Nas Performs “Hate Me Now” with Brass Band and It’s Lit [Watch]

Hip-hop and New Orleans’ 100-plus-year-old brass band street music have for a long time been bedfellows. The Crescent City’s rap sub-genre known as bounce borrowed many of the same call-and-response chants and cadences from the local brass bands like the Stooges, Hot 8 and Rebirth. Club-shaking smash hits like Silkk the Shocker featuring Mystikal’s “It Ain’t My Fault,” Fiend’s “Big Timer” and Master P’s “Get Yo Mind Right” all lift hooks from brass band anthems that had been around for generations.

Earlier this year, New Orleans native paid homage to the city’s legacy of second line jazz bands in a video produced by The Fader and Beats by Dre entitled Lil Wayne Love Letter To New Orleans. Helping to further bridge the gap between two musical genres born and bred in the poverty-ruined streets of America– one in the Big Easy around the turn of the 20th Century and the other in late 1970s New York City– multi-platinum rapper Nas and award-winning New Orleans brass band the Soul Rebels have taken this musical mashup worldwide.

In recent months, Nasir and the eight-piece ensemble have performed in Australia and various parts of the globe. Peep the high-energy video above for their performance of “Hate Me Now.”

Although rap music and brass bands may not seem to go hand in hand, this is not the first time that the Soul Rebels have shared a stage with rap royalty. In the past, they have shared stages with Rakim, Prodigy, Queen Latifah, Talib Kweli and Joey Bada$$.