” because I WILL get stupid comments like “geez jeff haha you have too much free time,” as if I’m not being taken too seriously.
      It’s sorta like if you’re going to go politically incorrect, you HAVE to write some sort of stupid disclaimer, or else you’ll have people calling you a racist, heretic, whatever. It’s really dumb and shows that some people can’t easily respect others’ views…

  2. It’s funny that paranoia actually started at an acceptable BPM for a jugnle soung… cuz i guess that earlier DDRs were supposed to be more “real” music oriented?… Then of course it then soared to heights of rediculous BPMs. What if someone made a song that fast that was meant solely to listen to?
    My god its a scary thought, we could have a new genre of electronic music on our hands! (except for the fact that you cant realistically dance to it outside of ddr, but its all good)

    1. 300 is a gimmick BPM. No one really counts BPMs over about 180, since they’re usually cut in half. Like, in the music world, PARANOiA would be half as long, and 90 BPM. MAX 300 would probably be 150 BPM. Get what I’m saying?
      Then again, it’s all relative. I made a DDR song, Laugh and Beats, that starts at 130BPM, and goes all the way up to 315BPM. I mean, in the music world, if anyone was really picky, they could set the measures from 4/4 to 2/4 and have it only go up to 158 at some point, but… yeah, you get my drift.

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