Spyro the Dragon has had a huge impact on the world of video games and pop culture and has made a name for himself in the rap and punchlines of your favorite rappers.
Dragon, you know, is a pretty little name to talk about a joint in street jargon. You know this because Wald and Fianso had a hand in it. But in pop culture, one of the most famous dragons is undoubtedly Spyro. The undisputed mascot of the PlayStation, with Crash Bandicoot, a small purple jewel-hunting dragon, was the heyday of Sony’s first console.
As for me, the first Spyro is even one of the first games I finished as a kid. Ah… I remember his hours spent in the world of dragons, burning sheep, stealing and attacking gnorks and egg thieves… What, I’m telling the story of my life, and you have a problem with that? I don’t care, this is my article, I do what I want.
Moreover, not only I liked the adventures of Spyro, Snoop Dogg himself considers him his nephew and posted himself in his networks in a T-shirt with a dragon. He even signed a completely banned ad for remakes of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy.
Fire rap like Spyro
We often hear the expression that rappers spit fire when it comes to very juicy and very dirty lyrics. Of course, many of them compared themselves to a small purple dragon. This is, for example, the case of Kikesa in his play “All Alone”: “I don’t give a fuck, I do whatever I want, I’m very boring, very hot.” I like Spyro, I fly and spit fireballs“.
He is obviously not the only one, there is also Zuukou Mayzie, who in his song with Lala &ce says: “Your Anna, fuck my pussy before, soon spit flame into the microphone like the dragon Spyro.” Just like rapper O2, who confesses in the chorus of the title “En Balade” that he has “Te-tê in a spiral and spitting fire like Spyro”.
Still with the same image of crazy lyrics, there’s Flocktown, which, not content with remixing “The Food”, a Common and Kanye West classic, throws out a well-felt climax in its single verse: “Nan nan nan no sound Bimbo in the Bumbo car, you listen like Dumbo, I spit fire like Spyro.
In the same vein, we have Itopak, the geek rapper who explicitly dubbed one of his albums “Purple Dragon” after Spyro. We even find the fiery face of the hero on the cover of the project. As for the climaxes, there should be many. Like “Your sque-di in the basket haw I’m awake think scratch pay, meanwhile he scratches the play, spits fire like a purple dragon” and “Viscount like Yuro dragon like Spyro, to hell with the rap game, light me corny”
500 euros for Spyro
Okay, we get it, Spyro would burn the whole rap game himself if he knew how to use a microphone. But you want more proof that the beetle is the most gangster of all dragons? Obviously, it’s not because he slaps sheep in the face to turn them into butterflies, or because he has more swag than any rapper with his sunglasses, but because he’s purple.
And this color, you know, is on the most popular banknote of 500 euros. Few artists have come up with an analogy between its color and the color of Europe’s greatest sign of wealth, but Skizi Sensei has done it. On the track “Hooligan” Dany D, after placing one for Samus Aran from the Metroid saga, he calmly releases these climactic lines: ” Come set fire like an arsonist, bPurple Carnation Spyro”
Are you really surprised that Spyro went broke? Guys, let’s be honest, with all the gems he’s collected from his Playstation adventures, this guy probably weighs even more than Soprano’s and Ai Nakamura’s SACEM rights combined.
We laugh, we laugh, but Spyro, even if no game released subsequently has surpassed the first three episodes on the Playstation, it still remains one of the most popular gaming licenses in the world. Proof that the dragon has remained in the hearts of players for so long is the collection of remakes of the original trilogy, released nearly twenty years later and selling over 2.7 million copies on PS4 alone. Not to mention a few ports on other consoles, that’s a lot of money for Spyro. His bank account would be enough to make our most protected French rapper turn green with envy.