The Best of K.K. Slider

As fans of the video game Animal Crossing are well aware, there is a guitar-playing dog called K.K. Slider who frequently shows up to your village to play music for the public. But he’s not just a small-time wandering musician. He’s highly popular in the animal kingdom and he’s had several hits spanning multiple genres. In fact if you check to see what’s on the radio in your neighbor’s home, more often than not it will be a K.K. Slider song. And it’s easy to see why he’s so popular since there is bound to be at least one song in his discography that will appeal to someone, no matter what your favorite genre is.

The character first appeared in the Japanese Nintendo 64 game Animal Forest as Totakeke. His appearance, as well as his name, was actually an in-joke, because he was a caricature of the game’s sound director Kazumi Totaka, who is one of Nintendo’s regular composers and voice actors. Once Animal Forest was adapted to the GameCube as Animal Forest + and localized in America as Animal Crossing, Totakeke became known as K.K. Slider and his popularity increased even more. In that game he appeared in front of the train station every Saturday night between 8:00 PM and 12:00 AM to sing, and if you requested one of his songs, he would give you an audio version of the song (or an aircheck) for you to play at home after he finished singing it for you live. K.K.’s role has been consistent throughout most games in the series with minor changes. Such as when he became a DJ in Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

My family had a GameCube, and we played Animal Crossing and I have listened to all of K.K. Slider’s songs, so now comes the all-important question: which songs are the best? As with all my Best lists, this is just my personal taste, so I don’t want K.K. fans dogging me in the comments going “How can you not like K.K. Country??” A lot of the songs I did not include are great as well. In fact most of them are. These are just my all-time favorites, many of them ones that have been stuck in my head ever since I played this game as a teenager back in the early 2000s.

Side note: I don’t speak K.K. Slider’s language of Animalese so I don’t know what any of the lyrics to these songs are, but that has never stopped me from enjoying a good beat, and I assume that’s the case for you too.

Go K.K. Rider