Blindspotting: Cypress Hill, "Black Sunday"

(Note: Jefitoblog is probably still in maintenance mode for the next little while as I cope with significant life upheaval, but I'm hoping to claw my way back to some semblance of normal publishing activity this week. Your patience and continued patronage is appreciated.)

The Legacy: The early '90s ascendancy of West Coast hip-hop set the perfect cannabis-coated stage for Cypress Hill, an L.A.-bred trio whose flannel-draped aesthetic and weed-friendly lyrics tapped into the zeitgeist with the combined might of B-Real and Sen Dog's adenoidal vocals and DJ Muggs' murky production. Their first LP, 1991's Cypress Hill, sold well, but it was really 1993's Black Sunday that put them over the top, peaking at No. 1 and selling more than four million copies while sending leadoff single "Insane in the Brain" into the pop Top 20.

The bloom wore off fairly quickly for Cypress Hill, at least in terms of sales — they spent the rest of the '90s going reliably gold and/or platinum, but receding from the mainstream all the while. Still, what they did with their first couple of records stands as a big part of the template for the West Coast hip-hop of their era, and arguably beyond — and they also deserve a lot of credit for soldiering on through changing trends and lineup shifts, releasing new music on a semi-regular basis while many (if not most) of their peers have fallen by one wayside or another.

First Impressions: Listening to Black Sunday for the first time has been an entertaining reminder of how profoundly paradigms can shift in terms of the mainstream perception of pop culture. I say this because when Cypress Hill broke through, they seemed to carry an air of genuine menace, but it was every bit as performative as the then-terrifying darkness that suburban parents once imagined shrouding Alice Cooper or Mötley Crüe. "How I Could Just Kill a Man" sounded like autobiography in the moment; in retrospect, it feels no more threatening than "Ride Like the Wind" or "Wanted Dead or Alive."

Of course, there's a lot of racism behind those first impressions where hip-hop acts are concerned, but my broader point remains: With the benefit of a few decades' hindsight (and attendant cultural shifts), music that once made people clutch their purses often ends up sounding like a regular ol' party. Such is the case with Black Sunday. If I'm being honest — and I always strive for honesty in this space — the bits I heard in 1993 struck me as more of the same from what was then hip-hop's dominant strain, which is to say it sounded like a lot of pot-fueled braggadocio put forth by some dudes you wouldn't want to come across in a dark parking lot. That was, to put it mildly, not what I wanted to hear in 1993; in 2025, it sounds like something I would absolutely use as the starting point for a streaming barbecue playlist.

Apart from all that, as a listening experience, Black Sunday holds together impressively well. I'm obviously not a Cypress scholar, but based on these tracks, I'm a Muggs fan — he did a tremendous job of infusing the songs with a weed-scented haze while keeping things tight. He was also nominally creative with his samples, relying on staples like Sly Stone as well as more left-field choices like Harry Nilsson and the Youngbloods, and all of it meshes perfectly with everything B-Real and Sen Dog are doing on the mic.

In retrospect, it's probably inevitable that the group's trajectory would be impacted by stuff like Muggs and Sen Dog taking breaks to explore other artistic avenues, but it's still tempting to imagine an alternate timeline in which the members of Cypress Hill built on their early momentum and released a few more multi-platinum classics. Although I am not a churchgoing man, I now count myself among those who wholeheartedly observe Black Sunday.

Favorite Song: Aside from "Interlude" and "Legalize It," there isn't anything I'd cut from that track listing, so it's difficult for me to settle on a so-called "favorite." That being said, whenever I've stepped away from my computer while working on this post, I've found myself humming "When the Shit Goes Down," so I guess that's the default pick.