I told him, 'You know, gangsters use to carry their guns in a case like that. Ma nervously explained that he was a cellist, pulled out his instrument, and began to play. Combs still isn't sure what came over him, but he began to sing. Thus, Clap was born. Half a year later, the improbable fusion of classical music and rap has swept aside pop divas to reign atop the charts.
Clappers populate the newsstands.
Even the Grammys, long considered less hip than other award shows, will have a Clap category this year. Where rappers sang of an often violent street-life existence, and classical music's sophisticated instrumentalism appealed to the upper classes, Clappers sing about the street lives of 18th Century aristocrats to the accompaniment of piano, strings, woodwinds and brass. The servants fetch our robe de chambre, So we don't get cold. We have to read a lot of history, try to get into the heads of the masters, like Mozart, Tchaikovsky. Then we look at what life was like in, say, the palaces of St. Petersberg in 1743, and we tell it like it was.