I think video game history will remember Hideki Naganuma for many reasons. Fans might lovingly bestow upon him the title of “Twitter weirdo.” Others — especially modern music producers — might cite him as an important influence in video game composition. That’s more than fair; the man is responsible for his fair share of video game bangers. Tracks like Jet Set Radio Future’s “The Concept of Love” — which stuffs warped vocal samples, bright electric guitar riffs, and rushing synthy drums — still turn heads when they come on the playlist.
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But for me, I’ll always remember him as the video game composer who put a sample of a Malcolm X speech in a Sonic the Hedgehog game.
The song appears on the soundtrack for Sonic Rush, a 2D Sonic game Sega released in 2005 for the OG Nintendo DS. It’s called “Wrapped in Black” and it plays during the final boss fight with Doctor Eggman. The track opens up with rushing violins and operatic vocals that convey the evilness of Doctor Eggman, but soon a sharp repeating vocal sample cuts through it all. The sample repeats “Too black, too strong” a few times and then comes back later in the song.
The audio for “Too black, too strong” comes from a 1963 speech given by Malcolm X titled, “Message to the Grassroots.” Naturally, his talk had nothing to do with Sonic, and dealt with far more serious matters. In the talk, the Black revolutionary outlined his idea of a Black nationalist philosophy and criticized the Civil Rights Movement. In the sample quote, Malcolm X used the image of coffee and creamer to explain what happened to the movement. He said:
“It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool.”
That a Sonic game sampled this feels like nothing short of a fever dream. The composer commented on it once back in 2014 when he said, “‘Wrapped in Black’ is a song about coffee. lol.” And while the sample isn’t a joking matter, he is technically correct that the quote is, at least in part, about coffee.
Naganuma’s intensely stylized music fits his history as a composer and work on the Sonic series. Similar to how video games were a form of emerging media at the time, Naganuma experimented freely and didn’t limit himself to an idea of what art should be. He sent his first application to Sega in 1998, after which the first game he ever composed was a handheld toy called Hip Jog Jog. In 2000, he worked as the main composer for Jet Set Radio where he broke out as a composer. His uneven beats and screechy sounds brought influences from hip hop, electronic, dance, funk, jazz, and rock music into the fuzzy speakers of CRT the televisions of the 2000s.
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Image: Dimps, Sonic Team/Sega
Making a splash in the canon of Sonic the Hedgehog music and Sega games in general is no small task. Modern Sonic fans tend to remember the Chemical Plant Zone theme or later songs like the easy breezy rock theme of “Escape From the City” from Sonic Adventure 2. Because of this, I think it’s relatively easy to miss the soundtrack on Sonic Rush. Sega shipped it early in the lifecycle of the nascent handheld, and its roughly 1.62 million copies sold never made it the most popular or well-known game of the Sonic series
But Naganuma went off with the Sonic Rush soundtrack. He samples the British DJ Fatboy Slim’s reggae remix of Tribe Called Quest’s famous track, “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo,” to create a mariachi band-like holler for the theme of a Brazilian Carnival-esque level in “Ska Cha Cha.”
And while the nostalgic charms of the original Green Hill Zone theme will never wear off on me, there’s something uniquely thrilling to starting Sonic Rush off to the blaring horns and cascading twangy guitar of “Right There, Ride On.”
The eccentricities of Naganuma’s work have infected my brain and continue to shape my media tastes as an adult. So maybe that’s why I won’t let myself — or anyone else — forget the time when he put Malcolm X on a Sonic game and into the ears of an impressionable video game-loving child.
