Lemaire’s ‘Street Jockey’ Vibe Is Connecting Hip-Hop And Horse Racing
The champion rider is backing a new single by Yung Gritty, with an album to follow that will feature artists from hip-hop’s legendary West Coast and East Coast ‘bloodlines’.
CHRISTOPHE LEMAIRE’S latest off-track project has hip-hop artist and producer Frank Nitty calling him “The Dr. Dre of horse racing” for his involvement in the production of a new music single and album, with a mission to merge two popular cultures and reach a new audience of potential fans.
The Frenchman, Japan’s champion jockey for the seventh time this year, has invested in the project which is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based Nitty and Seattle-based racehorse owner and entrepreneur Greg Conley.
“This project is fantastic because both cultures, hip-hop and horse racing, will work together and I think it will be a good promotion for horse racing. It will hopefully bring a new generation into horse racing, this is the goal,” Lemaire told Idol Horse.
Nitty has connections to West Coast hip-hop legends Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg, and some of the production on the upcoming album – titled The Winner’s Circle with a planned release date of February 14 – has been done at Dr Dre’s studio. It features several artists including Nitty’s protégé Yung Gritty, recently co-signed to Snoop Dogg and dubbed by his fans ‘The Mexican G.O.A.T.’ The album’s first single, Let’s Ride, was released earlier this month and is a Yung Gritty track.
“The energy and time Christophe has put into the horse racing culture, he reminds me of me, because as many years as he’s been doing horse racing, I’ve been doing hip-hop, so I understand him. I think it’s a great combination,” Nitty said.
“If we get the horse community behind this product, I think it could be something that has never been done before. It’s a beautiful thing for the future innovation of horse racing because people are retiring, a lot of legends are retiring and there’s a new generation coming through.
“We’re for the good of horse racing, we’re for the good of hip-hop. That’s really the mission: if the fans and the people can gravitate to this then we can start a whole new hype.”
Horse racing worldwide is wrestling with how to arrest falling attendances and turnover, while combating both general apathy and animal rights-fuelled opposition in the sport’s broadly failing traditional bastions of mass public appeal, the United States, western Europe and Australia. Lemaire, like many fans, is concerned by track closures globally, and particularly in the U.S. in the past decade or so.
“Horse racing is struggling to get the new generation, to give interest to the people and give them a good image, so hopefully this album can do that,” Lemaire said.
“It will talk about the people involved in horse racing, from the grooms to the jockeys and the owners; it will talk about the love of the horse, about the passion from the jockeys, how much they involve themselves to win a race, the feelings of the jockeys on the horse in the stretch. It will talk about the (universal) aspects of horse racing.”
Lemaire is conscious of his position as a prominent jockey and personality in one of the world’s healthiest racing jurisdictions – JRA (Japan Racing Association) turnover in 2023 was approximately US$20.9 billion with average attendance of 16,000 – and his love for the sport and the horses he rides is evident in his desire to attract more interest worldwide.
He has already been astute enough to use his status to spread what he terms “horse racing culture” via his clothing brand, CL by Christophe Lemaire with its ‘Street Jockey’ style, which is now in its third year of trading.
“The clothing brand is going very well,” he said. “We are improving the designs and the distribution as well. From this month we start to sell worldwide, so it’s a big step for the brand. Hopefully next year, by the end of spring, we will open a shop in Kyoto, a boutique with a café, a kind of horse racing café, so again it will be another way of promoting horse racing and try to democratise it, try to make it better known by anybody.
“Music in general is able to pass some messages and to touch everybody, wherever you come from, the hood or if you’re an aristocrat or whatever,” he continued. “If you come from the bottom and now you’ve reached the top, whatever, music can touch everybody, so through this album hopefully we can make a good promotion of horse racing all around the world.”
The Street Jockey vibe is something that Conley and Nitty have tapped into, with Nitty firm in his belief that ‘Street Jockey music’ could become a new genre of hip-hop.
“I know there’s a new generation of horse owners, jockeys, breeders and all that, and it’s a young generation and the young generation loves hip-hop, they absolutely love it,” Nitty said.
“And some (in horse racing) haven’t heard hip-hop because it has a bad name but there’s good and bad to everything, so we’re going to bring the good side of hip-hop, no cussing, we don’t have to cuss. There’s nothing bad, it’s just all about the horse, the love for the horse, the jockeys, and not even just the jockeys, the trainers and all the people behind it.
“I feel like all that’s going to be part of this Winner’s Circle Album,” he continued. “We’ve got Spanish on there, we’ve got so much flavour on this album that if we do it the right way, we’ll create a whole genre of music that is Street Jockey music.
“We’re just uniting two ecosystems for good and that’s what I want people to understand. Hip-hop is bigger than religion right now, it’s the largest of all communities and horse racing is a beautiful community, so it just makes no sense for us not to come together and be able to celebrate together in a different way.”
Data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) shows the U.S. is still the country with the biggest music industry revenue, followed by Japan and the United Kingdom. Hip-hop surpassed rock music as the most popular music genre in the U.S. back in 2017; in 2023 it accounted for around a quarter of all streams on Spotify, while Apple Music’s figures show that 48 percent of its users listen to hip-hop.
Hip-hop emerged in the early 1970s out of block parties in New York city’s northern borough, the Bronx, spurred by the innovation of DJ Kool Herc and developed by such pioneers as Afrika Bambaataa and his Universal Zulu Nation, and Grandmaster Flash.
By the 1990s hip-hop was pushing towards the forefront of popular music and culture. That decade brought Ice Cube and MC Hammer, as well as Gangsta Rap and turmoil, with the genre seen to be steeped in gun violence, murder, and East Coast versus West Coast conflict. But as the 1990s progressed, major stars emerged like N.W.A., the legendary Dr Dre, Snoop Dog, Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G..
Hip-hop has continued to evolve this century and since Eminem cracked ‘Middle America’ and gained global stardom in the late 1990s and early 2000s its market share and influence on popular culture has continued to spread.
Conley brought together hip-hop and horse racing when he invited Nitty to join him at Emerald Downs. The two had connected via LinkedIn when Conley reached out about some creative cross-overs in the Web3 space.
“I met Frank and invited him out to the racetrack and the first thing he said was ‘I’m from the hood and nobody ever invites us to the racetrack.’ And I said, ‘That’s a shame, there’s a whole culture here that I think would fit in very well, especially with the new young crowd that we need to try to encourage to get out to the racetrack,’” Conley recalled.
He took Nitty to the backstretch and that led to a perspective-altering, fear-facing sit on the back of a thoroughbred. Nitty related how as a child, one of the foster homes he was placed in had a farm and one day he slid off a horse, down its neck, and was stepped on. That led to a lifelong fear of horses.
“But once I got on that horse, I don’t know how Greg convinced me to do it but he did, once I got on that horse, I don’t even think I told Greg but I had chills go through my body because the horse felt so powerful to me: I could feel the heart and he was just alive and powerful, and I think that’s what popped my cherry, I thought ‘You know what, this is a good thing.’
“I just told Greg it would be dope if we did an album, because if we did an album and united both cultures, I think it would be something that had never been done before.”
Conley eventually reached out to Lemaire when he saw on his X profile that he was a hip-hop fan. All three came together in person at the 2024 Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar and hit it off.
“We had some chat after Greg contacted me and he said at some point, ‘You are a quite famous jockey around the world, if you like the project, it would be wonderful if you would get involved, and if you become the ambassador of this project.’ I said, ‘Yeah, of course, I’m 100 per cent with you,’ so I became co-producer, which means I invested to complete this hip-hop album,” Lemaire said.
The ace jockey has been a Hip Hop fan since he was a teenager, when his friend and fellow jockey Frederic Spanu introduced him to the genre.
“Fred Spanu was kind of my older brother back then and he introduced me to hip-hop music in France, in the 1990s, so since then I’ve always listened to hip-hop music and I’m happy to get involved in the creation of a hip-hop album,” Lemaire said.
“I like Ice Cube very much, but I also like Snoop Dogg, he’s so cool, representing a Californian way of life, he’s such a big star, it would be wonderful if we could have this kind of artist on our album. For horse racing I think it would be big.”
Nitty was not giving away too much about which artists will perform on the album besides Yung Gritty, but talking in language similar to that used in racing’s bloodstock circles, he said the line-up would feature strong hip-hop ‘bloodlines.’
“We have artists from the N.W.A. bloodline on this album,” Nitty said. “I haven’t announced them yet because I want it to be a surprise for everybody and I learnt that strategy from (Dr) Dre. We do have RBX, Dre’s first protégé and he’s also Snoop Dogg’s blood cousin and he’s a legend from the Death Row (Records).
“I want people to be surprised. I don’t want to destroy what I’m trying to do and what I’m trying to do is make people excited every time we drop a song. What I will say, the N.W.A. bloodline is the royal blood of hip-hop from the west coast; we also have an east coast bloodline, Wu Tang, and that’s a part of it; we have all the best bloodlines of hip-hop culture involved on this album.
“I just want to share my bloodline with the culture because I’m a general in my bloodline, I’m up next to take the bloodline to another level and this is going to be one of the ways that I’m going to do it.”
Like Lemaire, Nitty and Conley are committed to the idea of the hip-hop and horse racing cultures coming together through music and expressed their ‘excitement’ at where the project could go. There’s talk of merchandise, movie potential and live shows – hip-hop at Happy Valley is a formative idea – and Winner’s Circle being Volume 1, the first phase in what they hope will be this new genre of Street Jockey music.
“Horse racing to me is like barbecue but the only thing they was missing was some barbecue sauce and I feel like I’m the sauce to the barbecue,” Nitty said.
And there is an underlying desire to give something back to the horses too, in the way of a percentage of sales going to horse aftercare and rescue organisations.
“Just like Christophe gives back through his clothing line to Old Friends Japan, we want to give back to Old Friends here in Georgetown, Kentucky,” Conley said.
“And this is non-generational: everyone can participate in this because it’s all about the horse and it’s about the people.
“The single, Let’s Ride,” he added, “is just the beginning.” ∎
