Cypress Hill - London Symphony Orchestra

[The Predator]

Hip-hop band Cypress Hill makes 1996 Simpsons joke come true



London Symphony Orchestra to play Black Sunday album at Royal Albert Hall decades after featuring on TV show

Hip-hop band Cypress Hill makes 1996 Simpsons joke come true

They might be more used to Rachmaninov and Brahms, but on Wednesday night the London Symphony Orchestra’s musicians will be showcasing their perfect crescendos while playing Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain.

The orchestra is making a Simpsons joke from 1996 finally a reality, by playing the US hip-hop trio Cypress Hill’s acclaimed Black Sunday album at the Royal Albert Hall.

The evening will riff on a joke featured in a Simpsons episode, in which Cypress Hill speculated that they had mistakenly booked the London Symphony Orchestra “possibly while high”.

After years of fan pressure, the group has struck a deal for a one-night performance in London, in which the LSO will perform its most famous songs, including Insane in the Brain and I Wanna Get High.

Considered pioneers of the West Coast hip-hop scene in the 1990s, Cypress Hill have sold more than 20m albums worldwide. Their hit Black Sunday album sold more than 3m copies in the US and spent a year in the UK charts.

B-Real (real name Louis Mario Freese) told the BBC: “It’s been something that we’ve talked about for many years since the Simpsons episode first aired. So it’s very special for us. And it’s coming off the heels of our 30th anniversary for our Black Sunday album.

“We’ve played a lot of historical venues throughout our career and stuff like that, but nothing as prestigious as this.”



B-Real added that Cypress Hill had always reached for experimental collaborations as “out-of-the-box artists”, including combining hip-hop with rock or metal or punk or reggae or electronic music.

He added: “We salute the Simpsons because if they had not written that episode, we probably wouldn’t be doing this.”

In the Simpsons episode, titled Homerpalooza, Homer tries to impress Bart and Lisa by going to the Hullabalooza music festival – a play on the Lollapalooza music festival held in Chicago – and hanging out with 1990s rap and rock stars including Cypress Hill and The Smashing Pumpkins.

In the episode, a crew member calls “somebody ordered”, adding “possibly while high … Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction”. This is followed by a rendition of Insane in the Brain, complete with the classic orchestral backing.

Cypress Hill have also invited the UK musician Peter Frampton, who features in the episode as the person trying to book the orchestra, although they are still waiting for a reply.

The LSO first violin and board vice-chair, Maxine Kwok, told the BBC that it was an important cultural reference and that “people are beyond excited at the idea of these diverse musicians mixing on the stage”.

She said: “Being a child of the 90s I remember the episode well.”

At rehearsals there have been cultural differences – for example, the LSO understood the word “glock” to mean the percussion instrument the glockenspiel, rather than a gun.

The Simpsons has previously predicted future events, including Trump’s presidency, a tiger attack on the Las Vegas magicians Siegfried and Roy, and the US beating Sweden to win its first Winter Olympic curling gold.

[dnjp4life]

Wish I had known about this beforehand, woulda tried to nab tickets to it.

[The Predator]

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'After the episode came out, our producer DJ Muggs was like, 'that might actually be a cool idea, we should probably do that'.



'He was talking about it with management and our agents for quite some time, then his schedule got demanding, and we all sort of forgot about it, and before you know it, Wu-Tang was doing a symphony show.

'And we thought, well f***, that's our destiny, we should be doing this, because we're with the Simpsons, and that's where the idea spawned for a hip-hop group to do an orchestra or a symphony in the first place.'

The idea returned to the band when they put out a tweet to commemorate the moment in 2017, which was then quoted by the LSO, which said: 'We mostly play classical, but we'll give it a shot.'



The band have already played two US shows with the Colorado Symphony, which wrote the original orchestrations, which have now been adapted by the LSO, adding a 'darkness', according to B-Real.

He said: 'Colorado Symphony wrote the first charts for us.

'What we did was we just gave them the music and said we don't want you to play over our track, because a lot of the time that's what a band will assume we want.

'In this case we said no, we're going to do everything organic, we're not going to play any of our track, we're going to do it all from the instruments, no samples, no existing tracks.


'We said, we would like it if you recreated the track.

'When we heard them back we were like 'oh my God this s***, this is happening, and it sounds amazing'.

'We were hoping the LSO would be open to the idea that they looked at the charts that had already been written, and maybe they wanted to rearrange it, or change some bits, or add to it.

'Fortunately, they did, they actually made it much darker than the previous ones, which we loved.

'Colorado did an excellent job of translating the music, but we felt like it could be darker, and we knew the LSO could definitely do that, and fortunately they did an amazing job.'

During the concert, the band will play Black Sunday in full, as it was the album which was out at the time of the Simpsons episode, as well as other fan favourites.

B-Real added: 'People that have come to our symphony shows, they were very surprised on some of the songs we played outside of Black Sunday.

'We can't wait to see what the reaction is here.'