Marking the anniversary, the creators of the rap beef beat-em-up sequel share memories of transforming Flavor Flav and Snoop Dogg into legendary video game characters ‘I remember we visited Ghostface Killah [of the Wu-Tang Clan] and he was mad at us!” recalls Daryl Anselmo, former EA employee and art director for 2004’s landmark hip-hop-fused beat-em-up, Def Jam: Fight for NY. “Ghostface had a four-pound solid gold eagle bracelet and he insisted his character’s finishing move should be this bird coming to life and pecking out all the other rappers’ eyeballs. The limitations of the PlayStation 2 technology and our violence restrictions meant we couldn’t pull it off. It was impossible.” The game’s producer Josh Holmes interjects: “When Ghostface first asked me about the eagle, Lauren [Wirtzer Seawood, another one of the game’s producers] told me just to nod along and smile. When we saw him again in the studio for the sequel, I apologised [for misleading him] and we quickly moved on to recording his character’s expanded insults for the new game. I remember one was: ‘Go home and cry to your momma. And, while you’re at it, tell her I’m hungry!’” Continue reading...

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Artist Butterbro accused of walking fine line between parody and discrimination and helping make racial slur mainstream A song about immigrants whose music, vocals and artwork were entirely generated using artificial intelligence has made the Top 50 most listened to songs in Germany, in what may be a first for a leading music market. Verknallt in einen Talahon is a parody song that weaves modern lyrics – many of them based around racial stereotypes about immigrants – with 60s schlager pop. Continue reading...

The use of fake AI vocals – including those of Donald Trump – is sending shockwaves through this historic scene. At a Montego Bay clash, performers debate their culture’s future Four days after the attempt on his life, the voice of Donald Trump booms from the speakers in Montego Bay, Jamaica: “If they needed an assassin, they should have sent for Bodyguard … about to commit a quadruple murder at Sumfest in Montego Bay.” The audience are taken by surprise, having been primed for a reggae riddim to drop, and laugh. The Bodyguard crew have just taken to the stage at Sumfest Global Sound Clash, a musical gladiatorial contest where sound systems battle against one another with creative mixing, hyped-up MCs and exclusive – often incendiary – recordings featuring star guests and in-jokes. AI vocalists such as this fake Trump, however, are sending shockwaves through a decades-old musical tradition in which authenticity and originality are paramount, and sound systems pay premium rates to artists to get vocals for clashes. Continue reading...

The Gold Coast trio’s frontwoman shares her list of clips – including Creed, dogs, and multiple TikTok trends she wants to try with her bandmates * Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email I have such a love-hate relationship with the internet and TikTok. I honestly find myself doomscrolling way more than I’d like to admit, but I am a true sucker for a funny video. When you find something that makes you laugh so much it brings you to tears, it makes the hours of scrolling through unboxing and Temu haul videos worth it. Continue reading...

Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memories Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles’ Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and a chunky double-decker compilation record, Now That’s What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects – my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s – when I read the other day that CD sales were enjoying an unexpected bounce in the mid-2020s. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, if distantly so, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with. So fans of Taylor Swift are gobbling up special-edition copies of her albums on CD? Overall sales of the format are higher than they’ve been in decades? Great! Good for good old CDs. It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo that had (I still remember the glamour of the phrase) a disc reader under its press-open lid. With CDs in a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat without stopping to rewind. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended. You could randomise the order of a Now compilation, putting yourself through a daring Russian roulette: Ugly Kid Joe (the sonic equivalent of an empty pistol chamber), then PM Dawn (another empty chamber), then Bryan Ferry (bullet through the head). Continue reading...

The haunting songs of the video game and TV series get to the heart of Joel and Ellie’s story. The man behind them talks about the ‘magical’ process of composing The Last of Us is a story about tension – the tension between love and loss, violence and intimacy, protecting and destroying, life and death. It’s a study of how impossibly delicate life is, but also the terrifying stubbornness of our will to survive. As its composer, Gustavo Santaolalla’s job was to navigate and soundtrack that tension, a mediator between the game’s warring themes. His mission was to score music for a video game that was doing something different, and really had something to say. Santaolalla tells me that when he was a child in rural Argentina, one of his tutors quit on him after just a few lessons, telling his parents “there is nothing I can teach him”. His career proper began in 1967, when he co-founded the band Arco Iris, which specialised in fusing Latin-American folk with rock. Later, after leading a short-lived collective of Argentine musicians in Soluna, he began striking out on his own, releasing solo albums and composing for TV shows, adverts and, eventually, films (most notably Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorcycle Diaries). Continue reading...

The geekiest edge of the British music underground is fuelled by the 90s, featuring a ZX Spectrum Noel Edmonds, a Blobby-themed grindcore band, and a lady who performs the script to Theme Hospital We’ve had live jazz bands playing Mario Kart, and a full orchestra rendition of Sonic. But there’s a whole subgenre of video game music artists who’d happily describe their sound as even more nerdy. “Nerdcore has been around for 25 years. It’s hip-hop about nerdy subjects, predominantly video games,” says 41-year-old Nick Box from Blackpool. Box has been in all sorts of “weird silly bands” such as electronic horror punk band Hot Pink Sewage, where “all I did was dress as a gimp and push play on the backing track”. He now performs solo as Cliff Glitchard and it’s even weirder than you think. “It’s all set against a backdrop of a ZX Spectrum running an AI clone of 90s TV presenter Noel Edmonds,” he “explains”. “The show starts with the Spectrum loading screen, then a pixelated Edmonds tells the crowd he’s responsible for every celebrity death, political decision and major disaster of the last 40 years. I run around shouting about crap celebrities and end up shagging Mr Blobby on stage.” Continue reading...

The Guardian illustrator – and veteran Glasto-goer – takes us through the festival’s highs and lows, from the stress of ticket-buying and tent-pitching to after-dark thrills and spills? Continue reading...

Social media reporter Matilda Boseley reacts to songs made with Suno AI, a new AI music generator. Like other paying users, Guardian Australia now owns the rights to these songs. But is this technology actually good enough to threaten the livelihoods of musicians? Spoiler alert: it’s no worse than some tracks on the radio, but don’t expect a Grammy anytime soon Continue reading...