When Muggs developed his production style and dropped it on the world back in 91' he introduced one of the first real evocative hip-hop production styles, one of the first to really take you away into a musical world all it's own. It was a delicious fun and dope style that people still like today. So is it really any surprise that Muggs made Cypress Hill into something of a vehicle for beatscapes? Not to me anyway. While the debut still had a rhyme focus with still somewhat spare beats, all that gets changed here. The production fills everything here, oozing through every speaker and all over and around the vocals. Much less spare music, much more filled out creepy beats. At this point I just look at B Real and Sen Dog as two more instruments in Mugg's arsenal. The point isn't them, not their lyrics, just their deliveries and how they sink in and out of the beats. B Real in particular is a great instrument, that voice is so damned weird, he's like a latin martian or something, and for such alien weed music he might as well have been born to rap over Muggs production. Could you picture him rapping over anything else? It might be funny to hear, but not dope. Cypress Hill has kind of gone down as a singles act like Naughty By Nature or something, but what really best describes them is a producers act. One dude behind the boards pulling the strings and making the pieces fit. And maybe some rap hipsters, especially the ones with giant boners for mic technique being the most important, see this as betrayal of the genre....well bull****. Hip Hop Music includes rapping, no one ever said it had to be in center stage.
By: Zephos