Gaz66D

This is a video I made in loving memory of my homie Dondi M. Bethea who passed away a while ago but I don’t think I ever did anything to really get closure. Since his birthday is coming up soon and he’s always been a fan of the old Sonic Games (dude got me past that pesky barrel in Carnival Night Zone, he saved me from spinning barrel purgatory! IYkYk) So I wrote this song for him. Tbh I had a few lyrics of this in my head since I was like 14? But I didn’t have any through plot or anything concrete to connect the few lyrics I had in mind. Until I heard the song again recently and thought, oh hey, that’s a new line, I should write that down! And as I’m writing them all out I’m like “Oh gosh, this is starting to sound like a eulogy for Dondi” So I’m like, no, now it IS his song. This is dedicated to you, big bro. Much love. Rest in peace.

Getting to the end of the list of Sonic 2 Parodies with this one i I had rattling round in my brain… but I unfortunately could never hear the full song (cos I would be too busy trying not to RIP myself on one of Robotniks spike arms or get crushed underfoot) so I finally completed the song after so many years…. Feels like overcoming my greatest adversary. Seriously this boss felt as hard as balls, and even if you had all the chaos emeralds by that point: they were useless to you, because there were no rings in the Death Egg… so at that point, you’d been cakewalking the game: just walking into enemies with supersonic invincibility and growing complacent, then you come across this mf and you feel naked, outclassed and outmatched. I hope these lyrics capture that feeling of insurmountable odds.

Continuing the Sonic2 themed bgm parodies with some absolute immaturity here! (You can tell I wrote some of these when I was still a very immature child) Though the opening line was the catalyst provided by my childhood friend Rhys. I originally uploaded this on instagram for his birthday last year, as a Throwback from back when we used to play Sonic over his moms house before I moved away. We had good memories there, playing Genesis and Legos. That’s how a childhood should be… despite everything else going on at the time, I was allowed to have these moments. Rhys was also the fella who introduced me to the band Queen, I didn’t know the lead singer to be gay. I just liked his music. One day I borrowed a cassette tape of Queen's Greatest Hits from Rhys and was listening to it over my grandpas house. Grandpa recognized the singer… and proceeded to tell me that he was a “Poofter” and what that meant, in terms of boys that have sex with other boys. I must have had a look on my face cos it was in that moment that I realized I was by his definition “a poofter” and I really was not ready for the information about Freddy Mercury having AIDS. That’s what send me spiraling. I tried to dismiss it. But by the time I found out whether it was true: Freddy had already perished. Which is why things started to look and feel so bleak and dark.

Now, let’s see what y’all think of my next installment. This is the infamous “Mama, HEY YOU!” It straight up slayed my cousins when I dropped the lyrics to this freestyle… Though it may be something of a contentious point that I wrote this when I was about 11… and for those that don’t know my mom, she’s a straight up badass. Just writing about what I know. She’s the one who would throw hands with a Karen at the PTA cos she was getting shade about being too young to be a mother. Other kids in the playground made “yo mama” jokes but honestly I was like “my mom would kick yo moms ass” I remember getting called into the principals office for having steel toed doc martens in school. I think they used to be hers… They’re what we had. Idk

Continuing my nonsense with a callback to the Marble Zone song, thematically. A sequel of sorts: Whereas the first one was written from the perspective of the Pharaoh trying to impress his lover by building a monument- this song is the poor unfortunate souls who were sealed in the tomb, buried alive, to watch over the Pharaoh and his lover’s sarcophagi until they too became corpses… Except… Due to some spoopy curse; they weren’t allowed the sweet release of death, and were kept alive in perpetuity to guard the tomb but as zombies/mummies... And they’re none too pleased about it

This one reminded me of an actual moment when I was convinced there was something underneath my bed and my parents told me it was all just my imagination… like, idk if I’ve always had sleep paralysis but when I dreamed something was in the room it didn’t feel like I was asleep and that was terrifying to a 5 year old. Anyway there’s this cadence in the song that felt a lot like “Entry of the Gladiators” which became more popularly associated with clowns than Roman gladiators for some reason… personally, I blame the Ringling Brothers! Taking that and the spooky vibes of this: I made the logical leap from scary caves+clown music=theme And I included a familiar conversation back and forth between both parents and the child as part of the breakdown at the end… (No this wasn’t inspired by Insane Clown Posse) ain’t no Juggalos here!

I actually let this one cook until I was 13-14 because I didn’t know a whole lot about casinos when I was 9-10 but I know I had the groundwork for the song I just didn’t know what Vegas was like, but I felt like it would be like this. I actually gathered some intel about Vegas from media- and my true version of the song has about three or four more verses eventually leading to the young gambler going broke. But my inspirations behind all those lyrics come from Ace of Spades by motörhead and the animated movie Rover Dangerfield. This is the shorter 1 verse version so it’ll fit under a minute… there are other verses but I’ll let those be a surprise.

Thematically this one is kinda connected to the idea behind “Cities Of Gold” and “Monument of Regret” in the way that it’s kinda focused on Ancient or lost Civilizations. There’s one that’s also kinda themed around Pompei. More on that later. As you can see the edgier lyrics about death and ruin, suffocating, drowning… as my young brain ascended into my teen years, as my abuse at home worsened, and my fears about the AIDs that I thought I had getting worse- or taking me at any stage without warning, the themes of facing death became more prevalent. I never felt like I could open up about my thoughts, but I didn’t exactly have a safe space to do so. So I started writing these songs in secret- but only I would ever know what they were about.

DOWN THE DRAIN! Seriously tho, this is the first Sonic Level to actually give me PTSD. Moving onto and continuing the edgier themes now as shown in my Scrap Brain lyrics and a darker song about that BLOODY WATER CORRIDOR with those platforms. You know the ones! By this point I may have been 9 or 10? Though maybe 9 cos I moved when I was 10 and couldn’t play Sonic 2 at my cousin’s house- Though we have them to thank (or blame) for chanting “Down The Drain” as nauseam while I was stuck in the water passage that I’m sure traumatized EVERYONE, let’s be fair. I wrote this song cos of you guys! You’re WELCOME. At that time I had four cousins and a brother, and taking it in turns meant I had to wait for 5 other players to kill their Sonic so by the time it was my turn I wouldn’t have a clue how Sonic moves differently in water. And I got stuck, drowned, or got squished… and then my turn was over. Leading me to wait another 5 lives until I get my turn again. So I heard these Sonic songs on loop MULTIPLE times. That’s WHY I came up with lyrics… making the earworm MY earworm.

Truth be told: I didn’t figure out how to make the lyrics for this one (which I came up with when I was 10ish) work with the song until recently. They were sorta loosely interconnected thoughts, some of the riffs made me think of a sequence of words but I couldn’t tie them together neatly to make a whole song. It’s was kinda like having scenes of a movie but no through-plot, needed some heavy editing and a good writer on hand to make it cohesive. But I tried to keep the language I used at the time faithful to how i originally thought up the phrases. That’s why some of these lyrics might sound like they were written by a kid. Cos I pretty much was. Even though the things I learned were mature for my age… and certain life struggles shouldn’t be forced upon any child. It’s important to bear in mind that this is how things looked and sounded to me at that age. But I started thinking about how my issues could be solved with time travel, if I could run really fast like Sonic could I run back in time and change the past? Make me “un-gay” or make the night with my babysitter not happen? Thought about it so much my head started to spin.

This is the final song in the “Young Love” series, I wrote this one when I was 8-9 but I it’s kinda like a Reprise of “Better Me” from Green Hill Zone, with some thematic callbacks. After all my failed attempts to woo My classmate and the soul crushing news that AIDS would take a persons life regardless of their dating preferences- I started feeling more closed off and wanted to feel nothing anymore. The idea of becoming an emotionless indestructible robot who would never die of any dumb disease that targets people for falling in love, or suffer any pain (from all the physical abuse that started at home) became so much more appealing. I didn’t wanna die. Obviously! Falling in love with a girl wouldn’t cure me. I started to think desperately in a very childlike way- if I was a cyborg I’d survive!

This is the second song in the “Young Love” series, I wrote this one when I was 8-9 but I had a crush on a girl at school Having completely failed to ask her out to the school Disco, I tried multiple times to win her affections. (I even baked her a scone for Valentine’s Day) I kept trying and trying to make my feelings known… like a fool. I needed to stop feeling like she was the be-all and end-all… there was another girl who super liked me. And I was starting to realize I like both boys and girls.

I know this isn’t the next zone in Sonic 1 after Marble, but the next few songs have a chronological progression of events that make sense when heard in order so I want to make sure I post those as an arc. This is a song I wrote because, while we didn’t exactly study ancient South America history in school (and I would have loved to) there was an Anime playing on TV called Mysterious Cities of Gold. And I loved that show so much. This song feels like that show to me. Even though labyrinth zone is one of my least favorite levels (mainly cos of the drowning music and the boss) I loved the music.

Another one of my little songs I made up in third grade while studying the pyramids of ancient Egypt… This song inspired me to write a whole headcanon about a pharaoh or prince that falls in love with a servant and (because he can’t have her as his queen) decided to make a pyramid to ensure that he and her will be buried together and hopefully meet in the afterlife. It was kinda dark, and because I was 8 the story gets even wierder with mummies and zombies etc. But yeah, good times. Yes, this song mentions slavery… Within the context of how the pyramids were constructed it’s historically accurate to call them what they were. They weren’t “unpaid interns” or “indentured volunteers” They worked themselves away in the hot sun to the crack of a whip. Let’s not try and kid anyone by being overly verbose for the sake of not causing offense. It happened. And yes, it was tragic. Even as a third grader I somewhat understood this.

This is the first song in the “Young Love” series, I wrote this one when I was 8-9 but I had a crush on a girl at school… And at the time was trying to muster up the courage to ask her to go to the school disco. Practicing how I would ask her over and over in my head- you know? Psyching myself up to pop the question. Felt like a big deal at the time. In a wierd way my mindset was that if I could fall in love with her I could forget about my feelings for a boy and then i wouldn’t have AIDs… because the law of the playground at the time was if you were Gay even just a little bit: you had AIDs Those were “the rules” I don’t make them.

Hi all, first video! Thanks for stopping by! Bit of a backstory behind this for folks that don’t know me: When I was a kid I played Sonic a lot at my cousins (but I had a lot of cousins) taking turns being player 1 meant taking long breaks in between, but hearing the same song on repeat. In order to pass the time I would make up lyrics to the songs in game based on how I was feeling at the time. I was about 8. And I read so many books I had an extensive vocabulary, and loved wordplay and rhyming. So this is what felt right. I wanted to upload these songs that I wrote back then in a format that would be easily accessible while still telling my story. My childhood wasn’t great. But this is how I coped: By drawing and making songs. As the songs progress you’ll see them go through some changes and I hope you’ll still enjoy the series and stick with me. I wrote this song while questioning my own life, I want to say it was in the aftermath of some life shaking news- Related to the media propaganda surrounding the LGBTQA and HiV/AIDs fearmongering that came out of the Thatcher administration. I’ve never publicly discussed the details of this before… I’m hoping that you understand the subtext here. But since other sites keep censoring or blacklisting my videos I want there to be some sort or record of my experiences and my work, and what I went through with regard to growing up in that era.