They say life imitates art – though it doesn’t usually take three decades to get around to it. But things sometimes move slow in the world of perma-stoned Los Angeleno hip-hop phenomenon Cypress Hill. Almost 30 years ago, they starred in The Simpsons’ episode “Homerpalooza”, which saw Homer hop aboard Hullabalooza, a fictitious stand-in of alternative rock festival Lollapalooza, befriending Gen X faves The Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth and, yes, Cypress Hill. Mid-episode, a baffled London Symphony Orchestra arrives, and a similarly befuddled tour manager must figure out who hired them, “possibly while high… Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction…”
Meanwhile, the Simpsons-ised version of the Hill’s DJ/producer, Lawrence “Muggs” Muggerud, asks the orchestra, “Do you know ‘Insane in the Brain?’” The conductor replies: “We mostly know classical… but we could give it a shot!”
Cue: the animated LSO translating that low-slung rap classic into something symphonic, a culture-clash that charms even Marge Simpson (“Now this, I like”). And the blue-haired matriarch wasn’t alone. “After it aired, Muggs said, ‘Hey, we should do that’, so we tried to make it happen,” remembers Louis “B-Real” Freese, backstage at Portland, Maine’s State Theatre, where the current Cypress Hill tour alights tonight.
However, the stars wouldn’t begin to align until the group tweeted the clip in 2017, prompting the LSO to reply: “We mostly play classical… but we’ll give it a shot!” Seven years of negotiations and orchestrations later, Cypress Hill finally walked onstage at the Royal Albert Hall in July 2024, Muggs’ dark, psychedelic productions reconfigured for strings, woodwind and brass. The triumphant performance is about to be released on vinyl.
“It sounded so beautiful,” says Senen “Sen Dog” Reyes, B-Real’s cousin and rhyme-partner. “I kept turning round to all the violins and horns, just to see how this music was being made.”
“If you’d told us when we started out something like this could happen, we’d have laughed at you,” says B-Real.
“The odds were definitely against us,” nods Sen Dog. “But sometimes the things people least expect to succeed end up succeeding.”
The Cypress Hill story begins in the late Eighties, in Los Angeles neighbourhood South Gate, then a battleground for the Bloods and Crips gangs. B-Real and Sen Dog were Bloods, “which meant we perpetually lived with our heads on a swivel,” says B-Real. “It was a f***ing struggle, it was hard. Any of us that lived that life was just learning how to survive.”
Those lessons were put to the test in 1987, when a verbal confrontation with some Crips erupted in gunfire. One bullet ricocheted off a wall behind the 17-year-old B-Real and through his lung. He recovered and soon returned to the streets, “trying to be Supergangster”, but something within him had changed. Driving around town with Sen Dog, rapping along to their Public Enemy cassettes, he felt long-dormant creative impulses from childhood reawaken.
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“That gangbanging life, there’s only a few outcomes,” he says. “You either get caught in a shootout and die or end up paralysed, or you end up in jail your whole life. Or you get lucky and you get out of it. I don’t have any good memories of those days, except the day we got our record deal. That was the beginning of our escape from all that.”
Determined to swap gang-banging for hip-hop, the duo hooked up with New York-born producer/DJ Muggs, who recommended they knuckle down in his studio and develop their USP. “Muggs was very creative,” says B-Real. “When you don’t have a lot, you have to figure out how to make it happen.”
They’d spend the next couple of years in search of their sound, discovering it with the track “Real Estate”, which showcased Muggs’s idiosyncratic mastery of funk and jazz samples, and the MCs’ new signature delivery, Sen Dog’s gruff tones keenly accenting B-Real’s wickedly playful, nasal flow. “I was just trying something different, to cut through Muggs’s tracks,” says B-Real. But this needling, mischievous new delivery was an absolute game-changer, a key element of Cypress Hill’s attack.
Signing to Ruffhouse Records – later home to the Fugees and Nas – their eponymous 1991 debut album didn’t shift units until New York radio DJs flipped the single “The Phuncky Feel One” in favour of its gritty B-side, “How I Could Just Kill a Man”. Drawing on B-Real’s pre-rap lifestyle, the track built their hardcore rep at the dawn of the gangsta-rap era and kept Cypress Hill hovering just outside the US Billboard Top 30, ultimately selling more than two million copies.
However, the group didn’t truly become a generation-defining phenom until they jumped aboard Lollapalooza in 1992. Perry Farrell’s touring festival skewed heavily toward the then-ascendent alt-rock scene, but Cypress Hill won a whole new fanbase among the kids who’d come to see Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. “I’d look out into the crowd and these long-haired kids were wearing NWA and Public Enemy T-shirts,” says Sen Dog. “Just because they were rock kids doesn’t mean they don’t listen to hip-hop.”
“Our songs connect with people, whether you live in the suburbs or in the ghetto – everybody has issues,” nods B-Real. “We had a punk-rock mentality – a ‘don’t-give-a-f***’ mentality at a time when people wanted to say, ‘I don’t give a f***, either!’ We represented those people. And it was surreal, seeing those audiences come to us, but we were never afraid of a challenge.”
“Those rock audiences helped grow hip-hop into one of the biggest genres,” adds Sen Dog. “They dug us because we’d grown up listening to rock and metal, too. Plus, there was the cannabis thing.”
Ah, yes, the cannabis thing. Few artists are as synonymous with the sweet leaf as Cypress Hill. Black Sunday, the 1993 follow-up that cemented the trio as Generation X’s favourite rap crossovers, opened with B-Real crooning “I want to get hi-i-i-i-i-igh” in his trademark nasal singsong, and fielded weed anthems like “Hits from the Bong” and “Legalize It”.
“Muggs was like, ‘We could be the hip-hop Cheech & Chong!’,” remembers B-Real.
“I don’t think there was any bigger stoners than the two of us,” grins Sen Dog. The group became vocal advocates for legalisation. “We just felt the government hadn’t done their homework: no way was cannabis some hardcore narcotic,” he adds. “We wanted to remove the stigma around marijuana, and help the world enjoy it for what it is – a plant that makes you feel good for 15 minutes after you smoke it.”
Their mission didn’t make life easy for Cypress Hill. “Customs was always a nightmare,” says Sen Dog, “digging through all our bags, agents searching every corner of the tour bus at border crossings. But we’re smart – we never carried anything. Anyways, everywhere we went, people brought us cannabis as gifts, so it wasn’t like we ever had to worry about going without.”
The group signalled their commitment to the cause by smoking spliffs onstage every night, risking arrest across a pre-decriminalisation America, though they never actually got their collars felt. “If the cops were fans, they just let us get away with it,” says B-Real, “and if they’d been given strict instructions to arrest us if we did spark up, they’d at least warn us. Most law enforcement didn’t care, or didn’t think we had the audacity to be smoking onstage for real.”
Weed became a key element of the group’s identity, but B-Real stresses, “we made plenty of tracks when we weren’t high. Cannabis wasn’t the key to my creativity, like ‘This is my cape. I put this on, and I’m a f***ing superhero’. I didn’t want to get in a position where I would feel creatively blocked if I didn’t have anything to smoke.” He pauses and chuckles softly. “Which is never, but… it’s very much a part of my life, but it’s not part of the creative thing.”
Perfecting their salted-caramel magic brownie of hardcore storytelling, drug-savvy wit and multi-layered, psychedelicised beats, Black Sunday sold almost five million copies worldwide. It was Cypress Hill’s moment of triumph. But then Sen Dog started to fall apart. “I had a problem staying on tour,” he nods. “A couple of weeks in, I just wanted to be home. A lot of the time, I wasn’t as professional as I needed to be.”
Buckling under the pressure of his newfound stardom, Sen Dog started going awol on tour and quit the group abruptly after 1995’s Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom. “My persona had become this global thing,” he says, “and that was a hard thing for a guy like me, from the neighbourhood, to adjust to, that this was who I was now. I felt like I was hurting the group, that I wasn’t an asset. The other guys tried to get me help, but I was too close-minded.” Finally, Sen Dog realised “I needed to refocus myself. I needed to feel comfortable wherever in the world I was at. It was hard – I felt wrong because I didn’t feel the same way everybody else did. And in the end, I finally went to see a therapist, to try and understand all this. They got me on the right track.”
Fully therapised and having established side-project SX-10 as an outlet for his metal impulses (“heavy riffs get my lyrical brain going more than hip-hop tracks,” he says), Sen Dog rejoined in 1998 and Cypress Hill cruised onwards. They went full rap-rock with 2000’s Skull & Bones, took a detour through reggae for 2004’s Till Death Do Us Part; Muggs became producer-at-large in 2005, but returned for 2018’s Elephants On Acid, a monstrous slab of acid-rap that scored the group their best reviews in over two decades. They seem unstoppable – indeed, at the Royal Albert Hall, B-Real prefaced their orchestral recut of primal banger “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That” with the promise: “We ain’t never goin’ out”.
Sen Dog isn’t so sure, however. I ask if he intends to follow the example of his fellow stoner, country legend Willie Nelson, who’s still toking and touring into his nineties, but the rapper has his eyes trained on his pipe and slippers. “I don’t want to get to that age and still be doing it,” he sighs. “The guys I looked up to – Ice-T, Public Enemy – they’re in their sixties and still pushing hard. But it’s a young man’s game. If you continue to look cool and your voice hasn’t changed drastically, it’s worth doing the older statesmen thing, sure, if you can. But I could see myself retiring, no question.”
“My favourite part of touring is coming back home to my family at the end of it,” nods B-Real, but he’s still more at home on the road than his brother-in-rolling-papers. “Everybody that says they’re gonna retire never ends up retiring. You’d end up missing the creative aspect. And once you’ve created something, you’ll wanna take it out there, to the people. So it’s hard to say I’ll ever give it up. I’m still healthy enough to do this, thank God, and I still love to do it, and I’m gonna keep on doing it as long as it’s still fun and I can still bring something to the table. I got no clue when this train is gonna stop. Plus, we just invented this new symphonic hip-hop thing, and it sounds enormous. Nobody thought it would work, but hip-hop can connect to anything because it’s made from everything. Who knows where we’ll take it next?”
Cypress Hill and the London Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Black Sunday: Live at the Royal Albert Hall’ is out now
