The latest trend in hip-hop has the genre going highbrow.
More than a half-century since it started, the most popular genre in the country has achieved not only mainstream acceptance but critical claim as well, producing a Pulitzer Prize-winner in Kendrick Lamar and long-overdue recognition as one of hte country’s major cultural exports. And for a genre that’s proven capable of melding with so many other forms of music, there’s now a new trend surfacing among golden age rappers: Collaborations with symphony orchestras.
“Hip-hop has always experimented with and dipped into other musical forms, because it’s basically a vocal on top of beats,” Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and Public Enemy frontman Chuck D says. “This is just another application, an evolution and it’s about time. Wu Tang and RZA were doing stuff like this back in the ‘90s, and it just made all the sense in the world.”
The idea of a hip-hop/classical music fusion harks back to another melding in the ‘60s and ‘70s when groups like the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, ELO and Deep Purple all recorded rock albums with symphony orchestras. The trend arguably started when Nas released Illmatic: Live from the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2018. The iconic rapper is in the midst of a current summer tour that includes dates backed by the Boston Pops, Atlanta Pops, Las Vegas and Chicago Philharmonic and Baltimore and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, among others. He starts a five-night stand with the Vegas Philharmonic Wednesday.
Just last April, in the latest signs it’s a bona fide trend, LL Cool J took to the Coachella stage with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil for a set that included hits like “Mama Said Knock You Out” and a medley of “I Need Love,” “Murdergram” and “Rock the Bells” alongside John Williams’ “The Imperial March,” from The Empire Strikes Back.
L.A. mainstays Cypress Hill — now composed of founding members B-Real and Sen Dog along with Eric Bobo and ex-Public Enemy turntablist DJ Lord — teamed up with the 70-piece London Symphony Orchestra and conductor/arranger Troy Miller at the historic Royal Albert Hall last summer to re-create their 1993 Black Sunday album. It resulted in a feature-length film that got a brief theatrical showing earlier this spring and is now streaming on VEEPS, Amazon and Apple TV, along with an accompanying album that came out back in June.
Speaking with THR, B-Real, aka Louis Mario Freese, admits the initial inspiration for performing with the London Symphony Orchestra came from a throwaway gag in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. Cypress Hill – booked for the “Hullabalooza” festival at the Springfield Fairgrounds by Peter Frampton – accidentally ordered the orchestra while “really high” to perform an impromptu “Insane in the Brain” with them backstage.
“That was what first sparked the idea,” B says. “But it took some time to get there. DJ Muggs always thought doing orchestrated versions of our music would be cool. We just never found the time to do it until now.”
B-Real exchanged a tweet with the London Symphony Orchestra, which led him to conductor/ composer/producer Troy Miller — who cut his teeth playing drums for both Amy Winehouse and Roy Ayers — to help put together the arrangements and charts for the classical musicians, who visibly beamed while working their way through the likes of “I Wanna Get High,” “When the Shit Goes Down” and “Hits from the Bong.”
“I love any excuse for a creative explosion,” says Miller, who cited composers like Mahler and Stravinsky as influences on the score. “And I love that hip-hop is so harmonically open; it’s almost a blank canvas. I’ve always been a Cypress Hill fan, even though I wasn’t allowed to listen to them growing up. The band was so receptive and keen to do something new. I was impressed with how musical they were. They didn’t just want to use the orchestra to back them up, but to be an integral part of the overall mix. All music should be full of these kinds of surprises and cultural exchanges. For me, creativity is all about taking risks, teetering on the edge of failure. I was just honored to be a part of it.”
B calls the collaboration ” just the culmination of a journey for us.”
“Troy exceeded all our expectations. We wanted it dark, and he really got that,” B-Real says. “The whole process was very organic from the ground up. We played live, not to tracks, and the orchestra really helped maintain the nuances in our music. We gave them the freedom to be themselves, while we could be ourselves. I was in awe of them. It was truly surreal. Turned out a lot of them were fans of ours. They made us feel welcome.”
“It was like listening to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the first time,” said fellow Cypress co-founding member Senen “Sen Dog” Reyes. “And just being taken away by the musicality of it all. We like showing other hip-hop cats that this can be done in a cool way. We’re helping hip-hop and classical music grow and expand beyond their boundaries. It was definitely an eye-opening experience that the orchestra was into it as much as we were. Showed my anything is possible.”
Beyond Cypress Hill, Red Bull Symphonic has also entered the fray, presenting its first hip-hop/classical music collaboration when Rick Ross joined Maestro Jason Ikeem Rodgers and his all-black symphony, Orchestra Noir at the Atlanta Symphony Hall in November of 2022. A little under a year later, in October 2023, rap producer Metro Boomin’ reimagined his music (including collabs with Future and Travis Scott) accompanied by a 43-piece orchestra conducted by Antony Parnther at L.A. Dolby Theatre, featuring special guests John Legend and Swae Lee. Red Bull Symphonic has scheduled a July show with MC Kresha & Lyrical Son and an orchestra in Kosovo.
“That’s the power of hip-hop… you can create it from anything, including classical music,” B-Rea says. “That’s what we did back in the day with sampling, taking the chaos to create a beautiful harmony. Now our idea is to do original songs in symphonic form with a hip-hop sensibility. We’ve always tried different things, thinking out of the box.
“In the end,” he continues, “we still owe the original idea to The Simpsons… Just the perfect example of life imitating art.”
