Kendrick Lamar Mario Kart Mashup
By Evan Hopkins 26 December 2015
An enterprising mash-up musician combines Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank)” with Mario Kart music to create the toe tapping track “Kendrick Lamariokart.”
Video games and rap have a long and storied history together. Notorious B.I.G. dropped lines about finally being able to afford a Super Nintendo and a Sega Genesis, and game fans crafted rap homages of their own to beloved series such as Legend of Zelda. The boom-bap beats of hip hop just seemed to work perfectly with video games. In recent years, enterprising fans have taken to mashing rap and video game music together, creating entirely new songs that blend street-smart lines with the beep-boop music of gaming. 2 Mello mashed Jay-Z and Chrono Trigger together (creating, of course, Chrono Jigga), Drake’s (no, not that Drake) awkward dance filled “Hotline Bling” got the Wii menu music treatment, and now butterfly pimper Kendrick Lamar has found his way into the world of video game music mash-ups with a track blending the rapper with Mario Kart.
The track, christened with the truly fantastic title “Kendrick Lamariokart,” comes courtesy of New York based mash-up artist Jed Kronfeld, who included the song on a compilation album entitled “The Slop Sink: One Year (or so) of Mashups of Varying Quality.” While the song was posted on the artist’s bandcamp page in 2013, it wasn’t until this week that hip hop tastemakers Complex stumbled upon the track and brought it to the Internet’s attention.
The track deftly combines the victory music from Mario Kart‘s iteration, Mario Kart Wii with Kendrick’s mega-popular “Swimming Pools (Drank),” crafting a bouncy track that manages to transcend its ridiculous premise to make a pretty decent song.
Video game rap mash-ups are nothing new, but “Kendrick Lamariokart” has gotten fans talking, with one Youtube commenter going so far as to crown the track “the pinnacle of human achievement.” Kronfeld has hopped on his sudden Internet fame, reposting the song on Youtube, where it has already begun to rack up hits.
Kendrick hasn’t commented on the video’s sudden rise to fame, but that hasn’t stopped fans from endlessly re-tweeting the track to the rapper’s Twitter.
While hip-hop heads may argue that the original “(Drank)” was better, there’s no denying that this oddball mash-up has resulted in a truly unique song. Sure, it might not be on the level of Just Cause 3’s rap ode to explosions, but it will certainly do.
Source: Complex
