Luke Cage Composers Announced – And They’re Awesome

News broke recently that the composers for the Marvel/Netflix series Luke Cage would be none other than Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. This is great news for people who like Marvel, who love hip-hop, and who care about scoring in general.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad was a member of A Tribe Called Quest, along with Q-Tip and Pfife Dawg. Together, the trio more or less owned the ’90s for hip-hop. Along with groups like De La Soul, they were part of a weird, trippy alternative East Coast rap scene that continues not only to inspire rap music to this day, but also to hold up much better than a lot of other music that came out of the ’90s. Muhammad served as both a producer and as a rapper for ATCQ, so he could be providing composition, vocals, or both to the new series.

Adrian Younge is a producer and film composer. If you saw Black Dynamite, he was the person behind those funk grooves, and those hilarious Curtis Mayfield parody songs that narrated the action, Superfly-style. But he’s not just around for jokes. He’s also teamed up with Ghostface Killah on two albums called 12 Reasons to Die, which married comic-book violence and horror tropes with mob-movie storylines for a gloriously ridiculous B-movie throwback, that cast Ghostface as a vengeful mafioso spirit, who rose from vinyl pressed from his remains to wreak vengeance on those who plotted his demise. The concept hearkened back to the early, pop-culture-heavy days of the Wu-Tang Clan, and, fittingly, saw a tie-in comic that elaborated on the album’s story.

When Netflix first announced that Luke Cage and Iron Fist were getting TV shows, my first, immediate hope was that they could somehow incorporate tongue-in-cheek throwbacks to their cheesy ’70s kung fu roots. Mike Colter’s beautifully grounding performance in Jessica Jones was a highlight in an already-stellar show, and sold me on a more straightlaced, Bendis-esque version of the character making it to the screen.  (Let’s be honest; that’s always what was going to have happened.) But both Younge and Muhammad are associated with styles of music rooted vintage hip-hop and soul. It seems that whatever vintage soul isn’t on the screen will likely be shining through in the score.