A Hardcore Reality: Talking with Cypress Hill, Hiphop Survivors

Cypress Hill The cliched take on Cypress Hill is all wrong. It's said that their career fell off, yet Cypress albums continue to go gold and platinum. They're routinely portrayed in the music press as out-of-touch pothead clowns, but in fact B-Real, Sen Dog and DJ Muggs are more serious about their music career than 99 percent of the rap acts in the market. That's why they've stayed together throughout the decade. It's why they tour like they do, as extensively and often as anyone in hiphop. Cypress even brought a percussionist?Eric Bobo, son of Latin-jazz legend Willie Bobo?into the group to give their stage act an extra boost. They enjoy putting out a high-quality product. Instead of merely releasing their greatest hits, for instance, they rerecorded them all in Spanish, for last year's Los Grandes Exitos En Español. But effort is somewhat out of fashion in rap at the moment.

We join the conversation in progress, after a discussion of the things critics write about them. This transcript was edited for length. Sen Dog doesn't speak until the end because he didn't feel like it, not because I was ignoring him.

B-Real: ...All the writers and stuff like that, they're entitled to their opinion and I respect that. My satisfaction comes when our shows are sold out and we see all these different kids, black, white, Hispanic and Asian, all jumping around to our shit. That lets us know that the ones we're making it for appreciate it. That's what really counts.

DJ Muggs: That's what it's for. It ain't for these trendy kids, trendy motherfuckers jumping from trend to trend every fuckin' year. We're here to stay. We're like a Led Zeppelin?we've never been a strong singles band, but we always put strong albums together...

You gonna tour this summer with musicians? Gonna go all out?

BR: Yeah. The only album we didn't do that for was the last one [IV]. We didn't really support it with a tour the way we should have. But that's because we came in and worked on this shit. Definitely we're gonna support this one, take the live band out and everything. We have to make our sound strong enough to compete with the people we're playing with and are gonna play with. Sometimes the only way to do that is to have a band up there, because a track act can only pump the volume up so much. I'll be damned if we get blown away onstage?forget that.

A lot of rap acts don't stand up at those festivals with metal bands.

DJM: We been doing it. We played with Metallica this summer, then the next day with Wu-Tang and then the next day with Fear Factory. We make music, period. There ain't no boundaries or color lines. This is a growth and progression for us as a band, as musicians. Always need a new way to go, some way to be creative. Most rappers decide to go the r&b way and start doing songs with Aaliyah and all this shit. That ain't us. We always had rock 'n' roll roots. We sampled rock records, and now it's the place for us to go. Back in the days when we came up, if you did an r&b record you were selling out. Man, if you can't do your hardcore shit and sell motherfucking records you need to stop.

What'd you think of Limp Bizkit when they came out?

DJM: I like it. It's cool.

BR: I thought the music was cool.

But...I know you're not supposed to say anything against another MC.

BR: No, he's decent, compared to a lot of people who are trying to do it. I think he's a great businessman for how's he's marketed his shit. It's pretty nice. How long they'll last? Who knows.

DJM: It is what it is. He's got something about him. He's not, technically, the greatest rapper, but he's got his own little niche.

BR: The way I look at it is: This game, music, is big enough for every-fuckin'-body to get into. What sets you apart is going to determine how long you stick around. If you can do something that makes your sound and your image distinct from everybody else's, it's up to you from there how long you can carry your career out. I think it's too early to say how long they'll be around. But their shit's cool.

You guys have a different perspective than a lot of people in hiphop, because when you stopped being in the media spotlight, in the top chart positions, you just focused on touring to promote your albums yourselves, on the road. A lot of rappers, if they're not pleasing everyone, just roll over.

DJM: That's when they start switching up everything they were about and everything they stood for. They feel they have to start sounding like this year's sound. Fuck that.

B, what was on your mind writing the lyrics to this album? You seem pretty pissed off at some other MCs who aren't named.

BR: Yeah, well, at times. You see the changes that hiphop goes through, and the trends that people are on now. The overall direction, it saddens me. I've been in this game for close to 10 years already. I've seen what hiphop was and what it's become. And it's an ugly thing. Hiphop is more about materialism right now than anything. Before, that was the thing that everybody was talking shit about. The Big Willie syndrome. Whatever. You need variety in music so I guess it serves its purpose. We've always been with the hardcore hiphop mentality, with the underground. Though we have a mainstream appeal...it's still with that sentiment. We're not about bragging about what we have. We're not about being flashy and in the limelight, being the superstars. We enjoy fame and all that crap, but we let the music do our talking. I think a lot of hiphop has lost its focus.

DJM: It became everything it was against! It was the urban punk rock at one point. It was against formulaic music, against conformity, about having your own identity, standing alone. It became what r&b was, what we all hated. But, at the same time, it created a whole new underground uprising. Young kids were like, Fuck that.

BR: Hiphop is big enough. It has so many different faces. If it had one way, the way we wanted it...

DJM: Hiphop is the popular culture, period. Everybody takes from hiphop, from movies to Britney Spears. When we came out the culture was underground. You'd go to a club and be the only fools rapping. Now you go to a club, everybody raps, everybody deejays.

Do you keep up with the underground?

DJM: Dilated Peoples...

BR: Self-Scientific and kids like that. I have a radio show where we play a lot of underground shit.

Did you feel at all compelled to make a political song about any specific issues?

BR: I feel that a lot of the songs we write have political notions in them, but it's not on the level of reaching out to politicians. It's more on realistic terms, neighborhood politics. Now that we've grown and moved away from where we were before, we talk about the new shit that goes on in our lives now, as musicians, shit that we see and things we experienced that maybe made us bitter or frustrated or angered about something. We're always talking about things we're going through now.

If I go back and talk about gangster shit like I'm living it now, that would be bullshit. I'm not a gangster right now. I've still got that mentality. I'm not gonna let people get over on me or approach me with disrespect, but the life I live is more responsible so I gotta talk about other things. If I talk about gangster shit it's always clear that I'm talking about past situations. It'll be a song about reflecting on the past...

How was the response to Cypress Hill IV, nationwide? Here in New York I didn't hear much...

DJM: Commercially it wasn't big. Our fans loved it?thought it was one of our best records. But we went from having a $1.5 million promotional budget to a $400,000 promotional budget. Magazine ads cost $25,000 a pop, so figure that out. Just a first wave of promotion, without a commercial hit?we didn't give a fuck. The game is fueled by fuckin' singles. You don't have a single, they don't know what to do!

BR: Back in the days record companies, with us, they knew we weren't a singles-orientated group. They knew not to rely on us for a single. It was like, promote the project and these guys will go on tour and sell the record.

DJM: More of a rock mentality... The only time we really have control of a record is in the studio. Once we hand it in to a label, we got nothing to do with it no more. We make records, Columbia sells records. We ain't in the business of selling records.

BR: It's the equivalent of, let's say you have a daughter. You cherish that daughter and you fuckin' love that daughter and then you gotta let her go to some guy who's calling for her hand. You're not really sure, because you don't know if he's a fuckin' idiot. But sometimes you gotta let 'em go. Sometimes the guy'll treat her right, sometimes he'll treat her like a fuckin' ho. I think our last record got treated like a ho.

DJM: We went to that label [Sony], they had P.E., they had EPMD, LL Cool J?the whole Def Jam thing. Now you go up there, they got Jermaine Dupri, Lauryn Hill, the Fugees?it's whole new world, an r&b-orientated world. You put Cypress in that equation?the shit don't mix! Oil and water.

BR: For a minute, they forgot how to market us.

DJM: They don't know whether to put us in Urban or Alternative. We sell to both.

A lot of kids today don't even separate rock and rap in their minds.

DJM: They grew up with both!... A lot of people at labels, they just work at a label. They went to college, they like music, so they get a job at a label. That's cool, but they ain't visionary people. They're there for the moment, they handle their paperwork, they get their job done at the end of the day, turn their paperwork in, and that's good. But when it comes to seeing what the next thing in music is gonna be?that's what we do! When we try to tell somebody that, it's like Van Gogh trying to explain a fuckin' painting. They go, "Huh?"

Why do rap groups always have these really long contracts? Rock groups don't sign for so many albums, usually.

DJM: Labels sign rap groups for an album with six options?their options.

BR: You know what it is? Record companies test the water with rock groups. If a record does good they'll sign 'em for more.

I guess rap groups usually have hot singles before they sign, so labels know the debut album will do all right.

DJM: We signed for $75,000 our first album. That was it. I made like $800 a track. Kids get a million dollars on their first album now.

Is label politics the reason that you didn't tour as long behind IV as your other albums?

DJM: We just wanted to get back to the studio and do our next album. And to finally do the Spanish album, which we'd been waiting eight years to do. We wanted to do it in '92. We said, Fuck the tour, and we did our album, then we did the Spanish album, and we did a whole rock album. Three albums in three months.

BR: We didn't even plan the rock album. That shit just came about.

DJM: We recorded 13 rock songs in two weeks.

Did you just call those Fear Factory guys up or...

DJM: They're our friends.

BR: The funny thing is, we were doing this thing for the WCW soundtrack, and that's sort of what sparked it. We did the one song, and that came out cool for them, and then we were like, Why don't we do some more of this shit? Sen Dog had been doing it with his band, SX10?he brought that sort of influence back to us. We had been doing it in '93. Me and Muggs always looked at it like, whatever, let's do the hiphop shit. Sen was about doing the fusion shit. When he came back to the group he brought the influence back.

DJM: You know what I hate about music? People always want to restrict you. When you try to do something new, people always have to say a bunch of shit. Back in the days rock stars would go work with Ravi Shankar, or some percussionist from Africa, then the next album work with somebody like Joni Mitchell?y'know what I mean? Musicians are creative?for the next album we're gonna be on some way other shit!

BR: You have to roll with the punches. If you let shit get into your head, you lose focus. And that's the one thing nobody can ever accuse us of. I firmly believe, in my heart and my mind, that we've never done a weak record. Maybe a few individual things that we've cameoed on and shit like that, but not as Cypress Hill. I don't believe we've made a wack album. I think all our fans appreciate that.

People who aren't your fans since you were on MTV, who haven't heard your third, fourth and fifth albums, don't know where you guys are at. They don't know that you see yourselves as like a rock band, that you admire Led Zep.

DJM: That's our inspiration: Zeppelin, Sabbath, the Who, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Run-DMC.

BR: The Who, Santana, Anthrax.

A lot of people in New York don't know anything about Latino kids in L.A. who are all into Anthrax and Black Sabbath.

BR: That's the thing! When we first came out here, everyone thought we were from here! Because of our tastes in music.

DJM: And our visuals stem from the rock world.

BR: Nothing's changed. All that's changed is the way we're perceived. MTV and the record company had a lot to do with that, but we're still the same motherfuckers. We never changed our attitude.

L.A. Latino youth are never portrayed, in movies and on tv, as being metalheads.

DJM: Shit, go to a Rage Against the Machine concert! Half the motherfuckers is Latin. Straight-up Mexican. If you're not in L.A., Homes, you don't know the impact L.A. groups have. When we did our second-annual Smokeout?the first one had 13,000 people, the second had 44,000 people at a Cypress Hill concert. Here you don't even hear about it but when you're in L.A., shit's like, Boom. That's our world.

BR: MTV covers a lot of shit out here. They don't really cover all the shit in L.A. that's going on. Our presence is really felt out there. Out here, I can honestly say that our presence is felt, too. Not on the radio, maybe not even on MTV, but that's the beauty of Cypress Hill. We don't need that.

DJM: When we came out, we thought we'd do about 300,000 records. Every group we respected at that time was doing that. Quest, Ultramagnetics, BDP. When we came and the shit blew, and then the second shit too?me, personally, I was like, "I wanna go just raw, dark, grimy, dirty and dark." That was Temples of Boom. A moody fuckin' record, no singles?we did that on purpose. That was where we felt comfortable.

That's where a lot of people lost you.

BR: Not our true fans, and I'll give you an example. We haven't had a hit single in a long time. "Greenthumb" should have been a hit, but because of the weed connotations in it, and MTV not pumping it, we didn't really have the push, like we were saying earlier... We felt it represented Cypress Hill at that time. We put out that single and there was no major play. Nowhere. We booked a show here, at Roseland. A week or two before, one of our good friends, who sold about three million records this year?maybe more than that, who the fuck knows. I'm not gonna say no fuckin' name. But he came out here and his show [at Roseland] wasn't packed. That's with a big record out, single and everything. We came out here with none of that shit and packed that motherfucker. Sold it out! That says a lot. For a group from the West Coast, who's been in this game for fuckin' eight or nine years, to fuckin' come to New York, hit Roseland and pack that motherfucker with no single, no promotion no nothing?that says a lot.

Can you guys pull a big crowd in, say, Minneapolis?

DJM: Yeah, we're strong in Minneapolis.

Up in Canada?

DJM: Yeah, Canada is big for us. That's a big market.

Sen Dog: We don't really have a problem, man. Radio stations have shined us off so much that it's the thing to do, to go to a Cypress show when they come to town. Because they ain't gonna see us on the tv. We have a really energetic show. Now we're seeing a whole bunch of younger fans. I'm talking 17, 18 years old. They're coming out in bunches, and they were like nine years old when we first started.

They saw B's big afro in the "Insane in the Brain" video when they were babies in their cribs. B is like their Teletubby.

SD: It's kinda like the Grateful Dead the way we got fans of all ages coming. The face of it, the aura of what Cypress is doing is always changing, but it's never been to where we couldn't pack an auditorium.

Sen, let me ask you about your rhyming. You were sort of out of the group for a while, and since you've come back you've been rhyming with a lot of intensity. So I wanted to ask what went on with you.

SD: Well, when I stepped out of Cypress for a minute, it was basically on me, what I was gonna do. There was really nobody there to tell me, "Hey Sen that sounds cool," or "that doesn't." The guys I was working with didn't know me that well. So I had to decipher for myself. One thing that I had to get better at was just blowing. Just overall presence on the track, to be stronger. Going through all the shit I went through when I was out of Cypress, dealing with Sony and with Flip Records, that just angered the fuck out of me and it made me way more of a rhyme animal. Before, I'd go to the studio and write like half a rap, B would have to help me because I'd smoke too much weed and I didn't want to do shit. Now it's the total opposite. I write a rhyme in 10 minutes and put it down.

So you had a disappointing experience with the industry?I don't really know what happened, I don't know if you want to talk about it.

SD: I don't really mind talking about it because it's in the past. You really find out what you're worth when you're not with the band that got you to where people knew you. You might feel that because of the work you've done in the past, and the records you've sold, that maybe somebody should give you a chance and put you on. But that's not necessarily the case. Nobody has faith in me but me. I know what a bad motherfucker I am, on the mic, in the studio or on the stage. I'm the type of motherfucker who rips shit up. I'm not gonna sit here and say I'm the best, but I'm slept on. People sleeping. That's what I like, though, the underdog position. You get to come up and blow people's minds that way.

I'm sure it means a lot to your fans that you've stayed together. Very few rap groups have.

BR: The three of us always had a tremendous amount of chemistry. We all have the same fuckin' likes in life. Growing up together, when we met, we all liked the same things. We even liked some of the same women. We're like brothers. We're all we got, really. We connect on a personal level and onstage. And it translates to record. Sometimes we don't agree on shit, sometimes we don't get along, but that's the way a family is.