examples of artists who incorporated "real instruments" while keeping it street/hardcore/modernist/"for the floor": timbaland, the bomb squad, ced gee, marley marl, mannie fresh, the neptunes, swizz beatz, organized noize, dr. dre, red spyda, oh like every great rap producer ever (who isn't an essentialist premier-style sample chopper), any number of house producers, arguably roni size...*
it IS possible. it's just that most of these producers don't/didn't draw attention to it. or, even when they did ("i see myself working with a symphony orchestra one day", gawd just shut up already you meglomaniac), they never got around to it because they knew which side their bread was buttered on. (one of the benefits of rap's hyper-capitalist rate-of-turnover is that it doesn't allow trackmasters to indulge their [cough] "creative" side if they wanna stay paid. the fact that he purposefully turned his back on jungle's populist core at a key moment is what allowed goldie to make "mother". this is likely why, if it ever materializes at all, the new dr. dre album will be god-fucking-awful.)
can you imagine, for a less rock-centric analogy for a moment, having to listen to a solo timbaland go through a lovesexy-through-musicology style two decade slough?
(and, yeah, live drums do sound different than the programmed kind, but anyone who doubts you can do similar things with a live kit should listen to the otherwise pretty boring jay-z unplugged, where ?uestlove imitates timbaland drum patterns beat for beat. the problem is that live drummers rarely *think* like drum programmers when they sit down to play. [see also all rock band takes on the "drum & bass beat".) [would they have go through some sort of derek bailey-style unlearning process before they could sit down blind and bash out a "niogga what, nigga who"?])
* it should go without saying that all these producers are represented here at their respective peaks, ha ha.