B-Real on The Reason for Cypress Hill's Distinct Sound

How many times did a dude come up to you and went insane in the membrane? Oh man. Is it countable? Almost everywhere we go if I catch eye contact. And sometimes if I don't catch eye contact they'll wait for me to walk by and then they'll sing it. Or they'll call me Cyprus. Yo Cyprus! That's been my name in New York for a long time. Yo Cyprus! Because sometimes they don't know all of our names but they know what group we're in so they won't say, hey be real or Dr. Greed, yo Cyprus! That's kind of awesome though. I got a lot of names. Man I remember when you guys first came out I was like this is a totally new kind of sound. You guys had a totally new kind of sound. I remember I found out about it like I wasn't even into weed back then. I was like why is this weed symbol everywhere? What are these guys doing? These rappers with weed? What the hell is happening over there? But I remember listening to it and I'm like you guys had a completely different kind of sound. Yeah you know the thing was that Muggs was from New York. It was from Flushing. So a lot of his influence was from New York. His favorite production was like the Bomb Squad which were producing Public Enemy and all their shit. They had some of the most complex production at the time with bridges and breaks and these crazy sounds and stuff like that. So that's what Muggs got down with now. When he moved out here and we start hanging out he's introducing us to New York music hip hop music that we heard. We heard some of it via the radio on KDAY, an AM station that was playing a lot of hip hop in the mix and some of it mixed with R&B and Soul throughout the day. This is where we got our first introduction to hip hop but Muggs being from New York whenever he'd come back with new records and he'd introduce us to stuff like that. When it came time to working on an album he had all that influence and being from New York and absorbing all that culture it sounded sort of like New York style production mixed with a little bit of LA influence especially with what Senn and I were kicking in terms of vocals because we were using a combination of LA and New York slang merged as one. So that's why a lot of people were confused like where are these guys from? You asked people in New York they thought we were from East New York and they were from Cypress Hills, New York and people that were from LA they were like well wait a minute they kind of sound West Coastish I think they're from out here but they didn't really know until we came out and said yeah we're from LA. Our boy's from New York and we're sort of a bridge between LA and New York with the sound so yeah it was always a New York influence sound because I mean that's where he was from but I think that that's what added to us being different because most things that were coming out of Los Angeles in that time or Southern California sounded like gangster rap, sounded like a version of NWA or Compton's Most Wanted or something like that and we wanted to be different we didn't want to be in that lane you know we felt that was their lane we need to make our own so we didn't want to sound like anything else that was in Cali. We didn't get signed by a California label like whether it was Sony or any of it we got turned down here because we didn't sound like we were from California. Isn't that funny? Yeah. How short-sighted people are. And it turned out that like our what we call him Uncle Joe, Joe the Butcher who was based out of Philly he had you know his label with Rough House with Chris Swartz he had worked with Muggs on an album that when Muggs was in a group called 783 he knew Muggs' potential he liked Muggs he saw that you know he was evolving as a producer he heard about our thing and he wanted to take a chance on us where we were getting turned down from every goddamn label in LA. Isn't that funny? They just didn't understand us. You guys are talking about weed? How does this make sense? Have you got any other songs? We're like no we're cool and yeah. I want to get high. We're sitting there eating lunch listening to a song about getting high. They're like what the fuck is this? Or no we didn't even have that song yet. It was what we were talking about it was the Get High song on there was Light Another and something else but Light Another was the main one and we're talking about it that's one of the demos that played and you know that you could see the execs just scratching their head like what do we do with this? Isn't it funny that everybody wants everything to be cookie cutter? The idea that rap didn't even exist a few decades prior right it wasn't even a common thing and now all of a sudden it's huge and they can't see that maybe there's another branch of this. It's funny that they wouldn't recognize how good it is. That's what's weird. What it is is they don't want to take a chance on trying to develop it because if it fails it's on their back. So they want something that's easy that oh like oh this sounds like this we can market it in this lane. This is already a successful template let's use this. Oh they're not using that shit we can't do nothing with it. So you know like it's the development and fortunately you know when we got assigned to Rough House Columbia we had the power of Columbia backing us up because they sort of believed in what we were doing. Well they not sort of believed they believed in what we were doing and got behind it and allowed us to be as creative as we wanted to be and pushed us. And you know along with having Joe and Chris on our side creatively like pushing our line and saying hey with these guys are doing great we don't want to intervene and you know change anything they're doing just let them fucking go. I mean that was everything because you know most of the time they want an easy layup. So if let's just say you know there's a group over here that's doing well hey how come why don't we make a record like this over here. It's like well why don't you go sign that shit over there. This is not who we are. So you know they want you to make it easy but realistically it's nothing good is ever easy you got to work toward it and develop it. Basically you know we got on the team that believed in that and man it was the biggest fuck you to all those that turned us down and didn't get what we were doing. They got it now y'all got it now right. You got it now.