We can thank Hideki Naganuma for putting Malcolm X in a Sonic game
I think video game history will remember Hideki Naganuma for many reasons. Fans might affectionately call him “Twitter weirdo.” Others—particularly modern music producers—might cite him as a major influence on video game composition. And rightly so; the man is responsible for his fair share of video game hits. Songs like Jet Set Radio Future‘S “The concept of love” — which features distorted vocal samples, bright electric guitar riffs and rushing synth drums — still turn heads whenever they appear on the playlist.
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But I’ll always remember him as the video game composer who put a sample of Malcolm X’s speech in a Sonic the Hedgehog game.
The song appears on the soundtrack for sonic rusha 2D Sonic game that Sega released in 2005 for the OG Nintendo DS. It is called “Wrapped in black” and it plays during the final boss battle with Doctor Eggman. The song starts off with raging violins and operatic vocals that convey the evilness of Doctor Eggman, but soon a sharp repetitive vocal sample cuts through. The sample repeats “Too black, too strong” a few times and then returns later in the song.
The audio for “Too black, too strong” comes from a Malcolm X’s 1963 speech titled, “Message to the base.” Of course, his speech had nothing to do with Sonic, and was about much more serious matters. In the speech, the black revolutionary outlined his idea of a black nationalist philosophy and criticized the civil rights movement. In the example quote, Malcolm X used the image of coffee and milk to explain what had happened to the movement. He said:
“It’s like when you have coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You mix it with cream; you make it weak. If you put too much cream in it, you don’t even know you ever had coffee. It was hot, it gets cold.”
That a Sonic game sampled this feels like a fever dream. The composer once commented on it back in 2014 when he said“’Wrapped in Black’ is a song about coffee. lol.” And while the sample isn’t meant to be funny, he’s technically correct that the quote is, at least in part, about coffee.
Naganuma’s intensely stylized music fits in with his history as a composer and work on the Sonic series. Just as video games were a form of emerging media at the time, Naganuma experimented freely and did not limit himself to an idea of what art should be. He sent his first request to Sega in 1998, and the first game he ever composed was a portable toy called Hip Jog JogIn 2000 he worked as main composer for Jetset radio where he broke through as a composer. His uneven beats and screeching sounds brought influences from hip-hop, electronic music, dance, funk, jazz and rock music to the fuzzy speakers of CRT, the televisions of the 2000s.
Image: Dimps, Sonic Team/Sega
Making a splash in the canon of Sonic the Hedgehog music and Sega games in general is no easy feat. Modern Sonic fans often remember the Chemical Plant Zone theme or later tracks like the easy breezy rock theme from “Escape From the City” by Sonic Adventure 2. That’s why I think it’s relatively easy to miss the soundtrack on sonic rushSega released it early in the emerging handheld’s life cycle, and its approximately 1.62 million copies sold never made it the most popular or best-known game in the Sonic series
But Naganuma ran away with the sonic rush soundtrack. He samples the Reggae remix of famous song Tribe Called Quest by British DJ Fatboy Slim“I left my wallet in El Segundo,” to create a mariachi band-esque cry for the theme of a Brazilian carnivalesque level in “Ska Cha Cha.”
And while the nostalgic charm of the original Green Hill Zone theme will never go away, there’s something uniquely exciting about starting sonic rush on to the blaring horns and twangy guitar of “There, drive on.”
The eccentricities of Naganuma’s work have infected my brain and continue to shape my media tastes as an adult. Perhaps that’s why I won’t let myself—or anyone else—forget that he put Malcolm X on a Sonic game and into the ears of an impressionable video game-loving child.