It's all about the
music, you know?
Cowboy Bebop did
it first but it wasn't until Samurai Champloo that
I realised anachronism could be used for more than just humour.
Anachronism grounded Cowboy Bebop in
the past whilst flinging the setting far into the future and the
opposite was true with Samurai Champloo.
Set in Edo Period Japan, Samurai Champloo uses
hip hop to update the history of Japan to a modern context.
But
what distinguishes Samurai Champloo from
Cowboy Bebop's score
is Watanabe's efforts to make hip hop affect how the story is told.
He briefly flirted with the idea in Jupiter Jazz with
Gren's wind-up music box triggering his memories in an inspired
metaphor of winding back the clock, but Watanabe really came into his
stride with Samurai Champloo.
The chopped up samples of hip hop and record scratching lend the
story a staccato rhythm both visually and textually. Scenes and
episodes are divided by musical cues and emceeing. It's more than
Cowboy Bebop's thematic
use of jazz to enhance the atmosphere, it's genuine engagement with
the text.
And
closer examination reveals that hip hop is remarkably suitable for a
show set in Edo Period Japan. It was an era of great societal change.
The samurai were superseded by businessmen who saw that profiting of
their fellow man was better than killing them and an inkling of
Western culture had slipped into the borders before the rigid port
lockdown for all foreigners. Japan was a melting pot of change and
social upheaval. In contrast to Cowboy Bebop's infatuation
with the past, Samurai Champloo is
concerned with the uncertain future. Much like Spike and Jet before
them, Mugen and Jin find themselves penniless and without a
consistent job but, instead of languishing in their prior greatness,
toss themselves into the future with reckless abandonment.
Samurai Champloo is
a show about appropriation. It's about a culture on the cusp of rapid
change and figuring out what it can identify with while inviting all
the exciting changes of globalisation. It looks to the past only to
figure out what it can steal. And hip hop is the great appropriation
of our times. It takes the old and makes it new again and by doing so
forges a greater appreciation of what has come before us.
But,
if there's one thing that the show makes abundantly clear, it's that
Mugen and Jin don't belong in this brave new world. As much as the
pair seem to adapt to the life of hired swordsmen, the culture around
them are no longer interested in killing people. There's baseball to
look forward to and an inkling of Japan's rapid technological
advancement and its eventual terrible misfortune. When a sample in a
hop hop track is so readily absorbed into popular consciousness
without even an awareness of where it came from, or even a question
as to whether or not it is a sample, society tends to forget what
came before. All the jumps, grooves, and scratches of a vinyl are
invigorating at the start, but they gradually wear away the original
underneath it.
Samurai Champloo is
built to show change as inevitable, natural, and even damn cool, but
the show trips itself up at the end with a disappointing finale.
Mugen and Jin live when they should have died. But then I wonder why
I wanted them to die so much and realise that maybe my responsibility
as a consumer is just to enjoy the show put in front of me. Maybe
Watanabe, the DJ, is the one responsible for preserving and
appreciating the culture we've lost. He's the one that mixed the two
to begin with. Let him keep his sappy ending. We've got a future
ahead of us.
