B-Real, Along With Cypress Hill, Honored at Tonight’s VH1 Hip Hop Honors

Posted on Monday, October 6, 2008
Tags: B-Real , Cypress-Hill

In 1988, N.W.A.’s seminal album Straight Outta Compton established L.A.’s gangsta rap scene, but another expression of street knowledge from the same city was hot on its heels. Living in South Central Los Angeles — an area so stigmatized by its reputation for crime and poverty that it recently changed its name as part of a PR move — rappers Sen Dog (born Senen Reyes) and B-Real (Louis Freese) teamed up with producer DJ Muggs (Lawrence Muggerud) to form Cypress Hill, a street-level survey of dangerous communities, endless supplies of weed and the resulting paranoia that both create.

1991’s Cypress Hill laid out the group’s musical attack: Muggs’s stoned beats tricked out with funk-guitar samples; casual, candid depictions of inner-city desperation; and the yin-and-yang complement of Sen Dog’s grizzled growl and B-Real’s nasally cadences. At a time when feuds between East and West Coast rappers would soon spill over into bloodshed, Cypress Hill represented a fertile amalgam of the two styles, with Queens-born Muggs adding a gritty New York urgency to the rappers’ sun-baked rhymes. And though hip-hop remained a largely African-American art form in the early ’90s, Cypress Hill gave the genre a hint of Latin flavor, helping to open the door for artists of different ethnicities to break through.

As the group expanded into the mainstream on singles like “Insane in the Brain” and appearances at Lollapalooza, Cypress Hill helped birth the ’90s rap-rock movement by contributing to the Judgment Night soundtrack, a collection of collaborations between hip-hop bands and rock groups. Their interest in genre mixing would blossom further with 2000’s Skull & Bones, a double album divided between hard-rock tracks and hip-hop joints bolstered by newest member Eric Bobo’s powerful drums. Twenty years after forming, Cypress Hill possesses a legacy that extends far beyond the Cypress Avenue neighborhood that inspired their name. Part good-time hip-hop crew, part thug-life documenters, part B-Boy purists, part mosh-pit nutballs, Cypress Hill improbably turned songs about life’s many dead-end paths into shockingly life-affirming jams.

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