Some people have questioned the outreach strategy of hip-hop upstart Kadillak Kaz, who spent an hour or so last week tweeting a plea to any vaguely video-game related Twitter feed he could find, imploring them to put any of his music in their games.
Question Kadillak’s technique no longer.
Indie game developer Michael Beret is signing Kadillak up to feature the rapper’s song in an upcoming game, as long as Kadillak is ok with tweaking his song “Drugs” a tad.
Beret’s game, Demon Chic, is “mainly a two-person project,” he told me over e-mail, “and the other person (our lead coder) is my mum, so we may have to censor the word ‘pussy’, but Kadillak Kaz seemed down with whatever.”
Beret expects he will need no further edits as he makes Kadillak Kaz’s latest dream come true.
“We can definitely leave the vast majority of the song unedited, since our game is profane like whaaat, but I figure since our game is pretty inclusive in general I just should probably avoid language that seems disrespectful in general. Don’t want to make anyone feel bad. That can be our company’s motto: ‘All instances of the word “bitch” must be in an a gendered context.’ Or something like that.”
The collaboration between Kadillak Kaz and Michael Beret was rapidly forged through Twitter last week, shortly after we published an article about the rapper’s unusual and not quite on-target push to get into the video game scene. (Kadillak’s pitch to everyone who would listen: “who can i talk to regarding getting my music placed on your games”)
“I DMed back and forth a bit with Kadillak Kaz and it looks like I’ll be able to at least put his song “Drugs” (from your Kotaku post) in the indie action-RPG I’m making!” Beret told me in an e-mail on Friday. “He responded very quickly and was totally polite and professional.”
Kadillak had tweeted the creators of Call of Duty, the makers of Fable, indie folks like Jonathan Blow and even the people who run a game development conference in China. His approach was scattershot, to put it kindly, but, he had told me over Twitter, gaming was an important new avenue for him. “Its a lane that is not crowded like everything else in music…it would be good branding for not only myself, bt 4 the game 2.”
The makers of Call of Duty didn’t seem to get back to him. Nor did he make inroads with GDC China. But Beret looked at his own game — “about three dudes living in a house (two brothers and the older brother’s boyfriend), both the boyfriend and one of the brothers are schizophrenic and the third brother is always just tripping and together they fight their common hallucinations” — and he saw a spot of Kadillak Kaz.
The drug song was nearly perfect for a wacky game like Demon Chic.
“I can totally see how someone would do this as a lark,” Beret said, “but I love hip-hop, so I figured ‘why not?’ and listened to the song you posted, and hey! I really liked it.
“The rest of our soundtrack is a mix of super-sick stoner doom metal from the band Queen Elephantine and indie folk and hip-hop from local Providence musicians (I’m based in RI), so I mean — we already have some hip-hop, the song was tight, and our game is I guess a lot about drug stuff! — so it seemed like a perfect match.”
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