I Was Almost Porky Pig's Ghostwriter

Space Jam, Jay Z and Rap Battles

This week’s episode of The Almanac of Rap is the second and final installment from our live event series. We teamed up with The Questions and our guests for this episode were Josh Gondelman and Petey DeAbreau.

Also heads up that this will be the last episode of 2023 but we’ll be back at the top of January with more episodes. The show is available on all major platforms and you can listen to past episodes and subscribe to the show here.

This current newsletter has nothing to do with the current episode. What can I say, I love a tangent!

The other day I was reminded of the time that I got asked to if I would submit to write the raps for a rap battle scene in Space Jam 2.

I was excited to give it a shot and have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of one of my favorite rappers, Jay Z. He penned the lyrics to Buggs Bunny’s song from the original Space Jam soundtrack.

The line ‘got a girlfriend Lola she’s a fox / ain’t no bunny like the one i got’ is pretty cool if you know that Jay Z wrote the rap because it’s a nod to his song Ain’t No **** feat Foxy Brown.

Also speaking of ghostwriters I had no idea that Smoothe Da Hustla wrote a lot of Foxy’s verse on that song but apparently he did!

That photo of a quote is from a HipHopDX article and if you are wondering why it’s a photo of words and not just a straight quote it’s because DX does not let you copy paste their text.

I was almost 100% sure that Jay didn’t do the demo in the Buggs Bunny voice but this clip of him on The Shop talking about the experience almost makes me doubt that. Like you can definitely hear his flow in the song but if you use your imagination you can almost hear it in his voice.

If I knew how to model AI voices I would 100% run that song through whatever spits out the Jay Z voice just to see if I’m buggin or not, no pun intended.

So yeah long story short I didn’t get the gig but when the movie dropped I was still kinda hype to watch it for the sole purpose of seeing what happened with the battle rap scene but also wondering If I’d be able to figure out who wrote the verses.

Other than Lebron’s bad acting I don’t remember much about the film including how much rap battling was in the film but here is a clip of one that I found on Youtube.

The rapper who ended up getting the gig is Murs which is cool because he’s fucking Murs! Yeah I would have loved to been able to put this one on my resume but knowing that he was the one who wrote the bars feels pretty good because I love it when companies rock with independent artists.

While they don’t come across my desk nearly as often as I’d like I love a rap writing assignment. The challenge of it is fun and when it’s not your personal story you can be less precious and more open to taking notes. And if you didn’t think that my Space Jam 2 demos would be attached to this post then you don’t know me very well at all!

They asked me to write rhymes for a battle between Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Al G. Al G did not have a voice yet because he was a new character and rapping as Daffy Duck is not very easy at all so I didn’t even try but yes, I absolutely tried to rap in the Porky Pig voice

There were three demos in total but for some reason the third one won’t upload so you only get to hear two of them.

Battle Sequence 1

Battle Sequence 2

It was a really fun exercise and while I don’t have much experience with ghostwriting I think I did a pretty good job of capturing the voice and essence of each character.

So yeah feel free to leave a comment to tell me how you think I did* and if you ever need a person to write a random rap song for your animated film, wedding mixtape (hi monica & bj) or otherwise hit me up.

*Unless you don’t think that I did a good job. In that case keep it to yourself haha.