This week, Cypress Hill frontman B-Real stopped by the KROQ studios in Los Angeles to co-host the '90s At Noon with Nicole Alvarez -- getting into discussions about music, weed, and Cypress Hill's upcoming 'Haunted Hill' show at the Fonda Theatre on October 30.
LISTEN NOW: Cypress Hill's B-Real co-hosts '90s At Noon' with Nicole Alvarez
B-Real's visit was truly an honor for KROQ host Nicole Alvarez, whose favorites growing up just happened to be Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A., 2 Live Crew, and of course, Cypress Hill.
Kicking off the ‘90s At Noon’ with Cypress Hill’s classic “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” B-Real provided some inside baseball explaining the track was comprised from "three different songs that I had written, and when Muggs made the beat, he was like, ‘Hey, take a piece of the song that you wrote for this thing. Take this piece and this other piece and this is how we're going to craft the song.’ So, it was like three different songs made in one.”
“I didn't know how it was gonna work, but once we started recording it, I totally heard what he was saying, because I wrote three specific styles on these three different songs and he thought making those three different styles one on this one song would be it,” he adds. “That's the genius of his production style -- he could hear something like that ahead of time and say, ‘Hey, I know that this song is this and all that, but let's sacrifice this because this one song is going to be great in comparison to the three.”
B-Real continues, “The other thing was that we ran that video in New York, so a lot of people initially thought we were from New York because not too many L.A. Hip-Hop groups were filming videos in New York at that time. That was the other thing it created, you know, like the ‘Where are they from?’ type of vibe.”
“We still have a lot of fun playing that song,” says B-Real. “A lot of artists get tired of playing some of their old songs or whatever. We don't, we're totally in appreciation of what those songs did for us and we're fans of our music too. When we see people -- it still has that impact, that crazy energy from day one to now -- how could you get tired of seeing that? And how could you get tired of feeling that? I love doing these songs. Yeah, we'd like to do newer songs and stuff like that as artists but when it's a song that impacted someone and it means so much to ‘em, you cannot move away from that.”
Looking back on their 2022 documentary, Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain, where in the Q&A portion they say they felt that the group was on a “path to nowhere,” B-Real believes several things could have happened had Cypress Hill’s success faded.
“All trouble,” he admits,” because I was a gangbanger for a while before we start making the music. Music was the hobby and passion for Sen Dog, DJ Muggs, Mellow Man Ace, T-Funk from the Funkdoobiest, and myself who we all sort of grew up together as young men, and this was our hobby. We loved Hip-Hop, we loved the the rapping aspect of it because we started with the B-boy stuff and popping but we graduated over into emcee and whatnot. But for a while, I fell off and I started hanging out with my other friends and we were up to no good, truthfully. I still have some of those friends, but they grew up and they're not on that path anymore neither.“
“It happens,” B-Real adds. “There is a way out for these youngsters who think this is the only life that they could have. You know, you tell yourself that. But that is not a truth. You could tell yourself something else and manifest something different. I was fortunate enough to have this hobby that was still a passion, and three great friends who saw where I was going, which was nowhere. They could have been in prison, could have been in a wheelchair, or in the grave. Those are the three paths that are always available to you as a gang member. I was fortunate enough to have a different path. God blessed me with the talent and these guys… they loved me enough to come get me for what they saw I had at the time and say, ‘Yeah.’ They saw me, and I appreciate that. No matter what has happened between any of us in our personal lives over the course of the years, always love them like my brothers, because they didn't have to take that chance.”
Cypress Hill will take the stage this Wednesday, October 30 at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles along with the homies Funkdoobiest, The Alkaholiks, and Coyote. Tickets are available at CypressHill.com.