jujutsu kaisen

Megan Thee Stallion’s new album, Megan, has arrived — but not without some difficulty for the Houston rapper. In a recent livestream, Meg shared how a major obstacle emerged just days before the album’s release, forcing her to extensively re-record one song, “Otaku Hot Girl,” to remove references to one of her favorite anime.

She said on Tuesday, June 25, her team got an email from the anime’s production company, requesting the removal of a sample from the show, as well as several character names from her lyrics. “They said, ‘Actually, I need you to take out the names of the characters that’s in the show’,” she recalled. “That is the whole song. That makes the song make sense. They said, ‘You could either do this — you could have the music clearance or you can have the name clearance.’ The music is what’s really important to me, but the names really tied it all together.”

Ultimately, she re-cut the song in a makeshift studio just before going Live on Instagram, telling fans, “I really hope y’all think this sh*t sound fire, ’cause I had to jump through eight million hoops to get this sh*t. Once y’all hear the sample, y’all are gonna know why they was giving us a hard time. This is a very big production company, so for them to even say yes — and I be cussing and sh*t — like I said, I’m grateful. I’m not complaining. I really wanted this sample. I really wanted to do it, so I’m doing everything I got to do to keep it. But change the names? Change the names the day before the album out? That was nuts.”

Even though Meg did not reveal the name of the anime or production company… it’s pretty obviously Jujutsu Kaisen, a show with which she’s already got something of a history. The beat, by Bankroll Got It, interpolates the show’s theme song, while Adam McArthur, the voice actor for the main character, Yuji Itadori, declares, “I like a tall woman with a big ass, like Grammy winner Megan Thee Stallion.” The show is licensed in the US by Crunchyroll and Viz Media, and is one of the more popular properties being licensed by the companies.

The line reading used in the song is not actually spoken in the show. Although Yuji does assert his fondness for statuesque women, the example given in the show is Jennifer Lawrence (who technically qualifies by Japanese standards, I guess). Fans online rewrote the line to pay homage to Thee Stallion’s love for anime and fitting physique, then convinced McArthur to re-read the line with the Meg reference. It’s kind of a shame we might not get to hear the original verses and see how she used the names of the characters to tie it all together, but it is cool to see the continued crossover between hip-hop and anime.