Five times hip-hop ruled Glastonbury Festival
There’s an argument to be made that no genre of music has a more documented relationship with Glastonbury Festival than hip-hop. Sure, the Pilton spectacular is a rock festival at its muddy, acid-laced core. Thus, there’s a place for every shade of that genre at the greatest music festival on the planet, from Metallica to Travis and everywhere in between. In terms of what gets people talking, arguing, and, in some truly sad cases, petitioning and threatening, no other genre has the reputation that hip-hop has.
In fact, you can trace the evolution of the festival through its deployment of rap and hip-hop over the decades. For its first 20 years, Glastonbury wasn’t just a rock festival, it was pretty resolutely a hippy-coded affair. If you think that the stink kicked up by some of the acts appearing on this list was bad, check out the stories of an entire biker gang revving their engines through New Order’s 1981 set waiting for Hawkwind’s headline slot.
Granted, it would be difficult for it to appear in the first ten years of Glasto as the genre literally didn’t exist then. However, the festival held out for the entire 1980s, a decade that owes some of its best and most exciting music to hip-hop bands like Public Enemy, Run-DMC and De La Soul. By the early 1990s, any music festival still holding out on hip-hop was starting to look extremely sus, so Michael Eavis decided to bite the bullet and book some deviant acts for his crown jewel.
It’s rare for people not to be weird and aggro about hip-hop, for reasons both good and (the vast majority of the time) bad. Something particularly weird happens when people talk about it at Glastonbury, though, and, as this list shows, there’s no real reason to. Some of the best sets in the history of the Glastonbury Festival have come from hip-hop artists, so let’s take a look at five moments where the genre ruled the stages!.
Five times hip-hop threw down at Glastonbury:
Beastie Boys (1994)
It’s very telling that by the time the first hip-hop band played Glastonbury Festival, one had not only played a major UK music festival, but headlined the damn thing. In 1992, Public Enemy levelled Reading Festival and laid down a gauntlet to every other festival in the country. A performance that said to each of them that rock audiences loved hip-hop as much as any other genre, so they couldn’t hide behind that excuse anymore.
]It’s truly uncomfortable that the first hip-hop act to tread the boards at Pilton is still the whitest band to ever have real hip-hop cred, but that doesn’t stop the Beastie Boys being one of the best to ever do it. Especially in 1994, when they were riding high off three masterpiece albums in a row and their iconic single ‘Sabotage’, hitting the top 20 in the UK. Given a prime slot on the NME Stage (now the Other Stage), the band smashed it and opened the door for other hip-hop acts to come through after them.
Cypress Hill (2000)
While the 1990s saw acts like The Roots, Jurassic 5 and Kool Keith all take the stage, there was one place that remained hip-hop free for the rest of the decade. The Pyramid Stage, otherwise known as the nerve centre of all music at Glastonbury. Until then, hip-hop had been welcomed at the lower stages and had even had an entire stage dedicated to it in 1999. With a new millennium came a new ‘Glasto’, and it was time for the main stage to host some rap.
Cypress Hill were an inspired choice for hip-hop’s debut on the Pyramid Stage. With nearly a decade on the clock, they had a deep back catalogue of hits but weren’t yet “veterans” or a nostalgia act. Chill enough for the hippies (with similar taste in smokes), fun enough for the kids, yet conscious enough for the festival’s counter-culture atmosphere, Cypress Hill were a perfect addition to the bill. After them, the only way was up.
Jay-Z (2008)
Had to do a whole lot of digging for this one, but if you can believe it, a hip-hop artist actually headlined the Pyramid Stage in 2008, can you believe it?! It flew so far under the radar that we’ve since completely forgotten about it, but it’s true! Jay-Z actually topped the bill in a set that everyone collectively nodded in agreement with, said “sure, he’s one of the biggest acts in music, he’ll be a fine fit”, and then he was, then we moved on with our lives.
Except we didn’t, did we? The announcement of his headlining Glastonbury was the biggest music story of 2008. Noel Gallagher said some stupid shit as is his wont. The amount of toys thrown out of prams could have restocked Hamleys from scratch. Then Saturday came. The single greatest opening to a Glastonbury festival set happened, and the rest is history. Afterwards, it was clear that not only did hip-hop have a place at the festival, it had a place at the very top of it too.
Stormzy (2019)
You might have noticed that the early history of hip-hop at Glastonbury Festival is particularly American. Which is fair enough on the surface; hip-hop is up there with jazz as one of the great American art forms. However, British hip-hop has had a sterling showing at Glastonbury. In fact, the year before Jay-Z’s titanic headline slot, the first rapper to perform during a Glastonbury headline slot was Dizzee Rascal, who guested during Arctic Monkeys’ Friday night set. Thus, it was only a matter of time before a British rapper topped the bill, too, and in 2015, the exact right man emerged onto the scene.
Stormzy was announced as the Friday night headliner on the Pyramid Stage. Unlike basically any other time a hip-hop act has been announced as the Glastonbury headliner, everyone agreed it was a great shout. The man exudes star power and off the back of ‘Vossi Bop’ reaching number one, Stormzy obliterated the main stage with, legitimately, one of the best headline sets the festival has seen in the 21st century. Seriously, that climactic ‘Big For Your Boots’ is as good a closer as any other headliner the festival’s ever had, and that’s a hill I will kill and die on.
Kendrick Lamar (2022)
Headlining Glastonbury Festival is music’s ultimate poisoned chalice. If you play a fan-favourite set, you lose the casual fans. If you play the hits, then people could have just stayed home. The best headline sets have been a canny mix of both. When Kendrick Lamar was announced as a headliner for the 2022 edition, one could have the famously uncompromising Lamar going for the former. Some expected a fairly tiresome, brow-furrowed set drawn mainly from his thorny, uncomfortable fifth album, Mr Morale & the Big Steppers. Then the weirdest thing happened.
After a pretty spectacular intro with a troupe of backing dancers soundtracked to the Mr Morale opener, ‘United By Grief’, the “If Pirus and Crips…” intro to ‘mAAd city’ kicked in. What followed was a swashbuckling, absolutely dazzling run-through of K Dot’s biggest hits in chronological order, peppered with thoughtful interludes from Mr Morale. At a point where doubters thought his preachy, capital A Artistic side was holding him back, Lamar gave the world a preview of the world-conquering pop star it would see in a few years from the biggest stage in live music. An utter triumph that few headliners before or since have matched.
