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Don’t Touch Shinichirō Watanabe’s Playlist
The anime auteur picks his best needle drops — from Cowboy Bebop to his new show Lazarus.
Cowboy Bebop was famously informed by 1940s American jazz; Samurai Champloo ports a hip-hop aesthetic to the Edo period; Space Dandy was a New Wave space-cowboy saga. Watanabe’s latest show, Lazarus — set to premiere on Adult Swim on April 5 — draws from various innovations he’s made throughout his career, using the music of Floating Points, Bonobo, and Kamasi Washington to help tell a story about a futuristic society facing a doom of its own creation. But I didn’t want to make it a set rule that an action scene would use a certain kind of music — that would get stale — it’s just meant to convey the first image of Cowboy Bebop to the audience.
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