A New Kanye Song Sounds Like the Zelda Soundtrack and We’re Not Mad Actually

On Friday, Kanye West finally released the long-awaited album Jesus Is King, an 11-song summation of the rapper’s Christian rebirth. With features from Kanye’s Sunday Service Choir, the album’s gospel influences are obvious, but behind the hallelujahs driving the chorus of the second song, “Selah,” some people hear an unexpected inspiration: The Legend of Zelda.

If you haven’t played much Ocarina of Time, this one might slide right by you. But as pointed out in a tweet by author and illustrator Louie Zong, the chord progression of Kanye’s “Selah” lines up pretty well with one in “Gerudo Valley” from the soundtrack of 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. With the two songs merged, as included in Zong’s tweet, the similarities between the songs are pretty obvious, and it’s pretty hard to unhear them even when you listen to the two songs separately (particularly around 1:00 in “Selah”).

Similarities between major-label artists’ songs and those of smaller artists have been the subject of several big copyright infringement lawsuits as of late, including a four-year suit over Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” which ruled that Perry had infringed gospel singer Marcus Gray and a recent $15 million suit against rapper Juice WRLD by the pop punk band Yellowcard, but in this instance, we’re unlikely to see anyone lawyering up. While NME posed the question “Did Kanye West’s ‘Jesus Is King’ rip-off ‘The Legend of Zelda’?,” Nintendo Life pointed out before it that “Selah” doesn’t actually copy a specific melody from “Gerudo Valley.”

That said, Zong’s mash-up actually slaps, with the relaxing sounds of “Gerudo Valley” rounding out the gospel theatrics of “Selah.” Release the full remix! This is the 2019 collaboration we really need.