20 Years of ‘Samurai Champloo,’ the Best Hip-Hop Anime Ever Made
The influential series opened the door to a world where rap and anime are more intertwined than ever.
The first time I watched Samurai Champloo, it wasn’t the visuals or the story that grabbed my attention. It was the beats.
As a high schooler in the late 2000s, I stumbled across the show’s last episode on YouTube. And before I could get a grip on what the hell was happening—why was one samurai mashing another samurai’s hand into rocks and whining about revenge?—thudding drums and a maudlin piano loop started to dance on my eardrums. The soundtrack matched the action perfectly, with the low end booming when feet connected with faces, and the piano line—dripping with a slight tinge of dread—mirroring the tension of the fight.
At that point, my palette for anime was just beginning to expand, and I’d only seen a handful of touchstones like Dragonball Z, Ghost in the Shell, and Big O. But anime set to rap music? For a kid already entrenched in hip-hop culture, that was completely new—and wildly exciting. I rewatched the scene dozens of times, losing myself in the beat for hours.
With Samurai Champloo celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and with its four soundtrack albums being reissued on vinyl and finding their way to streaming services, I was inspired to revisit the series. Whereas the anachronistic blend of music, action, and humor had me locked in as a kid, the rewatch made me realize that Champloo embodies the entirety of hip-hop culture more than any other anime before or since.
It’s now much clearer to me why YouTubers and TikTokers make edits of the series to this day; why superstars like Megan Thee Stallion can now turn loving anime into a part of their brand; why Nujabes—one of four producers who brought the show’s score to life—became a standard bearer for rap’s lo-fi movement; why underground rappers like Blackchai and Noveliss seed Champloo’s influence throughout their projects. Champloo opened the door to a world where rap and anime are more intertwined than ever.
Created and directed by Japanese animator Shinichiro Watanabe and first aired in 2004, Champloo follows a trio of characters—the wily roughneck Mugen, the rogue ronin Jin, and the waitress Fuu—on a meandering journey across Edo-period Japan. All three are loners, but fate brings them together at the tea house where Fuu works —which Mugen and Jin wind up destroying during an impromptu fight to the death. After seeing the two go at each other, Fuu hires them as bodyguards on a quest to find her estranged father, a samurai “who smells of sunflowers.”
Similar to his previous show Cowboy Bebop, which leaned on jazz band the Seatbelts to set the mood for its steampunk Western vibe, Watanabe enlisted Japanese rap producers Force of Nature, DJ Tsutchie, and Nujabes, as well as Ohio rapper-producer Fat Jon, to soundtrack the Edo backdrops of Champloo. Watanabe created the series with hip-hop in mind, clearly understanding how beats can soundtrack an assault on imperial guards one moment and a tender farewell at a riverbank the next.
I still get chills every time Nujabes’s “Battlecry” plays during the show’s intro, its pattering drums, synths, and vocals from rapper Shing02 flowing like high tide. Some of my favorite action scenes, like Mugen’s injured walk along the beach or his river fight with a blind assassin, play out to the death-march intensity of Force of Nature’s “The Million Way of Drum.” Tsutchie and Fat Jon offer bouncy and meditative cuts that give transitional and expositional moments an industrial snap. (Hearing Jon’s beats in this show led me to his 2009 album Hundred Eight Stars, a personal favorite to this day.)
But the beats are just the first layer of Champloo’s hip-hop connection. The word “champloo” is a riff on the Japanese word “chanpur,” which means to blend or mash, and that’s exactly the vibe Watanabe and his team brought to the series. There are Edo-period interpretations of rappers, beatboxers, graffiti artists, and breakdancers. Scene transitions are executed with record-scratch sound effects that match the jittery editing. Episode titles utilize alliteration (“Tempestuous Temperments,” “Beatbox Bandits”), and two-part arcs are labeled “Verse 1” and “Verse 2.” There’s an entire episode, “War of the Words,” built around the tongue-in-cheek notion that two minor characters invented modern streetwear and hypebeast culture.
Mugen, in particular, was designed to fit what Watanabe once called “a rapper’s ideal” of self-expression. He’s a preternaturally skilled swordsman born on an island of criminals whose style is loose and instinctual, like a b-boy’s; he’s also flippant, cocky, chauvinistic, dismissive of authority, and ready to scrap at a moment’s notice. Mugen’s characterization is fun not just because he’s the perfect foil to more grounded characters, but because he’s the antithesis of the standard good-natured shonen protagonist. He’s not Goku from Dragonball Z; he’s a short-tempered livewire in the vein of Cam’ron’s character Rico in 2002’s Paid In Full, eagerly joining in on graf battles and stepping to legendarily skilled assassins with no fear. Making him the protagonist is as hip-hop a decision as you could make.
Even more than that, Champloo makes an effort to represent who hip-hop was always made for: the marginalized and downtrodden. Mugen and Jin are orphans fighting for survival in unforgiving environments, and Fuu is the daughter of a Christian samurai targeted by the shogunate for his beliefs and left to poverty as a way to spare Fuu and her mother. On their journey, the trio regularly run into other outcasts on the margins of Edo society, including thieves, a queer traveler (and aspiring otaku) from Holland, and a woman sold into sex work by a gambling husband. Oniwakamaru, a disfigured man manipulated into Frankenstein-style destruction, and Sara, a blind sangen player and swordswoman, are two of the most poignant characters—people seen for their disadvantages and forced to act within sociopolitical power grabs bigger than them.
Samurai Champloo doesn’t just utilize hip-hop as a form of music or even culture, but as a way of life that’s akin to the Japanese moral code of Bushido. The characters and music reflect that in surface-level ways, but a decade removed from my last viewing, I enjoyed how hip-hop’s spontaneity and drive manifests in Mugen, Jin, and Fuu. By the time their journey ends, and the trio drifts apart to the tune of Japanese rap group Midicronica’s song “San Francisco,” Watanabe’s vision becomes clear. At their cores, hip-hop and Bushido thrive on loyalty and perseverance, with their most dedicated practitioners duty bound to carry on traditions. Champloo honors those traditions by subverting them, remixing two cultural forces of their time into timeless art.
Listen to a playlist of my 10 essential tracks from the Samurai Champloo soundtrack.
