The best description of this show would be “eclectic”; it encapsulates so much of one’s lived experience through a semi-historical lens. Our lives are both so individualistic and yet so universal in our desires to find ourselves in others.

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I know the fans are always going off about the music but when you finally listen to this soundtrack, you really will learn to respect Nujabes and a mind like Watanabe. The music of Samurai Champloo is eclectic and free-flowing, not in the way that jazz is, which can sometimes be sporadic or spontaneous and other times a smooth moodmaker. Lo-fi hip-hop is a story. We take the hip-hop that is so quintessential to life and we live each other's experiences through their music and rap, further blending it with both the fluidity of the beats and the scratchiness of low fidelity. This music encapsulates so much of what Samurai Champloo is: nothing, everything, and the in-betweens. It is the nostalgia and reflection on the self, the discovery and looking toward the horizon, the journey of life that has no blueprint. You don’t always need to find a meaning in your life, and you don’t always need to have a set goal in mind to be fulfilled. Within 26 episodes, this series has taught me so much about existence and how we live within each other. You might not see how this story about three vagabonds ― an escapee pirate, a ronin, and an orphan ― could even slightly be applicable to our lives, but that’s just the thing! They’re vagabonds, wandering about having no place that they truly belong except eventually to themselves and each other. Having lost everything, the three of them try to find a purpose in life as they travel from here and there and get into various escapades.

Nujabes has worked with and inspired many other artists as the father of lo-fi hip-hop (a genre Sam Champ heavily incorporates). A particular song of the genre that sticks out to me is Uyama Hiroto’s “Soul of Freedom” featuring Cise Starr, where the latter raps in an earlier verse: “How you feel about the mirror when you stare in the abyss? Ask yourself a question quickly: Why in the hell do I exist?” This question of belonging and existence is one that we’ll carry until the end of time. So it’s fitting for such a historical (albeit not accurate) series to use such contemporary music ― so often incorporating the urban, graffiti, hip-hop, etc.

Each episode of Samurai Champloo is independent of itself, only strung along by Fuu’s goal of finding the samurai who smells of sunflowers, and in the discussion of life and finding meaning in it, what would it say about the show if its teachings of life consisted of a concrete “plot”? No life is planned and manufactured; we can only be certain of so many things, and maybe of those, we might find solace in the people we meet along the journey that is life.