Kendrick Lamar's 'The Blacker the Berry' Scores a Train Shootout in Netflix's Bass X Machina

The clip is only a few seconds old before it stops you. Gunfire inside a train car. Bass Reeves, voiced by Brian Tyree Henry, looks at the men across from him and gives them a deadline: “Anybody wanna reconsider? You got until I finish reloading this gun.”

Then the beat lands — a remixed version of Kendrick Lamar's "The Blacker the Berry," reworked to sit inside the scene's sound design, with Assassin's hook cutting through Kendrick's verses the way it did in 2015.

Netflix's Strong Black Lead account shared the moment from Bass X Machina, and by Tuesday it was moving — HotNewHipHop, DancehallMag and others picking it up on November 10 and 11, a week after the series itself arrived.

A record that never really left

"The Blacker the Berry" came out as a single in February 2015, ahead of To Pimp a Butterfly. It was the album's hardest conversation — race, identity and hypocrisy, argued from inside — and one of its most debated records. Kendrick took it to the Grammys stage in 2016, in a medley with "Alright."

Assassin, the Jamaican deejay also known as Agent Sasco, delivers the hook. DancehallMag's coverage led with his voice for a reason: in a scene built around a Black lawman in a reimagined West, that hook is the sound that tells you whose story this is.

Why this show reached for this song

Bass X Machina launched on Netflix on November 3 — six episodes, created by LeSean Thomas and animated by Studio Mir. Henry voices Bass Reeves, the real-life figure who escaped slavery and became one of the first Black deputy U.S. marshals west of the Mississippi. The series rebuilds him inside a steampunk West of outlaws, machines and supernatural threats. Janelle Monáe performs the opening theme and appears in the cast, and the score comes from Wondaland's Roman GianArthur and Nate "Rocket" Wonder.

Reviewers noticed the music choices early. ScreenRant singled out "The Blacker the Berry" and Charles Bradley's "Ain't It a Sin" as needle drops that carry the show's themes, and Gizmodo wrote that the Kendrick pick proved the series "knows its shit thematically and socially." KComicsBeat reported a 100 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes the day after release; Wild 94.1 reported 100 percent critics and 92 percent audience.

The placement makes sense on the merits. A song about what it costs to carry Black identity in America, dropped into a gunfight carried by a Black marshal the history books nearly skipped — the show is not borrowing Kendrick's weight. It is arguing the same point in a different century.

Kendrick in anime-adjacent worlds is not new, either. Producer Mustard told Grammy.com that Kendrick compared the feeling of the "Hey Now" beat, from 2024's GNX, to Goku. This time he did not have to record anything. The record was already there, waiting eleven years for the right train.

All six episodes of Bass X Machina are streaming on Netflix now. The clip is the invitation. The song is why people are accepting it.