A train gunfight, a reloading revolver and a warning line from Brian Tyree Henry.
That’s the moment Netflix’s new anime Bass X Machina drops a remixed version of Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry,” and it fits better than you might expect.
Henry voices Bass Reeves in the series, and the scene builds to him telling a carriage full of gunmen, “Anybody wanna reconsider? You got until I finish reloading this gun.”
The track kicks in right on cue. It’s not the album version either, but a rework shaped to sit inside the episode’s sound design.
For dancehall fans, the real thrill is hearing Assassin again. The Jamaican deejay, born Jeffrey Campbell and also known as Agent Sasco, delivers the hook that cuts through Kendrick’s verses on the original.
His patois chant gave the song its rallying, confrontational energy, which makes it a natural match for a standoff.
Assassin was already on rap’s radar before this collaboration. He’d turned up on Kanye West’s Yeezus in 2013 on “I’m In It,” and his work with Kendrick pushed that crossover even further.
“The Blacker the Berry” arrived as a single in February 2015 ahead of To Pimp a Butterfly, the album many still rank as Kendrick’s best.
The song tackled race, identity and hypocrisy head on, and it became one of the record’s most debated moments.
Kendrick took it to the Grammys stage in 2016 as part of a medley that also included “Alright.” That performance is still one of the most talked about in the show’s history.
The pairing carries extra weight given who Bass Reeves was. The real Reeves was one of the first Black deputy US marshals west of the Mississippi. A song centered on Black identity lands differently when it’s scoring his story.
HotNewHipHop editor in chief Alexander Cole called the sync “a dope move” and framed it as proof the record still holds cultural relevance a decade on.
It’s hard to argue when a Western anime is reaching for a 2015 rap single to soundtrack its biggest action beat.
There’s also a fun reversal here. Producer Mustard previously told Grammy.com that Kendrick channeled Goku while recording “Hey Now” from his 2024 album GNX.
“When I heard the beat, I just felt like Goku or something,” Mustard recalled Kendrick telling him during the “Not Like Us” video shoot. Kendrick explained that certain beats bring “out something else in me, so I just did whatever I felt.”
So anime fed Kendrick’s creative process, and now his catalog is feeding anime right back. With Bass X Machina streaming on Netflix, fans are already wondering which track the show reaches for next.
