Inside Hip-Hop and Anime’s Intertwined Creative Relationship

From bluesy space cowboy soundtracks to a rapping ninja, Black music has long made its presence known in anime — and now more than ever, the reverse is also true. Through decades of collaborations and references, the two universes have sampled sights, sounds and lived experiences from their respective cultures to deliver an expansive audio-visual symphony. Dating back to at least the ’90s, Black artists have anime in their music videos and other creative works. For instance, Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson included clips from sci-fi anime film Akira in their 1995 video for “Scream.”

During that same decade, Yoko Kanno and other acclaimed Japanese musicians began crafting stories and soundtracks inspired by and infused with Black music. Kanno and her band Seatbelts swirled jazz (“Cosmos”) and blues (“Spokey Dokey”) together to create the soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop, a seminal 1998 series that helped expand the influence of anime in pop culture. “I wanted to play brass music that shook your soul, made your blood boil and made you lose it,” Kanno told Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. That desire led her to compose the Cowboy Bebop opening theme song, “Tank!”, a stylish accompaniment for a tale of adventure, damaged souls and unresolved trauma.

How Black Music & Anime Sample Each Other | A Closer Look – Geeked

Cowboy Bebop director and co-creator Shinichirō Watanabe, who worked alongside Kanno to bring the show to life, has arguably had the biggest influence in connecting the worlds of anime and Black music over the past two decades. In 2004, Watanabe created Samurai Champloo, an anime about two swordsmen accompanying a teenager on a quest to find her father during Japan’s Edo period. Watanabe, borrowing from hip-hop’s penchant for sampling old songs and remixing them into something new, infused his historical drama with newer, “edgier” animation. “This art form turns past music into new and edgy,” Watanabe told Medium in 2019. “So I decided to sample the exciting part of an old genre called ‘Jidaigeki,’ Japanese historical drama, and make it into new edgy animation.” He was also inspired by audacious rappers, leading him to create a character who “boasts like a rapper with a microphone.”

Champloo takes heavy cues from hip-hop itself, featuring both graffiti art and beatboxing, and the theme song, “Battlecry,” comes courtesy of rapper Shing02 and late lo-fi producer Nujabes. “With Samurai Champloo, it wasn’t that I had the story in mind and then added hip-hop to it,” Watanabe told Eastern Kicks in 2015. “When I came up with the character of Mugen, I heard hip-hop at the same time, and I thought he was going to be a rapper samurai.” Though Mugen never dropped any bars, his uncompromising approach to life and quirky fighting style, which resembles break dancing, mirrors the spirit of an MC. 

Afro Samurai is an even more explicit example of Black music influencing anime. The 2007 series, created originally as a manga by Takashi Okazaki in 1998, follows Afro, a swordsman who’s seeking revenge against the people who killed his father. Afro Samurai’s titular lead was inspired by the musicians Okazaki saw on ’70s Soul Train episodes that aired in Japan in the ’90s. When it was time for the manga to become an anime, legendary Wu-Tang Clan co-founder RZA was tapped to produce the soundtrack, which includes appearances from various Wu-Tang Clan members and affiliates, many of whom had already sprinkled anime influences in their own music. “I feel my saga is similar to his: For an artist in the hip-hop world, the idea of being the No. 1 producer, the No. 1 rapper, the No. 1 kid in the neighborhood is very important,” RZA told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “I feel like I’m Afro Samurai — as a producer and rapper.” 

Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, an animated version of a popular syndicated cartoon strip of the same name, further cuts lines between Black music and anime. The Adult Swim satire, which includes an intro that mirrors the opening of Samurai Champloo, features anime-inspired artwork and animation, as well as a soundtrack — and storylines — largely powered by hip-hop culture. Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) and other rap legends make routine guest appearances, and the series’ blend of stylized violence, humor and anime-esque imagery has grown so popular in Japan that it’s become one of the first non-anime titles to be dubbed in Japanese. 

LeSean Thomas, who eventually turned his own comic series, Cannon Busters, into an anime for Netflix, worked alongside McGruder during the first two seasons of The Boondocks. Featuring a popular opening theme song performed by rapper Marty Grimes, the show is another example of where Black music has intertwined with anime — and it’s a trend Thomas continues, with a little help from producer-DJ-rapper Flying Lotus: The two helped tell the tale of a historical Black figure. In 2021, Thomas and FlyLo reunited to reintroduce the world to the legend of Yasuke, a Black samurai who lived in Japan more than 400 years ago. Produced by Japanese animation studio MAPPA, the Netflix series Yasuke finds the titular character combatting his demons, not-so-hidden prejudice and a bunch of zombie swordsmen in order to protect the one person he still cares about. 

Flying Lotus’ soundtrack, with his muted electronic and spurts of ambient hip-hop, adds color to Yasuke’s solitary journey as a stoic warrior with a troubling past and an uncertain future. FlyLo’s relationship with anime is a prime example of how closely the mediums have become joined. Before scoring Yasuke, he repeatedly collaborated with Watanabe, producing the score for the director’s 2017 tech-noir cyberpunk anime short film Blade Runner Black Out 2022 and tracks for his 2019 space anime Carole & Tuesday. That relationship has flowed in both directions: Watanabe directed the animated music video for “More,” a Flying Lotus and Anderson .Paak collaboration that dropped in 2019. “I’ve been a fan of anime for forever, but I never thought the day would come where I’d be part of this world,” FlyLo told The Independent in 2021. 

These days, plenty of Black musicians are making anime part of their world, too, especially the ones who came of age when Toonami and Adult Swim became popular. The video for Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y’s 2009 song “The Check Point” features footage from Samurai Champloo. Kanye West re-created scenes from Akira for his “Stronger” video in 2007, and Lupe Fiasco’s 2015 album Tetsuo & Youth is named after the protagonist of the movie. Lil Uzi Vert’s video for “Ps & Qs” features anime-inspired animation, and in 2020, he dropped a song titled after Naruto’s character Sasuke Uchiha. Megan Thee Stallion, who sometimes posts anime references on her Instagram, mentions Sasuke in her 2020 single, “Girls in the Hood.” In one of her first magazine covers, she even cosplayed as My Hero Academia’s Shoto Todoroki. 

“I really like the storylines about it, like how you grow with the character,” she told Crunchyroll in 2020. “You see all the trials and tribulations they gotta go through, and you meet new people along the line that’s really helping them become the hero that he’s meant to be. So I feel like I apply that to my life a lot.” Megan’s not the first rapper to find parallels between themselves and the world of anime. “To me, Dragon Ball Z also represents the journey of the Black man in America,” RZA wrote in his 2009 book The Tao of Wu. “Son Goku has superpowers but doesn’t realize it — a head injury destroyed his memory, robbed his knowledge of self,” he added, referencing the story of an alien race that had its past, present and future erased before one man rose up to become the strongest of all. 

Tethered by memory, rhythm and animated modern folklore, Black music’s connection to anime is the sight and sound of cultural exchange. Whether it’s name-dropping anime in songs, featuring a rapping samurai on screen or cosplaying in a music video, creators from the worlds of anime and Black music have reimagined and reconfigured pop culture iconography to add new layers to their respective histories. It’s a series of collaborations that’s destined to continue growing. All of this is just a sample. 

Top illustration source credits: Armstrong: Bettman, via Getty Images; Record: Maciej Toporowicz/Getty Images; O’Jays: Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images; All other images: Netflix.