Eminem surprised everyone when he dropped his latest album, Kamikaze, completely unannounced. The tenth studio album from the rap icon has been met with mixed reviews from critics and fans but there’s definitely a few standout tracks on there. One of the most interesting being Good Guy, which has a very different sound to the rest of the album. You can listen to it yourself below:
Now that you’ve given it a listen you may be thinking that the beat sounds kind of familiar. Especially if you’re an admirer of wonderful Japanese role-playing games that combine the worlds of Final Fantasy and Disney. That’s because the songs producer, Illadaproducer, took the theme song from Kingdom Hearts, chopped it up and made it something nearly unrecognisable. Below is an excerpt from his interview with Rolling Stone where he spilled the beans:
What about “Good Guy,” what’s the sample there?
“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.”
We’re not sure if Eminem appreciates the world of Kingdom Hearts as much as his producer but it’s still a cool thing to be sampled. It’s not even the first time Eminem has sampled a video game in one of his songs, with him sampling SoulCalibur in the past on Hellbound.
If you’ve never seen Kingdom Hearts in action before, or if you want to find out more about Kingdom Hearts III then make sure to check out our hands on preview of the game over on our YouTube.
Update: illaDaProducer confirmed on Twitter that the track actually samples ‘Glassy Sky’ from Tokyo Ghoul. He got confused with another beat he had made. The beat below does sample Kingdom Hearts though: