Music

Kanye West hid a Counter Strike sample in Life of Pablo

by Richard Howard

Perhaps it’s the bravado, the perpetually angry face or the diamond-encrusted teeth (or all three), but for some reason people keep forgetting that Kanye West is, at heart, a gigantic nerd. Don’t believe it? These anecdotes from an early collaborator and this stellar photo might convince you. If you’ve been paying attention, though, you’ll have realized Kanye himself shamelessly puts his dorkiness on display. Granted, it’s hard to keep up with his tsunami of stream-of-conciousness tweets, but the rapper often refers to his egghead exploits. With the news that he’s begun working on his next album, tweets from almost a year ago suggesting the new offering will pay homage to his love of video games have resurfaced. Though we should have clued in to Kanye’s love of gaming when he announced he was developing a video game the objective of which is to get his mother to heaven (yes, that’s a real thing):

Of course, West already got his gaming nerd swag on while making Life of Pablo, and now a sharp-eared listener is pointing out that the Street Fighter II sample-laden “Facts” isn’t the only track to feature video game voices. Like many of us, it seems Kanye also loves to sit for hours talking smack into his headset while shooting strangers. Though very faint, the iconic “throwing flashbang” voice from Counter Strike was slipped into “Ultralight Beam” at around 1:50 of the recording, and it only took us 11 months to notice. (All credit to TZ2 on the Kan to the Ye forums for the spot).

Sneaky. As for his new album, rumours abound that every track will sample a different video game (c’mon Battletoads), but for now we’re just hoping against hope Kanye actually sticks with a first-choice album title and actually names it the wonderfully esoteric TurboGrafx-16 – if only for comments like this from fans born a decade or two after the console’s release.