Earlier this week, Netflix released a teaser for Luke Cage that showed Harlem’s Defender laying out some clueless goons who’d obviously never heard of the bulletproof hero. The ringside beatdown features some great musical beats that follow up the trailer’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” accompaniment. With A Tribe Called Quest’s Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge working on the show’s score, you can expect plenty of other hip-hop gems. Muhammad and Younge reveal some of their process in a new video series from Netflix, Street Level Hero, which lays the hip-hop foundation for the show.
Showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker and star Mike Colter join A$AP Ferg and Method Man in talking about how hip-hop shapes the show. For example, the episode titles are borrowed from Gang Starr tracks, and the music will punctuate all the brutal action that will go down. The strains of Raphael Saadiq’s “Good Man” that play over the behind-the-scenes look also hint at the R&B influence, which could very well be fleshed out in another installment of the video series. This is, after all, only the first part of Street Level Hero, so keep your eyes peeled for updates.