Remixing Samurai Champloo

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 The samurai were superseded by businessmen who saw that profiting of their fellow man was better than killing them and an inkling of Western culture had slipped into the borders before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.