There's a precedent for rappers dedicating an entire song to expressing their affinity for video games, with my personal favorite being Beanie Sigel's video-games-as-a-parable-for-dealing-drugs opus, Mac Man. That doesn't diminish how bizarre it is to hear Ludacris mix up his usual go-to topics of smoking weed, brandishing guns, and general celebration of his status as the freshest MC in the Dirty-Dirty, with references to Ultimate Doom, MechWarrior, Galaga, Virtua Fighter, and a slew of other random-ass video games in Push the Start Button, a track from his new album, Theater of the Mind. Apparently it's only on the Norwegian version of the album, though it should come as no surprise that the song is popping up all over the internet. Including right here!
You know, since around the time of the original PlayStation, video games and hip-hop have gone together like salt and pepper (Salt-N-Pepa?) but at 10 years old, punching SimCity codes into my dad's green monochrome 386, I never could've imagined a world 20 years into the future where rappers are spitting hot rhymes about Will Wright's urban planning simulator. Then again, there's also a Go, Diego, Go! reference in there, which makes me wonder if there's anything that Ludacris won't rap about.