Today in Hip-Hop — August 13: Cypress Hill’s Self-Titled Debut Turns 35

Cypress Hill’s Debut Turns 35 (August 13, 1991)

Thirty-five years ago today — August 13, 1991 — Ruffhouse/Columbia dropped Cypress Hill, the self-titled debut from the South Gate trio of B-Real, Sen Dog, and DJ Muggs. It peaked at #31 on the Billboard 200, went Gold inside six months, and eventually cleared two million copies for a Double Platinum plaque. It also did something no LA rap album had done before: put two Latino MCs — Sen Dog is Cuban-born, B-Real is Cuban and Mexican — at the front of a mainstream hip-hop record and made the industry treat it like the event it was.

Why This Album Still Matters

The engine here is DJ Muggs. Every producer whose sound could later be described as “dusty” owes something to what he did on this record — chopped funk loops, warped horn stabs, spring-reverb weirdness stacked on breakbeats so cavernous they sound like they were tracked inside a graveyard chapel. The lead single, “How I Could Just Kill A Man” b/w “The Phuncky Feel One,” pulls its bones from Lowell Fulsom’s 1966 cut “Tramp” — same source Salt-N-Pepa flipped four years earlier on “Shake Your Thang.” Muggs turned it into something haunted.

The “How I Could Just Kill A Man” video carries a receipt most people forget: cameos from Q-Tip and Ice Cube. That’s before the Cypress Hill / Ice Cube beef that boiled over in 1995 over an alleged stolen “Throw Your Set In The Air” hook — Cube’s own guest verse got pulled off a Cypress record and the two crews traded diss cuts for months. In 1991, though, they were on the same side of the frame.

Ruffhouse was the same Philly imprint that would go on to break Kris Kross the following year and The Fugees three years after that. Their instinct on this record — let Muggs cook, put the group in gothic-graveyard iconography, don’t sand off B-Real’s nasal helium delivery — set the visual and sonic template Cypress rode into Lollapalooza ’92, where they arguably did more to bring rap to the alt-rock crowd than any single hip-hop act of the decade. That template also outlived the album: Muggs went on to build the Soul Assassins production collective, exec-produce GZA’s Grandmasters, and cook boards for everyone from House of Pain to Roc Marciano thirty years later.

The Cypress Hill Piece in the Catalog

We made a Cypress Hill Hoodie and a matching Cypress Hill T-Shirt that lean into the smoke-in-the-graveyard aesthetic the group has been running since day one. Anniversary energy — heavyweight fleece, aged-print treatment, no corny Photoshop swagger.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

• 2010 — Mac Miller drops K.I.D.S. The mixtape (Kickin’ Incredibly Dope S**t) that broke Mac out of the Pittsburgh underground, hit #62 on the Billboard 200 as a free download, and set up Blue Slide Park‘s indie-#1 debut the following year. Sixteen years today.
• 2002 — Luniz release Silver & Black. Yukmouth and Numskull’s third LP, with Fat Joe, Devin the Dude, and Treach on the guest list. Peaked at #53 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Twenty-four years today.
• 1993 — Detroit rapper Dex Osama is born. Best known for “Death On Me” and “Clean Up Man” before his death in 2015. He’d have been 33 today.
• Yesterday we ran it back for Del the Funky Homosapien’s 54th birthday — another West Coast pillar whose catalog runs from Hieroglyphics deep-cuts to Deltron 3030. Two straight days of Cali rap history, no coincidence.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones