Their first album, which was self-titled, was released in August 1991. Its single was "Phuncky Feel One", but it was the B-side "How I Could Just Kill A Man" (formerly "Trigga Happy Nigga") that attracted more airplay on urban radio and college radio. Based on the success of the single and other tracks such as bilingual track "Latin Lingo" and X-rated Spanish track "Tres Equis", the album sold two million copies in the US alone. Subsequently, DJ Muggs produced the first House of Pain album, then worked on other projects like Funkdoobiest. The band made their first appearance at Lollapalooza on the side stage in 1992.
Black Sunday, the group's second album, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in 1993, recording the highest Soundscan for a rap group up until that time. Also with their debut still on the charts they became the first rap artists to have 2 albums in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 at the same time. With "Insane in the Brain" becoming a crossover hit, the album went triple platinum in the U.S. and sold about 3.25 million copies.
Cypress Hill was banned from Saturday Night Live after Muggs smoked cannabis on-air and the band trashed their instruments while playing their second single "I Ain't Goin' Out Like That". The band headlined the "Soul Assassins" tour with House of Pain and Funkdoobiest as support, then performed on a college tour with Rage Against the Machine and Seven Year Bitch. In 1993, Cypress Hill also had two tracks on the Judgment Night soundtrack, teamed up with Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth.
The band played at the 1994 Woodstock Festival introducing their new member Eric Bobo, formerly a percussionist with the Beastie Boys. Bobo is the son of salsa musician Willie Bobo. Rolling Stone magazine named the band as the best rap group in their music awards voted by critics and readers. Cypress Hill played at Lollapalooza for two successive years, topping the bill in 1995. They appeared on the The Simpsons episode "Homerpalooza".
Their third album Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom was released in 1995 selling 1.5 million copies and reaching number 3 on the Billboard 200 on the strength of the hit single "Throw Your Set in the Air". Cypress Hill also contributed a track "I Wanna Get High" to the High Times sponsored Hempilation album to support NORML.
Feud With Ice Cube
Ice Cube asked to put "Throw Your Set in the Air" on his Friday soundtrack, but B-Real refused, prompting Cube to record a new song "Friday" with a similar chorus; Cypress Hill responded with the track "No Rest For The Wicked." Westside Connection replied with the diss track "King Of The Hill" and "Cross Em Out & Put a K", to which Cypress Hill replied with "Ice Cube Killa," which uses the same beat as "King Of The Hill" and disses Ice Cube and Mack 10. "Ice Cube Killa" has never been released officially. In 1997 B-Real of Cypress Hill and Ice Cube were invited to a late night talk show in order to reconcile their differences for the benefit of the hip hop community, and the feud thus ended. Cube And B-Real would work together later that year as guest features on the track "Men of Steel" for the soundtrack of Shaquille O'Neal's film Steel. B-Real and Cube did even feature as guests in Warren G's single "Get U Down" which also featured Snoop Dogg.
Continued career
Sen Dog took a break from the band to form a Los Angeles based punk-rap band SX-10. Meanwhile in 1996, Cypress Hill appeared on the first 'Smokin' Grooves' tour, featuring Ziggy Marley, The Fugees, Busta Rhymes and A Tribe Called Quest. The band also released a nine track EP Unreleased and Revamped with rare mixes. In 1997, band members focused on their solo careers. Muggs released Muggs Presents ... the Soul Assassins featuring contributions from Wu-Tang Clan members, Dr. Dre, KRS-One, Wyclef Jean and Mobb Deep. B-Real appeared with Busta Rhymes, Coolio, LL Cool J and Method Man on "Hit Em High" from the multi-platinum Space Jam Soundtrack. He also appeared with RBX, Nas and KRS-One on "East Coast Killer, West Coast Killer" on Dr. Dre's Dr. Dre Presents the Aftermath album, and released an album entitled "The Psycho Realm" from his side project of the same name. Though the focus that year was not on Cypress Hill, the band played Smokin' Grooves with George Clinton and Erykah Badu.
Cypress Hill released IV in 1998 which went gold in the U.S., even though the reviews were somewhat negative,[citation needed] on the backs of hit singles "Tequila Sunrise" and another tribute to smoking cannabis "Dr. Greenthumb." Sen Dog also released the Get Wood sampler as part of SX-10 on the label Flip. In 1999, Cypress Hill helped with the PC crime/very mature video game Kingpin: Life of Crime. Three of their songs from the 1998 IV album were in the game ( "16 Men Till There's No Men Left", "Checkmate" and "Lightning Strikes"). B-Real also did some of the voices of the people in the game. Also in 1999, the band released a greatest-hits album in Spanish, Los grandes éxitos en español. Cypress Hill then fused genres with their two-disc release, Skull & Bones, in 2000. The first disc, "Skull" was comprised of rap tracks while "Bones" explored further the group's forays into rock. The album reached the Top 5 on the Billboard 200 and number 3 in Canada. The first single was "Rock Superstar" for rock radio and "Rap Superstar" for urban radio. The band also released Live at the Fillmore, a concert disc recorded at the Fillmore (in San Fransico) in 2000. Cypress Hill continued their experimentation with rock on the Stoned Raiders album in 2001. However, its sales were a disappointment, as the disc did not even reach the top 50 of the U.S. album charts. In 2001, the group appeared in the film How High.
Cypress Hill recorded "Just Another Victim" for the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) as a theme song for Tazz. At the time, WWE was using original music for almost all of the wrestlers, so this was an unusual step for the company to take, but it remains one of the more memorable songs to emerge from the wrestling organization. The band released Till Death Do Us Part on March 23, 2004. The album saw the band experiment with reggae especially on the lead single "What's Your Number". The track features Tim Armstrong of Rancid on guitar and Rob Aston of The Transplants on backup vocals. It is based on the classic song "Guns of Brixton" on The Clash's London Calling and has proven to be a success on the modern rock charts. However, the album represented a further departure from the signature sound of their first four albums. The album also features appearances by Damian Marley, son of Bob Marley, Prodigy and Twin of Mobb Deep and producer the Alchemist.
In 2004, the song How I Could Just Kill A Man was included in the popular videogame Grand Theft Auto San Andreas created by Rockstar Games, playing on West Coast hip hop radio station Radio Los Santos. In December of 2005 a best of compilation album titled Greatest Hits From the Bong was released including 9 hits from previous albums and 2 new tracks. The group's next album was tentatively scheduled for an early 2007 release. In the summer of 2006, B-Real appeared on Snoop Dogg's single "Vato". Pharrell Williams produced the track, and originally sang the hook, but because of the video idea, B-Real was asked to sing the hook. Sen Dog is now currently touring with the Kottonmouth Kings, Kingspade and Dogboy on the Joint is on Fire Tour
In 2007 Cypress Hill toured with their full line up as a part of the Rock the Bells tour, held by Guerilla Union, and headlined with Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, and a reunited Rage Against the Machine. Other acts included Immortal Technique, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, The Roots, EPMD, Pharoae Monch, Jedi Mind Tricks, Erykah Badu, MF Doom, Sage Francis, Brother Ali, The Coup, Blue Print, Lucky I Am, Living Legends, Felt, Cage, Mr. Lif, Grouch & Eligh, and Hangar 18.
Departure from Sony
Having fulfilled their contractual obligations with Sony Music, Cypress Hill will release an as-yet untitled album through a different record label in 2008.
Recently, it was announced that Cypress Hill will be members of the Kannabis Kartel along with the Kottonmouth Kings and Potluck. Their album will be released on Suburban Noize Records.
STYLE
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Production
One of the band's most striking aspects is B-Real's exaggeratedly high-pitched nasal vocals, which fits and emphasizes the lyrics' concentration on parodied gangster stories.
Sen Dog's lyrics are progressively more violent and tend to involve fewer rhyme schemes compared with B-Real's. In addition, as the style is today, some words are emphasized by adding a background voice to say them, however, Sen Dog's emphases are always more prominent, mostly shouted alongside with the rapping.
The sound and groove of their music, produced by Muggs, is also notable for its influence and stoned aesthetic; with its bass-heavy rhythms and odd sample loops ("Insane in the Brain" is notable for having a horse neigh looped in its chorus), it carries a psychedelic value, which lessened in the later albums.
The band is also known for involving rock instruments in their songs. This has caused the band to sometimes be classified as a rapcore group. In IV, there is Lightning Strikes which doesn't truly use electric guitars, but a synthesized version of it. Skull & Bones has an entire disc using such instruments, labeled Bones. As for their later works, their involvement in rock ended with the album Stoned Raiders (the tracks Trouble (also the first single of the album), Amplified and Catastrophe being the songs).
The band's music is constantly subject to change; while the first album follows a more minimalistic and funky sound, Black Sunday, the successor, has a slightly darker side to it. III (Temples of Boom) and IV are mostly influenced by psychedelic music. The band abandoned that on Skull & Bones and got closer to the modern rap as it is today. Stoned Raiders has a more authentic sound than the rest, and Till Death Do Us Part carries reggae influences.
The band is also known to involve horns in their songs, and often have guitar and horns together in the instrumentals. What's Your Number?, Trouble, Tequila Sunrise, and (Rock) Superstar have become some of the bands most popular songs featuring these elements. Cypress Hill's experimenting in different genres of music even includes reggaeton in their track "Latin Thugs" which features Tego Calderon.
Some fans feel that the band has drifted somewhat from the values of their earlier albums. For example in "Strictly Hip Hop" from Temples of Boom, the band complain about hip hop artists who have an album of hardcore tracks but have one or two pop songs which just so happen to be the singles. Cypress have arguably fallen into this trap with the single "What's You Number?"
The sound contribitions of DJ Muggs seems to be clearly influenced by marijuana consumption. Since one of the effects of a cannabis high is an altered audio sensual perception, the often slow paced and deep bass can be better appreciated. Furthermore, psychedelic sequences underly some parts of certain tracks such as "I Wanna Get High" for example. This is an interesting feature of their music, that had also been used before, especially during the 60's and 70's (e.g. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles).
Lyrics
The lyrics of tracks like "How I Could Just Kill A Man" offer an insight into the cultural expression of social stratification in L.A. at that point in history. Many other songs have cited topics such as police brutality, racial profiling, gang violence and anecdotes about invasion of privacy by police.
Furthermore the celebration of marijuana consumption is what they are often associated with in songs like "I Wanna Get High", "Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk" or "Hits From The Bong", the themes of recreational use of marijuana are prevalent.
Many of their songs also protest the current marijuana laws and voice their opinions on the hypocrisy of drug enforcement institutions.
Their lyrics often reflect the hip hop culture of Los Angeles in their earlier work such as their self-titled album and Black Sunday, which were very influential not only to Latino hip hop of the time but to many other hip hop groups around the world as well.
Throughout their career they have commonly incorporated Spanish into their lyrics as well as slang used by some Latinos in Los Angeles on songs like "Latin Lingo". Their album "Los Grandes Exitos En Espanol" features Spanish translations of many of their hit songs.
Years active 1987 - present.
A to the K
Cypress Hill Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Check this out
I got the best kush ever, man
Aw, man
I've been so out
You got sent from heaven
All right, man, light it up, homes
Okay, check it out, man
I'm the original Dr. Green-thumb, the rest are liars
I'm the one with the prescription to get you higher
I got every type of weed that you might desire
Go ahead, fire it up, maybe you can get inspired
Any kind of flavor you savor, I can do you the favor
Just as long as you share with your neighbor
Some like the Sour D, that's an East Coast way
But on the West Coast we all know Kush is queen
Some of y'all will smoke anything, but me, I'm picky
I throw it out if I don't see that it's green and sticky
No stress, no bush, I'm pushing the Kush
When I harvest, put a K on the bag like the Nike swoosh
All over the world, in case you wonder
I smoked everywhere I went, they call me the weed hunter
But no one does it better like we do in Cali
Just ask one of my patients 'cause they always tell me that the
K-U-S-H keeps us so high
The K-U-S-H keeps us so high
The more I smoke, the higher I get
The better I feel, I can't quit
The more I smoke, the higher I get
The better I feel, I can't quit
Kottonmouth Kings are down with us
Snoop Dogg and Dre are down with us
Cheech and Chong, they're down with us
But the DEA, they can get the nuts
On the Hard Times cover, you might see us
Taking hits from the bong with the Aprons on
With weed so strong, that knockout King Kong
Hit it one good time, your mind's gone
Your eyes get red and your mouth goes dry
Just get me when you want more and I'll supply
Red and Meth said let's get stoned, I said how high
They said high enough to touch God and kiss the sky
That's a tall order, but I think I got what you need
I got the food-for-thought and I'm ready to feed
So, follow my lead, I got the gifts to bring
It's an everyday life for the reefer king
K-U-S-H keeps us so high
The K-U-S-H keeps us so high
The more I smoke, the higher I get
The better I feel, I can't quit
The more I smoke, the higher I get
The better I feel, I can't quit
I got the cream of the crop, my crop means cream
When it's time to bag it up I assemble the team
Like the Yankees, most winning, grand champs of the herb
Nothing gets you like the type of medicine I serve
Lawyers, teachers, actors, street cleaners
No matter what they are, they all come to see the reefer
They stay high 24 like Kiefer
I tell 'em don't hit it too hard, this is a creepa
Woody Harrelson is down with us
Bruce Willis smokes hard, he's down with us
Yeah, Willie Nelson is down with us
Who the fuck you think drives the ganja bus?
Dionne Warwick she's down with us
She got popped at the airport with joints and such
So if anyone asks, she's down with us
And you don't want to enter my weed in the cannabis cup
I'm Green-thumb, I reign supreme, son
A strain better than mine, I've never seen one
The K-U-S-H keeps us so high that you can't concentrate
Dave Chappelle is down with us
Halle Barry, too, but don't tell no one
KRS One is down with us
He's a blunt getting smoked and he can't wake up
K-U-S-H keeps us so high
The K-U-S-H keeps us so high
The more I smoke, the higher I get
The better I feel, I can't quit
The more I smoke, the higher I get
The better I feel, I can't quit
Cypress Hill's "A to the K" is a gangsta rap song that lyrically depicts the rough and dangerous lifestyle of gang members. The opening lines of the song suggest that the subject matter is something that is ubiquitous in the media, and refers to the AK-47 assault rifle. The lyrics go on to portray the life of a gang member who spends his life trying to get rich through various illegal means, including drug dealing and robbery. This person is depicted as someone who is always ready to use his weapon to get what he wants and protect his territory.
The lyrics suggest that the gang member has a group of like-minded friends, and together they form a tight circle. The chorus of the song repeats the phrase "A to the motherfucking K homeboy", referring to the AK-47 assault rifle being the weapon of choice for gang members. The lyrics also refer to the violent confrontations that are common in the world of gangs, where loyalty and respect are earned through bloodshed.
The song's title suggests that the AK-47 assault rifle is a powerful weapon and a symbol of power in gang culture. The lyrics explain how the gun is used to instill fear in others, to protect what is one's own, and to settle disputes. Cypress Hill is known for creating music that depicts the struggles of life in the inner city, and "A to the K" is no exception.
Line by Line Meaning
Look bib you it heard on the radio
You may have heard about my actions on the radio
You seen it on the TV show, A to the K
You may have seen it on TV, which is A to the K
A to the motherfucking Z
From A to Z, I am in control
One, life has begun for the roughneck
For a tough guy like me, life starts now
Kid who was gonna put niggaz in check
I am going to show everyone who's boss
Eighteen G's, for the green
I've got $18,000 for the deal
Obscene and it's for the time being
It's dirty money for now
I'm pickin' nine, hell I'm out to get mine
I am choosing my weapon and I am taking what's mine
And pick two homies, three combine
I am bringing two friends to help me
Next thing you know, jump in the six fo'
We get in the car and drive away
Get out, cock the hammer, then kick down the door
We approach our target and prepare to break in
Couple niggaz from the east side, headed eastbound
Two guys from the east side are driving towards us
Lookin' for a pound to haul around town
They are looking to score some drugs
Here comes a clown, I gotta hold my ground
One of them tries to act tough, but I stay strong
Hear the slug comin' when it come you fall down
When the gun goes off, they hit the ground
Buck down, dead sound that's what you found
Their fate is sealed, they are dead and gone
That's what you get when you fuck with the brown
They messed with the wrong people
Dog, Sen is comin' to the mound
My friend Sen is coming to join us
La Vida from Cypress, rips your compound
The Cypress crew destroys their hideout
Shit gets deep, eight niggaz on the ground
Things escalate quickly and eight guys are killed
What do you know? what go around come around
Karma catches up with them
Six for the pig and his punk hound
We take out the cops and their dogs
Hail to the King pig or you get crowned
We are the new rulers of this area
Or better yet I'll roll you up like a fat J
If you don't comply, you'll be taken out as well
Give me that weed fool and all your loot too
We take their drugs and money
I got a nigga in the back and the blunt for your crew
We have extra muscle and drugs for our crew
Loaded and cocked for any hard rock
We are always prepared for violence
If you're takin' my weed, I'm takin' over your spot
If you try to steal from us, we take over your territory
Keep your face down as I take your pound
Stay quiet as we take your stash
Don't let me see nobody get up, just hug the ground
No one should move until we leave
Stay still and don't make a sound
Stay quiet and don't move
As I get out the door headed eastbound
We leave and head towards the east
But why did the fool try to act brave?
Why did he try to stand up to us?
(Act brave)
Clip from the nine equals six to the grave
Getting shot with a gun is a one-way ticket to the grave
It's gonna be on, it's gonna be on
It's about to get serious
(It's gonna be on, goin' on)
Give me that weed fool and all your loot too
We'll take everything you have
I got a nigga in the back and the blunt for your crew
We are not alone and we have drugs too
Loaded and cocked for any hard rock
We are always ready for a fight
If you're takin' my weed, I'm takin' over your spot
Stealing from us means we will take over
Keep your face down as I take your pound
Stay low while I take your drugs
Don't let me see nobody get up, just hug the ground
Remain still and don't make a sound
Stay still and don't make a sound
Stay quiet and don't move
As I get out the door headed eastbound
We leave and head east
Lyrics © BMG Rights Management, CONCORD MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC
Written by: Jack Gonzalez, Louise Freese, Demerick Shelton Ferm
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
@esburnside
As a nerdy nervous white boy, I've locked doors and put this down in certain "areas"
@devious187
Never forget, outside of the weed songs Cypress is gangsta as fuck
@megustarc
Now you’ll remember, current flows in a diode from the anode to the cathode. a to the k.
@StrangeAttractor
saw them live at Osheaga Montreal 2016, that set went OFF, most energy of the whole weekend. Legends.
@rebeccabowron1055
This song has always been my favorite I would start singing it when it would start playing.
@henrirennet9306
A child is born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind...
@justloveeachother4884
Legendary.
@carstentonnies7380
Man this was the sickest rap album of 90's imo along side Biggies albums but this just hits differently. I was 18 when this came out in 93, i was in YOI, which i suppose is like Juvvie hall in U.S. i used to blast this out on my 3D Super Woofer in my cell while sinkin Buckets, gettin HIGH AS FUCK, Glen parva soldiers of the 1990's stand the fuck up!!! You know who you are!!! RESPECT
@eco_man_8652
Still One Of The Best ...
@asher666
Respect 🙌