“I was acting like a rabbit”: How Jay-Z went method to write a verse for Bugs Bunny
For entirely different reasons – which should go without saying – Bugs Bunny and Jay-Z are regarded as influential, iconic, and legendary practitioners of their chosen art forms.
The Looney Tunes stalwart has been a globally recognised favourite ever since debuting in 1938, munching on a carrot like no other and cracking wise through a string of adventures covering animation, live-action, film, television, video games, and pretty much any multimedia tie-in that’s ever existed.
Meanwhile, the man born Shawn Carter has built an empire of his own since breaking out in the 1990s, with his extracurricular activities extending well beyond music and into clothing lines, record labels, talent agencies, and technology, to the point where he’s a billionaire at least twice over and one half of entertainment’s premiere power couple.
With that in mind, what exactly do the two have in common? Rather predictably, given one of their professions, it came through the medium of rap. Not just any rap, though, but a contribution to a soundtrack that lives rent-free in the head of an entire generation, sold millions of copies and has the potential to trigger core memories whenever one of its signature tracks gets played.
It might not be a very good movie, but Space Jam sure was a popular one, making a killing at the box office on its way to spawning a billion-dollar merchandising empire. Pairing basketball superstar Michael Jordan with Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the gang proved to be an inspired move, and one that would only work once, considering the 25-year wait for a sequel was most definitely not worth it when Warner Bros decided the driving force behind follow-up A New Legacy had to be the shilling of its own wares.
Any Space Jam aficionado feels the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia coming on thick whenever Seal’s ‘Fly Like an Eagle’, Quad City DJs title track, or Monstars theme ‘Hit ‘Em High’ with Coolio, Busta Rhymes, LL Cool J, and Method Man blares over the speakers, but one of the less-heralded songs to feature on the soundtrack was Bugs Bunny’s own ‘Buggin’.
James Newton Howard, Dominique Trenier, and Dominique Owen were credited as the core writing team, but things could have sounded very differently had Jay-Z not been involved. Space Jam hit cinemas just four months after the release of his debut album Reasonable Doubt, so he was hardly a well-known commodity at the time despite the acclaim to greet his first record. To make ends meet beforehand, he’d been working as a ghostwriter, chipping in with verses whenever the opportunity arose, which led him into the path of the basketball comedy.
Going surprisingly method in his preparations, Jay-Z shared on The Shop: Uninterrupted that he “was in Sony studios, acting like a rabbit”. An impressive level of dedication, without a doubt, but at the time, he had no idea that the film he was contributing to was on the cusp of becoming a full-blown cultural sensation.
From his perspective, “You’re not really thinking about the legacy of it,” which led him to focus on professionalism above all else. “For me, it was just, ‘Write a song for Bugs Bunny,'” he said, which he did, and it’s something history will always remember him for.
