Eminem released a new album out of the blue last Thursday at midnight and as Kotaku reports, one of its tracks features a sample from Kingdom Hearts! While hip-hop/rap songs featuring rifts from video games isn’t exactly something new, it’s always fun hearing game samples being used in other mediums. Here’s “Good Guy” from his latest album, Kamikaze. Can you recognize what’s borrowed from Kingdom Hearts?
It’s the woman’s voice you hear in the background. For those of you KH fans who don’t recognize that voice, that’s actually the very famous Utada Hikaru, who sang “Simple and Clean” for the game. Check out the original version below.
The producer of this particular track, Illadaproducer, spoke with Rolling Stone about his work on Kamikaze, and specifically talked about the inspiration behind “Good Guy.” When asked about the sample behind the song, here’s what he had to say:
“That’s me doing my video game thing. Kingdom Hearts. It’s a Japanese videogame, and that’s the theme song from it. It’s one of the dopest melodies I’ve ever heard. Shout out Japanese videogames and Japanimation for inspiration. Filtered it, did some chops, did some processing to it. I basically made it unrecognizable, but I know they would have still found it. That’s why we had to deal with the clearance. But when I do anything I try to make it to where it’s not fully recognizable.”
This isn’t the first time Eminem has made a song featuring samples from a video game. Nearly 20 years ago, his album Game Over had a song on it called “Hellbound” which utilized a rift straight from Soulcalibur.
And here’s the original Soulcalibur soundtrack.
Needless to say, this one is a lot more recognizable.
For other times where hip-hop and the video game universes have collided, check out this great write-up on Pastemagazine.
Featured Image Source: Medium
