Grunty’s garbled grunting: Queer vocality and the lyrical gibberish of Banjo-Kazooie

This article examines the Nintendo 64 video game Banjo-Kazooie and its unique approach to vocalization, wherein designers chopped and rearranged sound samples into abstract, nonsensical grunts to represent character dialogue. Drawing upon queer and lyric theory, I argue that what at first seems like slapdash gobbledygook is in fact deeply poetic in nature, with the method used to disassemble and reassemble the sound samples ensuring they retained their metrical qualities. The resulting language, with its blend of poetic metre and abstract speech, engenders an unruly and distinctly queer sensation of vocality that allows us to imagine, or more aptly to hear , the possibility of new aural futures in gaming.