“It’s funny because it’s true”: (B) Real life imitates art

It’s finally happened. Wednesday night saw the Cypress Hill – LSO team-up that was predicted in a Simpsons episode way back in the 1990s, as the LA rappers performed their classic 1993 album Black Sunday with a full orchestra at the Albert Hall.

For those who are too young or simply don’t remember, the joke was featured in the Homerpalooza episode from 1996 in which Homer tries to impress Lisa and Bart by going to the Hullapalooza festival. As you’d expect from the Simpsons there were cameos a-plenty and aside from Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Peter Frampton, Courtney Love and indeed Cypress Hill.

The ‘joke’ is that LA rappers have accidentally booked the London Symphony Orchestra for their slot. A crew member adds “possibly while high...Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction”. Cue an orchestral version of Insane In The Brain.

In an interview with the BBC, B Real of the group said that the collab had been a long time coming: “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…We salute the Simpsons because if they had not written that episode, we probably wouldn’t be doing this.”

It’s not the first time the cartoon has predicted future events – the outlandish notion that Donald Trump could ever be US president was first floated in a Simpsons episode, as well as the slightly less preposterous idea that the US could beat Sweden to an Olympics curling gold medal.

In the event the orchestra fitted into tracks like When The Shit Goes Down and Hits From The Bong surprisingly well. The strings and brass add a shadowy grandeur to tracks like I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That and there’s an almost jaunty swing to When The Shit Goes Down. Here are some edited highlights:

Cypress Hill clearly loved the whole experience – near the end of their set B Real muses that “we need to make this happen again, yeah?” before adding that the 30th anniversary of Temple Of Boom is coming up.

So... orchestral hip hop. Could what was once a surreal imagining of Matt Groening and his team of writers be a whole new direction for the LA rap veterans?