The Internet Thinks Kanye West Accidentally Ripped Off ‘The Legend of Zelda’ on ‘Jesus Is King’

In terms of sonic influences, Kanye West has always claimed to crib from no-one but himself.

That’s not really true, of course: Yeezus, widely considered one of the most subversive of all mainstream rap records, was actually an assemblage of the work being done by other people in the world of underground rap. The whole thing’s an endless Death Grips rip-off — good, but hardly original.

Now, however, the work of an internet super sleuth makes it clear that Kanye might have accidentally nabbed ideas not from another band, but from a video game. And not just any video game, but The Legend of Zelda, one of the most popular titles of the modern era.

The controversy all started when one Twitter user by the name of @everydaylouie discovered that a snippet of the Jesus Is King track ‘Selah’ sounds a lot like the ‘Gerudo Valley’ theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

And I mean, it really, really does:

noticed something while listening to the new kanye album… pic.twitter.com/q1nRklkhf4

— Louie Zong (@everydaylouie) October 25, 2019

It’s particularly funny given that ‘Selah’ has been the one well-received track from a fairly poorly received album. Kanye’s newest has been derided as his worst, a limp collection of half-baked gospel songs about Christ. In the middle of that sits ‘Selah’, a punishing track, full of the fire and fury that the rest of the album so sorely lacks.

Anyway, turns out that Zelda apparently beat him to the punch like two decades earlier.

Of course, as Louie Zong has already taken pains to point out, nobody’s actually suggesting that Kanye deliberately and directly lifted from the soundtrack. Hell, he might never have played a Zelda game in his entire life — although he does have at least a shallow interest in gaming as a concept, given that he once said he’d make one about guiding his mother to heaven.

At the very least, it’s a fun — if completely bizarre — example of multiple realisability, two artists reaching through time and drawing from the same creative well.