Swagger-Jacking the Great Composers

From a Vibe interview with Dr. Dre (via Rap Radar):

You mentioned a hip-hop album without rapping. Will we ever hear a Dr. Dre instrumental album?
Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.

So:

  1. Who’s going to tell him?
  2. When Gustav Holst got this idea, and talked about it with his friends, did he admonish himself by saying, “I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it”? (This site doesn’t say.)
  3. How will Dre’s conception of the personalities differ from Holst’s? How will they be similar? I am genuinely extremely curious about this.
  4. After Dre’s planets enter our orbit, which orchestra will realize the dream of me sprinting to be first in line at their box office window by programming a DJ spinning Dre and a symphony playing Holst back-to-back? (“Gadzooks! Using interest in popular music to shine a new light on a past materpiece? We simply can’t have it! Give ’em the Figaro overture, Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, and Beethoven 7 again!”)
  5. Will any rappers attempt to sample Dre and end up sampling Holst when the realize the copyright has expired on the latter music of the spheres?

(definition of swagger jacking in case you didn’t know)

4 thoughts on “Swagger-Jacking the Great Composers

Leave a comment