It’s no secret that rapper Megan Thee Stallion is among the greatest anime followers within the music trade. To that finish, one monitor on her self-titled LP, Otaku Hot Girl, not solely fulfilled anime followers’ desires, but it surely additionally proved the lengths Megan would go to get her anime anthem permitted.
In the lead-up to her third LP’s launch, the outspoken anime fan teased followers saying her monitor, Otaku Hot Girl, would have an anime pattern that she labored actually arduous to clear. When her album lastly dropped on June 28, followers beelined to the monitor and found that the anime the out-and-proud “weeb and a baddie” sampled was the business bumper for the second season of the mega-popular shonen anime Jujutsu Kaisen. The Houston rapper did not simply cease on the pattern; she additionally enlisted Yuji Itadori English dub voice actor Adam McArthur to relate the track’s intro.
megan thee stallion sampling a jujutsu kaisen monitor and getting yuji itadori’s english VA (adam mcarthur) to relate the intro like she is so insane for this lmfkskdkskdr#MEGAN #JJK pic.twitter.com/eUgCo7l3Sn
— springkies (@jekkibby2) June 28, 2024
It marks a full-circle second for Jujutsu Kaisen followers as a result of it referenced a 2021 fandom meme the place McArthur modified a well-known line about Itadori liking “tall chicks like Jennifer Lawrence” to Megan Thee Stallion. It must be famous that McArthur did the fan-requested fee at no cost, has it pinned to his official X/Twitter page, and has been steadily recited by the anime voice actor — to nice applause — at quite a few anime conventions.
Megan’s historical past with anime, extra particularly Jujutsu Kaisen, runs even deeper than the fan-requested identify drop. Since Jujutsu Kaisen first premiered in late 2020, Megan has added fan-favorite character Satoru Gojo to her rotation of Instagram cosplay pictures, offered Jujutsu Kaisen’s Crunchyroll 2024 Anime of the Year Award, and invited Jujutsu Kaisen cosplayers on the stage to dance whereas on her Hot Girl Summer tour. The triumph followers are experiencing with Otaku Hot Girl resonates all of the extra when you think about the “eight million hoops” she needed to undergo to make sure the monitor noticed the sunshine of day.
Megan Thee Stallion speaks on coping with pattern clearance points and having to alter names and phrases on a track the day earlier than her album drops. pic.twitter.com/9lSpaguF6J
— XXL Magazine (@XXL) June 27, 2024
During an Instagram reside on June 26 — two days earlier than the album’s launch — Megan revealed that she bumped into last-second clearance points with the anime’s studio. According to Rolling Stone, Megan was informed she would both must scrap the anime pattern or take away all of her references to character names with a purpose to preserve clearance rights to the track. Billboard experiences that Megan rerecorded Otaku Hot Girl in a makeshift studio hours earlier than her Dallas present on June 11 to get the track cleared.
“I actually hope y’all assume this shit sound fireplace, ’trigger I needed to leap by means of eight million hoops to get this shit. Once y’all hear the pattern, y’all are gonna know why they was giving us a tough time,” Megan mentioned. “This is a really massive manufacturing firm so for them to even say sure — and I be cussing and shit — like I mentioned, I’m grateful. I’m not complaining. I actually needed this pattern. I actually needed to do it, so I’m doing the whole lot I obtained to do to maintain it. But change the names? Change the names the day earlier than the album out? That was nuts.”
@ign There are so many online game references in Megan Thee Stallion’s BOA music video! #megantheestallion #boa #music #video #games #spacechannel5 #crashbandicoot #onepiece #mortalkombat #ddr #roomba #tekken #scottpilgrim #streetfighter #soulcalibur #spongebob #squidward #ign #sidebyside #reference #easteregg #gaming #gamingontiktok ♬ original sound – IGN
Megan’s LP is not simply chock-full of intelligent anime references; she additionally confirmed some like to the avid gamers of the world along with her music video for Boa. In the monitor — which references One Piece character Boa Hancock — Megan called back to a plethora of video games. Key amongst them are Crash Bandicoot, Mortal Kombat, Dance Dance Revolution, Street Fighter, and Tekken. In case Megan’s affinity for video video games was nonetheless in query, Boa’s single covers paid homage to the PlayStation 2’s video game box art.
In our evaluate for Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2, we gave the collection a 6/10, saying, “Jujutsu Kaisen gives loads of spectacle, however little else throughout the Shibuya Incident Arc.”
Thumbnail credit score: @theestallion on Instagram
Isaiah Colbert is a contract author for IGN. You can comply with them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.