Danish rapper Morten “Marvelous Mosell” Sell has, like so many musicians, looked to the past for creative inspiration. What he found there was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series—an enduring muse that’s inspired so much great art over the years, and has now led him to write his very own ninja rap, “Turtles In The Technodrome.”
Like the four heroic reptiles he’s so inspired by, Mosell’s ode to the Turtles’ animated series is colorful, infectious, and full of ‘tude. His verses describe the Ninja Turtles’ lifestyle—nights spent fighting crime by “jumping from roofs and throwing youths against phone booths” and days of pizza-eating—before detailing an adventure through the “shining chrome” of the Technodrome, where Krang must be stopped from playing a weeknight rave set.
Mosell’s style is disorienting, making rhymes out of verses as ill-fitting as “there was tumult, the Foot Clan began to do somersaults,” but his enthusiasm for the heroic martial artists is palpable. And who can deny the power of a chorus that goes, “Yeeeah, kick back …on the ground with a pizza stack!”
Is it better than Vanilla Ice’s seminal “Ninja Rap”? Get back to us with your answer in about 20 years. It’s still far too early to tell if “Raphael was fast with a sai, stabbed a Foot soldier in the eye” will stand the test of time as well as Ice’s “Have you ever seen a turtle get down? Slammin’ and jammin’ to the new swing sound.”
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