Cypress Hill provided one of the most innovative albums of '91. B-Real introduced his trademark nasal voice, Sen Dog provided the rough backup and Muggs supplied the strange and innovative beats with hard drums and repetitive loops. The Cypress sound was born and when they dropped their second single, "How I Could Just Kill A Man," it was on. Their self-titled debut, loaded with street reality and laced with hemp references, blew up and eventually went platinum. Cypress Hill went on tour and even became spokespersons for marijuana legalization.
Their second joint (no pun intended), Black Sunday, was belted out in two short months. Even though it didn't sound as good as their first, it was far from a sophomore jinx, 'cause it sold more than two million copies. This was largely due to the wide audience the group was exposed to via Lollapalooza and heavy rotation of the single, "Insane In The Brain" on MTV and radio. With success inevitably came the Cypress Hill detractors, critics and non-believers who accused Cypress Hill of crossing over or selling out. Rap artists are faced with the dilemma of either staying underground and not selling many records, or blowing up and getting flak for it. Well, the new album, Cypress Hill III (Temple Of Boom), is here and the trio has returned just as hard as ever. The album is filled with ill beats, rhymes about Buddha and street life and also takes aim at all the critics of their last album. Well, B-Real called me up the other day and we got to kick it about the new single, album and the crossover question that Cypress Hill is still understandably bitter about.
We just started out as a little local group doing backyard parties, just rappin' for fun. Somewhere along the line, we all got serious and decided to do this group. We learned from other brothers we knew who were before us in the industry. We didn't want to make the same mistakes so we just played the back for a couple of years and worked on our demos and then shopped 'em and finally got a deal.
We were already together but we didn't have the group name Cypress Hill. We were just young dudes doing this stuff for fun. We had the opportunity through 7A3 to learn about the business and for Muggs to get his foot in the door and when the time was right, to bring us in. When 7A3 ended, we started our thing.
It took about three years.
We were doing different things. Muggs was DJing and playing baseball in high school and working for his moms in a bar. Sen Dog was working a 9 to 5 and myself, I was gangbanging, hustling, bullshitting, nothing really positive.
I was always a rapper before I started gangbanging, you know, these brothers decided they should pull me back into doing the music thing. They didn't see no future for me in gangbanging. That's really why I do this thing. I didn't think it was going to do anything for me, I didn't see it at the time. Then I decided, 'Eff it, I'll try it out. Why not, I can still write [rhymes].' It developed into something, so I stuck with it.
There were like three labels you know--no bidding war--because nobody really knew what was up with us yet.
There's always envious mother effs around that talk shit, 'Ah, they sold out,' this and that. But they don't live in my shoes, they don't know shit. Just because you make money, it don't make the problems go away, it just pays the bills. Some people treat me better, some people hate me worse. It all depends.
Yeah, some people have tried to say that Cypress Hill crossed over just because you had a wider and more varied audience.
You gotta figure it like this, man. When you make music, you make it from your heart. And we always come out with hard shit. Our second album is straight up hard, there ain't no soft bullshit, crossover, pop theme in there. It's all hardcore hip-hop! People fail to realize that you can't stop the radio and you can't stop the kid from liking your shit if they can relate to it.
True, true.
Really, a lot of negative shit came from The Source, due to a personal beef that we had with writers on the staff at that time. They created all this bullshit about how we crossed over, like we did it on purpose or something. You can't stop people from buying your shit. If it's good and it's what you feel, that ain't sellin' out, man. You gotta figure that's introducing your shit to new people, it's making rap bigger. So what if white people like it or not, big f**king deal. If they can relate to it, it's a part of their lives. They always make this cop out that rap is for us, solely for us. Music is for everybody, no matter what color.
Yup, it is universal.
These are the same mother effs that say they ain't racist, yet they get mad when we sell records to white people. What's the problem? We're all human, this is the human race. It ain't about black or white, not for me. I don't give a f**k. If I feel my music then that's the way I do it and our music ain't on no pop shit. It all comes from hardcore roots.That's true indeed. Now, this year especially, the emphasis in rap has been on 'keepin' it real,' or 'we're real' and all that. What are your thoughts on this?
Well, if brothers knew how to keep it real the term would be worth something, man. But you have all these mother effs contradicting themselves. They say, 'He sold out and he sold out,' but these are the same mother effs going and doing Coke and Sprite commercials, the same ones modeling clothes and don't even get paid for that bullshit. Just playing themselves in magazines. Oh, you gotta support the hip-hop movement from clothing to whatever, but man, you can't tell me 'Keep it real' and then you're in a magazine posing real pretty. We ain't never done that. We haven't done Sprite commercials and we haven't done any songs like that. Yet people are quick to point the finger at us. I think we did a lot for hip-hop, we opened a lot of doors for a lot of hardcore groups to come through with us. People don't acknowledge that. The same people who buy Biggie Smalls' record buy our records, the same people who buy Snoop, [Ice] Cube, Dre, they all buy our records. But we're the ones who get singled out.
On your second album you didn't change your style, it was the same Cypress Hill.
Yeah, but what can you do if the radio decides they want to play it?
I understand that you were rushed to do your second album?
Yeah, we had two months to do it. We just kept everything. And for all that bullshit people say about crossover, we only had one platinum single. We only put out one single that the radio ever ate up, all the other singles didn't sell shit. The albums sold. I could see if we put out a gang of singles like that. We got lucky with that single ["Insane In The Brain"]. We didn't think radio was going to accept that single, but they did. We always make our shit anti-whatever. We don't try to cater to the mainstream. If they pick it up, that's cause they like it and that's on them. You try to cater to what you like, you have to like your music and believe me, I'm very anti-commercial type shit. I would quit this group and I would quit doing music if I thought in my heart that anything we were doing was pop or commercial. I'd quit this whole business. I've been a rebel all my life, I don't go with the way everybody thinks you should go. I'm pretty sure the rest of the group thinks that way.
So are you guys trying to move towards a live music approach?
Not really.
I understand that brothers have to pay far fees for sample clearances these days.
It's too much. We sampled live shit as opposed to records, but it's all played live, then sampled. We had people play different licks and a couple of live keyboards 'cause we don't like paying these damn vultures.
I heard you had to pay up to $50,000 on the last album for some minor stuff.
On "Insane In The Brain," the man who says 'I think I'm going crazy' [at the end], he tried to gank us for $80 [thousand]. We would have paid it but we ain't going out like that.
What's the concept behind your new album, Temple Of Boom?
We look at the studio as our sacred temple. You know, that's where we make our shit and either it grows out there and comes out like the best weed plant you ever tasted, or it comes out like a shitty sess plant. When we go in there it's straight up deep concentration. If we come out with some good stuff, that's the boom, the boomin' sound. If the songs don't cut it, then they gotta go. We cut a lot of songs off this album. We did like 25 songs.
And the final product has?
14 joints.
For heads that might not know, can you explain the concept for the song "Throw Your Set In The Air?"
That's something I feel I definitely have to explain. A lot of people would think from the way the song is written that it's promoting a gang message but really it ain't that. I definitely don't think kids should join a gang. It's the story of how I got into a gang when I was a kid, how I got manipulated by the older mother effs. I don't look back and say I wouldn't have done it again 'cause otherwise I wouldn't know what I know. I wouldn't want anyone else to go through that, though. You can learn by example. A lot of kids don't know what they're getting into. It's a whole world of pain when you join a gang 'cause you don't know what's ahead, you never know. Your partner that you're drinking a forty with one day can be dead the next, or locked down for life, or you could be the one. Kids gotta know, that shit is not for them. The way I wrote the song is to say, 'This is the way older mother effs manipulate younger kids.' This is what you can look for, this is what parents should be listening to also so they can know if their kids are getting involved with this shit. I love my neighborhood and everything but you know, I learned a lot and taking someone's life for no reason ain't shit. I'm not trying to promote it. I'm trying to show kids that this is the outcome. It's not all fun and games, shit is real. I've been through most of that shit. You can be proud of your hood but ain't no need to get mixed up in this shit.
What do you think about all these critics trying to ban or stop gangsta rap?
They're just closed-minded conservative mother effs. Some are probably like us. They're just afraid of what they don't know. They don't know what we go through down here. I'll give them this though, for a lot of mother effs, it's all about money. They talk about all this shit but they ain't been through it. Studio gangstas, if you will. Those are the people that give it a bad name. They make up a bunch of stupid shit and it's all meaningless violent shit and people look at that and say 'This is what rap is.' They don't look at rappers that have meaning behind why this violence be jumpin' off. It ain't about 'Stop doin' this.' When you tell people to stop, they do it even more. You have to learn from harsh reality. That's the only way I ever learned anything. I caught a slug for my neighborhood. But I've decided to play my cards right now. You can't pretend it don't happen, though. Violence was here before Cypress Hill, it was here before rap.