YO! Game Raps! Fourteen Songs with Terrible Rhymes
Video game music has never managed to take off here in the U.S. Thanks to the bleep-bloop legacy most people can’t even imagine why someone would want to listen to game music. Things have obviously progressed but even in the last ten years there’s been no penetration. Nowadays producers just plunk down some cash and either buy the rights to a song or get a lousy up-and-hopeful band to donate some tracks.
But before licensing, the job of making a game soundtrack feel hip and new fell to the composers. In the old days it was easy to synthesize some drums and guitars and whip out rockin’ tunes one after another. But once CD’s took hold in the mid-90’s there was suddenly tons of data space for real instruments and even vocals.
Typically stuck behind a language barrier and a world away from the American pop scene, composers have fumbled all over the field in the last ten years with lyrics. Rock and electronic stuff is pretty easy to ignore thanks to ridiculously loud guitars and beats, but when video games and hip hop collide it just gets ugly.
Here for your aural enjoyment punishment are fourteen rap songs from games with some of the worst lyrics ever commited to disc. I’m not complaining about the games themselves or even the music. Some of these songs I really enjoy but you just can’t deny how bad these rhymes are. Also, this isn’t a top-ten list like everyone loves to do nowadays. These are simply in chronological order so you can see the Darwin-defying (de)evolution of lyrical quality.
