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Cypress Hill: Sen Dog
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Despite the album’s many unique characteristics, Cypress Hill often feels very much like an eighties album due to the tried-and-true breakbeats, the percussive use of melodic samples, and the thin bass. Brief instrumental numbers serve as an equivalent to “DJ cuts” from the previous era. Like other 1991 classics, it’s clearly a transitional record, unprecented in both its strong sense of Hispanic identity and its fascination with marijuana, yet familiar in its stylistic connection to the roots of hip-hop.
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In the wake of N.W.A's brilliantly produced yet warped glorification of inner-city turmoil on Efil4zaggin this past summer, the Los Angeles-based rap group Cypress Hill jumps into the hip-hop gangsta scene with a debut album sure to raise a few eyebrows. Pushing the credo of "funky awareness" – street-life experiences riding over head-bobbing beats and samples – rappers B-Real and Sen Dog and DJ Mixmaster Muggs have produced an album that is engaging and innovative in spite of its hard-core messages.
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Cypress Hill were notable for being the first Latino hip-hop superstars, but they became notorious for their endorsement of marijuana, which actually isn't a trivial thing. Not only did the group campaign for its legalization, but their slow, rolling bass-and-drum loops pioneered a new, stoned funk that became extraordinary influential in '90s hip-hop -- it could be heard in everything from Dr. Dre's G-funk to the chilly layers of English trip-hop. DJ Muggs crafted the sound, and B Real, with his pinched, nasal voice, was responsible for the rhetoric that made them famous. The propot position became a little ridiculous over time, but there was no denying that the actual music had a strange, eerie power, particularly on the band's first two albums. Although B Real remained an effective lyricist and Muggs' musical skills did not diminish, the group's third album, Temples of Boom, was perceived by many critics as self-parodic, and the group appeared to disintegrate shortly afterward, though Muggs and B Real regrouped toward the end of the '90s to issue more material. DVX, the original incarnation of Cypress Hill, formed in 1986 when Cuban-born brothers Sen Dog (born Senen Reyes, November 20, 1965) and Mellow Man Ace hooked up with fellow Los Angeles residents Muggs (born Lawrence Muggerud, January 28, 1968) and B Real (born Louis Freese, June 2, 1970).
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Cypress Hill electrified Chicago’s loyal crowd of puffers with a 1 ½ hour high energy set featuring their best from the last decade. The band blended the mix of the terrific Latino/Cuban sound of B-Real, cut-through messages of Sen Dogg, DJ Muggs spinning, and Eric Bobo’s percussion to spark the Chicago crowd. No rock was left uncovered as Cypress vocalized their Los Angeles upbringing with gun-loving, cop-bashing, chronic obsessed lyrics, all of which the crowd admirably sang along word for word. Cypress Hill will leave their mark in music as having the bluntest, phatest, most inspirational dope lyrics of all time, a title they will continue to earn with impressive shows like this.
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Cypress Hill is a prominent rap music group (formed in 1988), which has sold 17 million records around the world. It is composed of members B-Real (Louis Freese or Freeze, Mexican/Cuban), Sen Dog (Senen Reyes, Afro-Cuban), DJ Muggs (Lawrence Muggerud, Italian-American) and, since 1994, percussionist Eric Bobo.
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Cypress Hill released IV in 1998 which went gold in the U.S., even though the reviews were somewhat negative, on the backs of hit singles "Tequila Sunrise" and another tribute to smoking cannabis "Dr. Greenthumb." Sen Dog ... released the Get Wood sampler as part of SX-10 on the label Flip.
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