Eminem Sampled Kingdom Hearts in the New Kamizake Album

Sometimes the world outside of video games dips its head inside, and things get mixed up in fun ways. One of the more common examples of that happening is in music, especially in the rap and hip-hop domain. Due to a practice called sampling, which takes music and sound from other sources and alters them to fit into an overall track or beat (with permission generally speaking), your favorite video games often make cameo appearances in chart-topping albums. In this case, Eminem’s latest album takes some inspiration, and even some literal music, from Square Enix and Disney’s Kingdom Hearts.

In a Rolling Stone interview, Illadaproducer spoke to much of his involvement with Kamikaze, Eminem’s new album that dropped seemingly out of nowhere last week. One track in particular, Good Guy, will be of interest to Kingdom Hearts fans. Here’s the snippet from the interview:

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.

When a famous person drops the phrase “Japanimation,” you know they’ve been around for a hot minute.

[Source: Rolling Stone]