George Lucas Experimented With Using Hip-Hop Music in STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS

One of the things that help make the Star Wars franchise timeless is the music that was created for it. I love the music of Star Wars and it will never feel dated.

Emmy-nominated composer Kevin Kiner has worked on scoring all seven seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars as well as the most recently released animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch. The guy is great at what he does and in a recent interview with /Film, he revealed an interesting thing about something George Lucas wanted to try with music in The Clone Wars. He wanted to include hip-hop at one point!

Lucas was looking to shake things up because according to Kiner Geroge Lucas "hates doing something that's been done before." Kiner went on to say:

“You could see that when he made the prequels, he tried to stretch things. He did that with me musically a ton of times. He would throw me a CD like, ‘Here, my son's listening to this, let's put this in this Obi-Wan space battle early on in season 1 in 'Clone Wars.'‘ The CD is all hip-hop music, and I'm like, ‘I can't put hip-hop in it.’ And then everybody, they're telling me, "No, don't do this.’ They're not saying that to George's face but everybody, the producers, everybody's like no.”

He went on to say:

“I had to figure out what he was all about. I saw that he wanted to experiment. I actually did one version of that cue that was pretty straight ahead hip-hop and didn't work at all. And then another version that had some of the electronic elements and some of the beats, but also had the orchestra in there and even had a little bit of the John Williams sound. But more of a hybrid kind of thing than the John Williams sound.”

Kiner went on to talk about what it was like sharing that music with Lucas, saying:

“So I brought both of those different versions of that scene. I gave it to the editor. I brought it up to Skywalker Ranch when I met with George and 12, 14 people in the room. Everyone is telling me, ‘No, we can't do it.’ Everybody shuts up as soon as George comes into the room. It's on me to have to tell him this, right? I'm the one. And so, we played the hip-hop thing for him and he's bopping his head and he goes to me after it's over, and he goes, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I hadn't thought of these words, but they just came to me. I'm like, Man, I think it makes 'Star Wars' like 'Power Rangers.' He is like, ‘Whoa.’”

What a crazy and weird situation to be put in! Everyone knows that this is a stupid idea, and it’s on the shoulders of this guy to tell George Lucas no way! Everyone was afraid to say no to Lucas when he shared an idea that he wanted to try out. Luckily Kiner had the guts to tell him what he really thought. So what happened after that? Kiner continued:

“And then I said, ‘Here, listen to this, I did this other version that's a hybrid.’ He listened to that and he was like, ‘Oh, okay. That's cool.’ So what you get from George is that he does like to experiment, but he knows when to back off. He knew when to not have a third of Star Wars be in Japanese with subtitles, even though that was an idea he'd had, but he knew to pull back. It's the same with the music, he knew when it wasn't working, even though he was trying to think outside the box and be new. Yeah, sometimes you can't. Sometimes too new is not good, but it's cool that he likes to experiment like that. It was cool to be pushed in those different directions, too.

Well, luckily Lucas backed off on the idea. The Clone Wars is a much better series because of it.