Eminem has recently released a new album – Kamikaze. After taking a break from the rap scene for most of this year, his signature no-holds-barred style is back from the brink on these new tracks, and Kamikaze is a tour de force of braggadocio. While Eminem may be well known for taking pot shots at the competition, he’s not exactly famous for being big on games. Despite that, one of the tracks on the album is an Eminem Kingdom Hearts crossover.
That’s right, Eminem has confirmed in this interview with Rolling Stone that the track ‘Good Guy’ on his album samples Kingdom Hearts. When Eminem says that he’s sampled the “theme song,” he really means that he’s sampled Utada Hikaru’s ‘Simple and Clean.’ If there’s any tune that really resonates with players of Kingdom Hearts, it’s that. The song is immediately recognizable to those who hear it, and Hikaru’s voice is incredibly distinctive to the point where it’d be impossible to miss.
Here’s ‘Simple and Clean’ from Kingdom Hearts:
And here’s ‘Good Guy’ from Kamikaze:
However, the reason why not many people may have spotted the sample in Eminem’s latest is because the essence of Hikaru’s song has been post-processed into its barest bones. Eminem notes that he made it “unrecognizable,” which seems like it defeats the point of using that iconic sample anyway, but hey. We’re not the award-winning musicians here, so we’ll leave that sort of theory up to the experts.
This isn’t the first time that a sample from video games has blown up on the music radar. We also reported previously on Doja Cat using the GameCube’s iconic startup sound on a track, and plenty of other artists use samples as well from popular titles that range from character soundbites to environmental music. That being said, Eminem is probably one of the few mainstream artists in his genre to throw out a track with a sample like that, so watch this space to see if others end up following his example.
