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
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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.
Light it Up
Cypress Hill Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Direct with the biggest fattest joint
Coming in with indo flavors
From Buddha, comin atcha like this in '95
It's Friday morning, where the weed at
Let me dip into my pocket for my fat weed sack
Cause I wanna get high like a plane in the sky
Where the fuck are my Zig Zags and my lighter
so I can roll it and set it on fire
Damn, I wish I had scissors cause the shit is so sticky
that it's getting on my fuckin' fingers
But it's smokeable, double tokable,
I got the one-hitter and the Bombay shit that?s tokable
I wanna do a joint venture
Let me make sure there ain't no lump in the goddamn center
The impregnated-looking joint, fuck it, I can smoke it and still get faded
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
East Coast hittin' that blunt West Coast hittin' that honey-dipped marijuana joint
And I want another hit
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, I wanna stimulate my mind so I toke it up
Can I get a hit, can I get a woooo
Gimme that fat bag of weed and the broom
So I can get faded, elevated, smoked the joint down with my bro's and I ate it
I stand true to the yesca (mota) as I keep runnin' from the chota
Gimme that weed fool and ya Zig Zags puto, don't be holdin' out on the big bag
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
The song "Light It Up" by Cypress Hill is a celebration of marijuana and its effects. The verses describe the feeling of smoking a joint and the desire to get high. The first verse starts with "Ole Buddah, coming atcha life," which suggests that the singer is addressing the weed itself as a person. The singer talks about the "biggest fattest joint" filled with "indo flavors" that he wants to smoke to get high. The chorus emphasizes the ritual of rolling and smoking a joint, encouraging the listener to "roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale."
The second verse continues the celebration of marijuana and the desire to get high. The singer talks about the need to find his Zig Zags papers and lighter to roll and light the joint. He also explains that the weed is so sticky that it's getting all over his fingers, but that he still wants to smoke it. The verse also alludes to the fact that the singer might be sharing the joint with friends, as he mentions wanting to make sure there is no "lump in the goddamn center" of the joint. The chorus repeats, emphasizing the communal nature of smoking.
The third verse shifts the focus to the different regions of the United States and their preferred way of smoking marijuana. The singer mentions the East Coast liking blunts while the West Coast prefers "honey-dipped marijuana joint." The verse also highlights the desire to keep smoking and getting high, asking for another hit and wanting to "stimulate my mind." It concludes with a call for weed and papers, indicating that the singer wants to keep smoking with his friends. The chorus repeats again, bringing the song full circle in its celebration of smoking marijuana.
Line by Line Meaning
Ole Buddah, coming atcha life
I am Cypress Hill, and my love for weed is embodied in the form of Buddha, which I am presenting to you now
Direct with the biggest fattest joint
I am presenting you with the biggest, fattest joint straight from Buddha himself
Coming in with indo flavors
This joint is a blend of the best indo flavors out there
From Buddha, comin atcha like this in '95
Buddha and I have come to give you the best weed experience of 1995
It's Friday morning, where the weed at
It's Friday morning, and I need some weed ASAP
Let me dip into my pocket for my fat weed sack
I'll reach into my pocket and retrieve my stash of weed
Cause I wanna get high like a plane in the sky
I want to get really high, higher than a plane flying in the sky
With the indo cloud in my brain
I want the high to be so strong that my brain feels like it's covered in an indo cloud
Where the fuck are my Zig Zags and my lighter
I can't find my rolling paper or my lighter
so I can roll it and set it on fire
I need the rolling paper and lighter to roll and light the joint
Damn, I wish I had scissors cause the shit is so sticky
The weed is so sticky, I wish I had scissors to cut it
that it's getting on my fuckin' fingers
The stickiness of the weed is getting all over my fingers as I try to roll it
But it's smokeable, double tokable,
Despite its stickiness, the weed is still easily smokeable and can be toked twice
I got the one-hitter and the Bombay shit that?s tokable
I have a one-hitter and some Bombay weed that are easy to smoke
I wanna do a joint venture
I want to smoke this joint with someone else
Let me make sure there ain't no lump in the goddamn center
Before I smoke the joint, I want to make sure there aren't any lumps in the middle
The impregnated-looking joint, fuck it, I can smoke it and still get faded
Even though the joint looks a little strange, I'll still smoke it and get high
Gimme that fat bag of weed and the broom
Give me that big bag of weed and the broomstick to help me smoke it faster
So I can get faded, elevated, smoked the joint down with my bro's and I ate it
I want to smoke until I'm really high, and then smoke some more with my friends and eat some food
I stand true to the yesca (mota) as I keep runnin' from the chota
I remain committed to my love for weed, even as I try to avoid the police
Gimme that weed fool and ya Zig Zags puto, don't be holdin' out on the big bag
Give me that weed and rolling papers, don't be stingy with the big bag
Roll it up, light it up, smoke it up, inhale exhale
Roll the joint, light it, smoke it, then inhale and exhale the smoke
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
I am a lover of funk and I am proud of it
East Coast hittin' that blunt West Coast hittin' that honey-dipped marijuana joint
The East Coast likes blunts while the West Coast prefers marijuana joints dipped in honey
And I want another hit
I want to smoke some more
I wanna stimulate my mind so I toke it up
I want to get high to stimulate my mind
Can I get a hit, can I get a woooo
Can I have a hit and hear you cheer with me
(I'm the freaka, the one who freaks the funk)
Again, I am a proud lover of funk music
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Peermusic Publishing, THE BICYCLE MUSIC COMPANY
Written by: Lamont Dozier, Demerick Shelton Ferm, Louis Freese, Brian Holland, Edward J. Holland, Peter Philip, Senen Reyes
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
Radio Doble HH Argentina
yeaaaaa ...!!! muy bueno
giovanni lainez
this shit actually has a flow not like the other shit that people listen to
The Simple Kind
Underrated song of Cypress Hill
Andres Ortiz
Love this song
Patricio Sotomayor
CYPRESS HILL FOR EVER!!! TRUE HIP-HOP !!! I WAS THERE!!! THAT SHIT WAS HOT!!! I MA LIGHT IT UP!!!
R S
Cypress doesn't only spit, he's also a magician. Check him at 0:25 where he magically let's his handkerchief disappear.
Paul
Lol that's true heheh
Paul
I'm 39 and I've played heavy metal lead guitar most of my life. Cypress Hill is the shit!!!
ShanTheMan
Horns up brother
D D
Keepin true rap alive!