CYPRESS HILL- self titled- 1991

            I, along with most everyone else at the time, had never heard of Cypress Hill when I first saw the video for the track “How I Could Just Kill a Man.” It blew my mind. It was cocky, had a funk groove, a spring in its step despite the siren/feedback screech of the Suicidal Tendencies riff on the chorus. All of this belied by the brutal frankness of the lyric. And done with a certain sense of wit and humor. Which served to make the message all the more terrifying. The lyric explains the violent reality of street life as something galactically removed from the person that it addresses. “Here is something you can’t understand:/How I could just kill a man.” But what makes the song brilliant is that it draws in the audience, showing that the difference between the horrifying lifestyle of the narrator and your own is merely circumstantial: “Say some punk tried to get you for your auto/Would you call the one-time, play the role model?/No, I think you’d play like a thug…” Each of us are a split-second away from violence if we think our life or lifestyle is endangered, we are just unwilling to admit it. The narrator of this song however lives in this split-second all the time, and worse yet, is comfortable with it. The carnival organ of the bridge demonstrates the incredible skill of producer DJ Muggs. Indeed, this whole album serves to prove that sampling is a skilled trade in the hands of a master. If you hear this track and don’t buy the album, you are made of steel. Or you are Tipper Gore.

            The unique Jerry Lewis vocal delivery of B-Real (the group’s frontman) is punctuated by the barking of Sen Dog. This should be hilarious, and sometimes it is (“Scooby Doo, Y’all/ Scooby Dooby Doo” from “Hole in the Head”) but over all it somehow works.

            How about the witty romp of the lead-off track, “Pigs”? The lyrics catalog the incompetence abuses and hypocrisies of the police to the tune of the traditional childrens’ rhyme. “This pig’s steady eating donuts while some motherfucker’s out robbing your home.” “This pig works for the mafia/ Making some money off crack.” In the end we’re invited to a pork feast: “How ‘bout a ham sandwich?!”