I’ve long known, thanks to numerous interviews with composer Grant Kirkhope, that the DK Rap was always intended to be a bit of a joke. That classic silly song from my childhood was never a serious endeavor. Even so, it’s become iconic to those of us who grew up around N64s or even just Nintendo in general.
What I did not know is that it was recorded in a stuffy hallway by the game director and a random programmer he picked, likely because that random programmer had once yelled “Zits,” “Rash,” and “Pimple” into a mic, and listened to Tupac when working in the evenings.
I learned all this from that programmer, Chris Sutherland. Nowadays, it feels flippant to refer to him as some random guy. He’s been in the industry for longer than I’ve been alive, starting at Rare as a programmer on The Amazing Spider-Man on Game Boy and working on Sneaky Snakes, Battletoads, two Donkey Kong Countrys, and Banjo-Kazooie before Donkey Kong 64. Since then, he’s tackled Banjo-Tooie, Viva Pinata, Kinect Sports, and finally joined his former Rare colleagues at Playtonic Games for Yooka-Laylee and its subsequent spin-offs.
Sutherland styles himself as a programmer. That’s his main job, the one he’s been doing for a living for 37 years. But he’s also, somewhat incidentally, a prolific voice actor. You’ve almost certainly heard him. He’s the announcer in Killer Instinct, Carrington in Perfect Dark, the “voice” of Banjo and Kazooie, and during Donkey Kong’s Rare era, was the voices of Diddy Kong and (probably) K. Rool. His voice acting resume is longer than his programming one at this point.
This, he tells me over a video call, was “by accident rather than design.” As Sutherland explains it, back in the day, there was “no concept of having a voice actor” at Rare (or most other places). So random developers would get tapped to do the sounds themselves. When DK 64 came along, Sutherland had already done some recording for Battletoads Arcade, which is where the yelling “Zits,” “Rash,” and “Pimple” came from. From then on, he says, he just started getting picked whenever they needed someone to do a voice.
“It became the norm that you’d just be coding away and then you’d get a phone call and then it would be somebody up in audio going, ‘Oh, could you come up and do some noises?’ ‘Oh yeah, I’m free now, yeah, okay, I’ll just pop up, do it now,’ and it could be done in about 10 minutes, no more than half an hour often, and so that became the thing.”
As Kirkhope has said in the past, the DK Rap was never intended to be a huge thing. It wasn’t a massive production. Sutherland doesn’t even really recall being super aware of it prior to recording it. Kirkhope composed it, while game director George Andreas wrote the lyrics and did most of the performance.
But he needed some help, and for that, he tapped Sutherland. Why him? Well, apart from his past minor soundmaking experience, he doesn’t know. But he does have a theory.
“We used to work in the evenings and I would sit there with music, listening to music on my headphones, and it would often be rap music, or I’d have all these CDs of different rap artists,” he recalls. “I was not in any way musically inclined at all, I just listened to music like we all do, and so I suppose maybe he knew that I listened to certain rap artists, whether it’s Tupac or DJ Jazzy Jeff or whatever it was I had at the time.”
Sutherland thinks that maybe Andreas assumed he knew how to rap. He recalls both of them adopting a “Well, can’t be that hard, can it?” attitude. It was, of course, very much that hard.
“There wasn’t a recording booth as such,” he says. “What they had is, where the offices were for the audio folks, they would have a kind of corridor, which would have blankets up, and then you’d pull the blankets to one side, so that they’re deadening the sound a bit, and they’d go to do recording, and then they’d shout back, ‘No, you’re out of time, and come back, no, you need to do it like this,’ and then we’d go off again. It also meant that in certain climates, it would get so hot in there, because you just had all these blankets around you in this small room.”
Kirkhope did in fact stop them what felt like every few seconds to Sutherland, usually because they’d gone off the beat. Sutherland remembers the recording “felt like it took forever,” and that “it became clear to me that I had no musical capability at that point, at all, I have no sense of rhythm or anything.”
Of course, eventually, they managed something that sounded, per Sutherland, “acceptable,” likely with a lot of help from Kirkhope’s edits.
Sutherland’s part in the rap is relatively minor by volume, but enormous in impact. Andreas performs most of the lyrics, with Sutherland joining in for certain lines such as “He’s the first member of the D.K. crew! Huh!” Other Rare staff members also joined them for the “D.K.! Donkey Kong!” chorus.
But Sutherland is the one who blesses us with the iconic first line of the rap. “So they’re finally here, performing for you.”
He performs it for me on the call, but it’s been so long, he gets it a little wrong: “So, it’s finally time!” He’s candid about his own memory of the lyrics being fuzzy. Sutherland remembers being at a video game museum cafe in Nottingham once, and overhearing someone talking to someone else and reciting the DK Rap. “I didn’t know whether it was the right thing to do, to go, hello, do you know who I am?”
He ultimately didn’t say anything. The two people he overheard, he thought, had probably heard the rap dozens of times as kids and remembered all the words. Sutherland can’t remember them, because the DK Rap never made the same impression on him. And why would it? He, Kirkhope, and Andreas had regarded it as “kind of a joke anyway, it was never intended to be a serious thing.” He recorded it like anything else, and went back to work. “I didn’t think I’d be being interviewed about it this many years later, or even talking about it.”
Given how Rare tackled recording back then, it’s unsurprising that the rap didn’t stick with Sutherland. He says he did other sounds for Donkey Kong 64 too, but doesn’t recall which ones. Maybe Diddy Kong? Someone recently asked him if he had done the voice for K.Rool, and Sutherland had to respond that he genuinely didn’t know.
“I know it sounds mad, but I didn’t think to look or listen at the time. When somebody asked me [if I was K. Rool], I got a recording online, and then listened to it, and then I realized that I couldn’t tell, because they pitch-shifted the vocal down. So I had to take the recording down from YouTube, then pitch-shift it up, and see if it sounded like me, and I think it is me. But if somebody said, if it was Kev Bayliss or somebody, then it’s probably him.”
“…On the credits, it just says support, I think, so it doesn’t call me out as being the person. It wasn’t something I was particularly bothered about as a thing, or a notable thing I did, it was just one of the many things you do to help out…There’s so many of them as well, that you don’t know whether you did, I might have done a take, but I couldn’t tell you whether they chose my version versus somebody else’s.”
Even so, the DK Rap has become famous of its own accord, and Sutherland now looks back on it fondly. It was fun, he says. And a little weird!
”You spent your life writing software, and then someone asks you, ‘Well, what about that noise, can you make that noise?’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I’m happy to make the noise.’ That was easy, so I, should I have just been doing that all the time? Maybe.”
Sutherland is still at Playtonic, and still occasionally making silly sounds on demand. He’s the voices of Yooka and Laylee in the original game, and he performed the game’s DK 64 spoof rap composed by Kirkhope, The Yooka-Laylee rap, with Bayliss.
“I don’t think we’ve got plans for any further raps or songs at the moment, but you never know. If the people demand it, well, I’m sure we can do it.”
