ShareIt is an unlikely musical pairing born out of a joke on an episode of “The Simpsons” 28 years ago, and of social media interactions some two decades later. On Wednesday, the American hip-hop group Cypress Hill was to stage a special performance with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in the regal surroundings of the Royal Albert Hall. The band will mainly play hits from its seminal 1993 album “Black Sunday”, which sold more than three million copies in the United States and spent a year in the UK charts. The LSO, which claims to be the world’s most recorded orchestra, will add orchestral arrangements to the tracks, including “Insane in the Brain” and “I Wanna Get High”.
The collaboration stems directly from a 1996 “Simpsons” episode - not the first time the beloved US television show has correctly predicted, or perhaps influenced, the future. In it, Cypress Hill - known for supporting the use of marijuana, including in its song lyrics - believed they had mistakenly booked the London orchestra while under the influence. Fast-forward to 2019, and after years of fan demands for the joke to become a reality, the band and the LSO traded tweets on Twitter (now X), seemingly sealing their eventual tie-up.
“Lets do this @londonsymphony,” wrote the Los Angeles-based trio, who in 2019 earned a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. The LSO promptly replied quoting their line from ‘The Simpsons’: “We mostly play classical, but we’ll give it a shot.” Five years later, the Royal Albert Hall awaits. “It’s been something that we’ve talked about for many years since the ‘Simpsons’ episode first aired,” the band’s B-Real - real name Louis Mario Freese - told the BBC ahead of the show.
“So it’s very special for us. We’ve played a lot of historical venues throughout our career... 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.” LSO first violin and board vice-chair Maxine Kwok told the broadcaster that people were “beyond excited at the idea of these diverse musicians mixing on the stage”. “Being a child of the nineties, I remember the episode well,” she added.
Several other ‘Simpson’ jokes over the years have proved accurate, including a March 2000 episode quipping that Donald Trump would become US president. Meanwhile, Cypress Hill has seen its 90s hits given a rebirth of sorts. A new generation has been introduced to the band on TikTok, where videos posted by users set to their soundtracks have garnered tens of millions of views. — AFP
