Howard Who?

Xzibit has long been known as a rapper, Dr. Dre protege, and host of the ever popular and amusing MTV reality program Pimp My Ride.

Well, how about this other epithet…classical music lover?

Okay, not quite, but the guy does have two pretty compelling rap songs that use classical music prominently:

1. The first is Paparazzi from the album At the Speed of Life, which was one of Xzibit’s first big songs. I remember getting caught up in its tidal wave of European classical intensity (Faure’s Pavane) and lyrics that assaulted the fakery of the celebrity world. It’s a pretty good fit…Xzibit even amps up the snobbiness of it with an operatic soprano rather than the kinda cheesy chorus of the original. The original piece was written by Gabriel Faure in the late 19th Century and it’s still his biggest “hit.” Btw, the music  picture above is a still from the music video for Paparazzi…so I can’t take credit for any photoshop wit there.

Paparazzi (mp3) - Xzibit.

Pavane (mp3) - Gabriel Faure.

2. The second is Symphony in X Major from the album Man vs. Machine. The sample that begins the piece is from the first movement of J.S. Bach’s Third Brandenberg Concerto. It’s a fairly well-known piece in its own right, but Xzibit doesn’t just go with the known parts. He choses the minor key section (of the major key piece) which starts in the middle of the piece at about 3:20. He doesn’t just pick a generic performance of it to sample either. He picks Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’ famous version of it from Switched on Bach, an amazing pioneer of then-new electronic music from 1968. It showed that electronic music could be accessible and fun, even if it did take tons of work to plug dozens of cables into the Moog Synthesizer just to create one note. And you can really tell Xzibit’s commitment to this music, because someone even bothered to write a choral part and have a gospel choir-like group sing in harmony with Bach.

Symphony in X Major (mp3) - Xzibit.

Brandenberg Concerto #3 in G major, 1st movt. (mp3) - Bach/Carlos.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 7:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical Music, Pop Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.