Within this framework, two cultures across the world have come to find each other. That was very much like dweeby-ass nerd culture, but now there’s major-ass films. “It’s just like how everybody loves superhero movies now. Once that happened everything was cool,” Father says. The distance between what was once considered geek culture and what is now considered pop culture has shrunk considerably this decade, so it’s only natural that the relationship between rap and anime blossoms. “They used to have Adult Swim bumps, and that’s what his stuff sounds like.” “When I heard the beat it reminded me of Nujabes, and I put Nujabes with anime all the time,” he says. According to Sah, the song conjured a very specific association with anime for him, and he ran with it. The song that finds the center of this Venn diagram is SahBabii’s “Anime World,” which cross-pollinates rap and anime in a way no one has before, turning entire plot points into bars. But in recent years “Naruto” has announced itself as DBZ’s heir apparent in hip-hop, becoming popular for similar reasons. It is rap’s favorite anime by a wide margin.
#NARUTO SHIPPUDEN SOUND EFFECTS SERIES#
In The Tao of the Wu, RZA said he felt the series represented “the journey of the black man in America,” comparing the lost history of slaves to that of the Saiyans-a generous interpretation, to be sure. (He’s a Crunchyroll subscriber.) There are Genius infographics tracing its influence. “Kids that were born in the ’90s, everybody used to watch ‘Dragon Ball Z’ back then,” says SahBabii, who was also introduced to anime through Toonami. “Dragon Ball Z” has been the flagship anime in rap since first airing on Cartoon Network’s Toonami programming block in the early 2000s, but references have spiked in the last 10 years or so. And he even has a song called “ Anime.” The floodgates have opened since. The cover for his 2011 mixtape 1UP is modeled after “Naruto” and his 2010 mixtape Death Note is an homage to the Tetsurō Araki series of the same name. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Īs with most things rap in the internet age, Soulja Boy ushered in a new level of representation for anime, and specifically “Naruto,” in rap music. Still, the feelings behind most of the intrigue in these spaces (rap, anime) are pure and go beyond curiosity. Take Nicki Minaj’s “Chun-Li” song and video, which jumbles anime EFX, Kanji characters, and coolie hats to stand-in as empty signifiers of exoticism, all while misinterpreting the Street Fighter character’s history as a Chinese martial artist created by a Japanese video game company. Likewise, blacks realize this same racialized distance by placing certain tenets of Japanese culture-bushido, ninja, etc.-on a similar pedestal while reducing Asian “otherness” into a homogenized caricature. and its African American heritage, while retaining a hint of their constructed simian presence,” somehow seeing blacks as both extraordinary and lesser. “The ironic, ambivalent workings of racialized distance can simultaneously place blacks on a high pedestal of ‘cool’ global pop culture dominated by the U.S. This relationship-between black Americans and the Japanese, between rap and anime-is built on a dissociative sort of mutual admiration that both “elevates and demeans,” as anthropology professor Christine Yano put it, in the book Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions. Just as The Samurai and The Ninja have become shorthands for “cool,” so too has The Rapper, and these points of reference intersect often in anime, which has become a hotbed for code-switching. Jackson, was inspired by A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and J Dilla. Most notably, “Afro Samurai,” Takashi Okazaki’s black swordsman revenge epic starring Samuel L. Logic, a self-professed “Cowboy Bebop” stan, had series voice actor Steve Blum play the main character on his anime-tinged album The Incredible True Story, in which (not so subtly) the United States and Japan merge into a super nation before a series of events leaves Earth uninhabitable. In turn, rappers like Chance the Rapper, Lil Yachty, and Curren$y have sampled anime in their songs. “Infinite Ryvius” was soundtracked by rap songs. Santa Inoue’s “Tokyo Tribes” featured characters modeled after Tupac in Juice, Ice Cube in Boyz N the Hood, and Wu-Tang’s Raekwon.
Shinichirō Watanabe’s anime series “Samurai Champloo” was a retrofuturist fever dream that reimagined Edo-era Japan as a hip-hop mecca, introducing the West to Japanese jazz rap sampler Nujabes in the process, and Aaron Mcgruder’s “The Boondocks” comic strip turned Adult Swim series was built on twin pillars of anime and hip-hop.