[Synopsizer – A Record Review of Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom]

Once again, the powers of the herb open up the mind;

Seek deep inside, Tell me what you find

I have a hard time deciding which was a better year for rap, 1995 or 1996. The latter bore some god damn poignant hymnals – both All Eyez on Me and Makaveli, along with the straight up assault in the trifecta of Reasonable Doubt + It was Written + ATLiens.

But with eight records coming out in 1995 that I would spin endlessly, that heavy-hitting year sparked the definition of who I was at the time. In a full rejection of my surrounding area, most of my schoolmates, and lame ass local farm culture, I have to give it to 1995 for solidifying some personality traits for me as a white, countercultural suburban teenager.

There were a lot of other CDs I purchased that fine year – a metric ton of plastic, to be sure. But the Elite Eight is what has stuck with me. Within my finely tuned niche wheel of gangsta rap and Wu Tang solo albums, the records of note released in 1995 include:

Dogg Food

AZ – Doe or Die

Me Against the World

Luniz – Operation Stackola

E. 1999 Eternal

Liquid Swords

Only Built 4 Cuban Links

and Cypress Hill III: (Temples of Boom)

Between two specifics – Bone Thugs E. 1999, and this third album by Cypress Hill, I couldn’t pick a favorite. Even if Krazy Bone, Mr. Leatherface himself held a sawed-off, pressed to my temple, I wouldn’t choose. I’ll have to save Bone for the fortieth anniversary release. I’ve chosen here to add Temples of Boom to the scroll in golden typesetter ink.

Exactly three decades ago, as of this writing, as an errant wanderer, I turned trick pages from loose leaf to zig zag.⁽¹⁾ I was told in the hallway between sophomore year high school classes by my friend Jamiel that “the new Cypress Hill album is fuckin’ bad as fuck”. That was all I needed to hear, man.

Halloween 1995 marked the release date for the album with its name punned from the darkest Indiana Jones film. Like Harrison Ford whipping across ravines for the Cross of Coronado, I got my hands on the CD as soon as I could.

It belongs in a museum!

The deep aqua green album cover matched the JNCO pipe jeans I borrowed from Jamiel and proudly wore to school one day. The hooded buddha monk traversing ancient steps to his Bavarian monastery. A despairing cleric, giving up his soul to Magus the Necromancer for the wealth of knowledge.

The compact disc itself with its strange skull shaped like the cranium of a bulbous ancient alien, pale baby blue, resonated with me, swaddled in my gangbanger wannabe North Carolina Starter coat. Not knowing one single player on the NC College team, I rocked that thing like a solemn shepherd. Walking the cold streets of Manteno, Illinois alone with my Sony Discman and a bummed Newport.

The Temple displayed a juxtaposition of thought and creativity from every other rap album cover that mostly just showed the artist on the front. The only cooler album art in hip hop history would be Cypress Hill’s very next album, Volume 4.

The liner note booklet showed relics and vintage stamps displaying marijuana leaves, and there was a photo of a sinister funk freaker – a vato loco with a pot leaf tattooed in the middle of his forehead. At the time I just assumed it was a photo of Sen Dog who must’ve undergone a large commitment to never again landing a real job.

I was mesmerized by the eerie, haunting samples and decrepit harpsichord death waltz melodies of DJ Muggs. B Real sounded like a demon as he switched to an even bleaker mode from Black Sunday. The instrumentation of a shamisen and a guzheng, pepper the deep grooves and hooky basslines. The production enchanted me.

The ending monologue of the first track featuring Kurt Loaded from Hemp TV cracked me up. I identified as a fifteen-year-old, with the notions on “Spark Another Owl”, as my friend Anwaar and I used to roll blunts in cheap-ass, dried-ass White Owl cigar wrappers, split with stolen steak knives or rusty box cutters.

“Throw Your Set in the Air” starts off with a ritualistic gang beat-in at the behest of OG Showtime. The audio sat with me in discomfort since I had friends who claimed to have been beaten in to gang membership. I never fully knew if they were telling me the truth, but whatever they described sounded an awful like that awful scenario.

The church pipe organ lent an eerie circus vibe with nostalgic yet off-putting notes of fun to a really dark description of South Gate, Los Angeles County gangbanger life.

It was rumored at the time that Cypress Hill showed Ice Cube this track in the studio while they were recording the Temples of Boom album. This story has become obvious in retrospect. Cube clearly stole the hook and created his own knock off song “Friday” for the soundtrack to his film of the same name.

So proceeded the Cypress Hill/Ice Cube Beef.

Cube, being the cheap dime store hustler that he was, released his version of Cypress Hill’s chorus so quickly, that Cypress Hill had time to write and record the diss track “No Rest for the Wicked” that appears on this very same album. It’s cutting and guttural. Ice Cube had not one, but 1.5 rebuttal tracks on the first Westside Connection album in response.

Westside Connection were a bunch of old crusty men with chonky beats and wonky raps.

They called B Real a white boy because they are some dumbass motherfuckers. B Real is Mexican and Cuban. Even at age fifteen I could tell those guys were out of their element.

Cube took the witch’s mark for jacking material. I lost respect for him after that. It all came full circle when he started doing children’s movies in a curse of the blood oath of a true sucka emcee.

“Throw ya Hands” was a remake of “Throw Your Set in the Air” that appeared on Cypress Hill’s Remixed and Revamped EP. I really wish they just changed the chorus for “Throw ya Hands” to something dissimilar because it’s so different and so good. It could have easily been a track on Temples of Boom instead of being relegated to Side B.

The Exorcist samples on “Stoned Raiders” provide substance of nightmares. The chilling piano line meshed with opera vocal samples, made me realize I’d never before struggled to listen to a song while being alone at night. Summoning Szent Andrǻs during the darkest warlock’s eve. Devils magic bids the wolf to speak with tongues of men.

You see, within the sacred Temple lies the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis. A book detailing diabolical signatures of the Monk and Mr. Mephistopheles.

“Illusions” is not only the best song on the album and the greatest song Cypress Hill has ever created, but it has landed in the top ten hip hop tracks of all time in my Necronomicon. It starts off by putting you in a stoned world of blacklights surrounded by a cypher of dirty dreadlocks and buzzing sitars.

That intro interlude still sends me back to the day where I once ended up in a white trash mobile home in Bradley, Illinois, chilling in some guys living room, listening to “Illusions”. This dude had a couch shipped in from somewhere, but the stuffing of the couch was all weed.

He had giant marijuana plants growing in his bathtub. I still do not understand where or when he took showers. I also remember wondering why he would need to grow his own plants, using up valuable bathroom real estate while he had a couch that was stuffed full of weed.

He had teddy bears that were stuffed with weed, too. I’ve never heard of, witnessed, or read about anything like this ever since.

All of this while DJ Muggs, with a blue yarn marimba mallet, tapped away at translucent, colored skulls full of varying levels of blood. Playing them as a hyrdaulophone over the drum tracks while the melody resonates and the song grooves on.

U-God and The RZA rapped cameo cuts on “Killa Hill N***az”. Along with The GZA, they’d collab again on the Soul Assassins compilation, which is another fine offering from DJ Muggs from this monumental era. The music is unhinged on this ensemble. Demented. Like what even is that high pitched squeal sample loop other than a screaming pixie dwarf being tortured in the crypt of the Nosferatu.

As the ghoul holds the nymph like a poison apple, sinking fangs into its heart, harvesting the blood of the supernatural, Muggs intertwines the darkness with the vibing bass.

“Boom Biddy Bye Bye” lets it rain from the cemetery gates with B Real sounding like a twisted Muppet over the breakbeat while Muggs plays a macabre, Mister Rogers xylophone fashioned and lashed together with skeleton bones.

The Bong Shack.

Cory Dockery’s storage shed in his backyard – the small, crowded corrugated tin box full of his parents’ gardening appliances and holiday décor was known only as The Bong Shack.

Probably the most notable time for me that I’ve ever smoked weed was at The Bong Shack, listening to “Everybody Must Get Stoned” on a crappy boombox. This would be in 1996 shortly after I had gotten my driver’s license.

I sat on a large plastic pumpkin – a Halloween decoration, as we passed around a gargantuan water bong and a Bic lighter. I lit that bowl and vacuum syphoned that smoke so hard, the tube was opaque. Just solid white. When I released the bowl piece and inhaled deeply, after one second, I was conked out. Just banked out like DJ A-Train.

Spinning, I immediately just wanted to go home and finish my panic episode in private. I could not tell you if those guys were laughing hysterically, or highly concerned. I’m guessing the former. 

I remember asking my friend Luke to drive my car to my house as I crawled in my own passenger seat. I lived probably five minutes away from Cory, but that trip felt like it was literally five seconds. I was just fucking zoned out, man. Everything was flashing erratically and vibrating as time stood still and then sped up and then slowed down on my very plain of existence. The powers of the herb opened up my mind. I did not want to keep seeking deep inside. It was not a great experience for me.

I guess Luke walked home. I don’t know. Although B Real, Muggs and Sen Dog would have been proud, my future dances with Mary Jane would be minimal at best.

…

“Funk Freakers” is a song with an interesting choice in a fading out of the vocals, mid-verse at the end. I do wonder if they went that route as a cover up to a mistake at the mixing desk. Perhaps the tape machine ran out of space. Maybe they just thought it would be novel.

As a kid I thought the guy acting as hype man suffered from severe Down Syndrome. I now see that he was performing as a cholo who hadn’t exhaled his weed smoke by the time it was his chance to lay into the mic.

It’s the Locotes, comin out the bote

Gotta new jale, jackin in the noche

“Locotes” is B Real creating anemoia – a sense of a jack move that puts you in the driver’s seat. A narrative of getting to be the bad guy who just got out of jail, discovering a new reason to live; a bunch of Locotes hanging out with Mario in the barrio, robbing people at night.

The revamped version of “Boom Biddy Bye Bye”, also cast to the side on the remix EP, features The Fugees as a relic of the time. An epoch before you would realize that a Lauryn Hill appearance would become an apparition – a non-presence in the future. I truly feel that Temples of Boom could have been a perfect double-disc album with zero filler.

Take the fifteen existing tracks, add the four B-sides from the Remixed and Revamped EP, and expand Muggs’ dazzling interludes to full instrumental cuts. With eleven songs on each disc, this powerhouse is what could have been if the red-light visions were broader.

I hadn’t yet seen Pulp Fiction at the time I got into Temples of Boom in 1995. I had no clue what the Samuel L. Jackson monologue was in the beginning of ”Make a Move”. I just thought it was some coldblooded shit to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass.

Make a move, make a move, every posse, make a move

Notes on Los Scandalous, Killafornia street life chess strategy set to a brilliantly funky bassline that is only four notes, infinity looping to Eternia. Those four repeating notes transmogrified to a grotesque dance floor.

“Strictly Hip Hop” – Nobility, exactitude, and liminal space. Samizdat documentation in analogue cubes that record light. Sunspot yellow in a limelight of pride on a soapbox. The price of a fiend’s service for the wagerer’s soul. To me, this song is what this album is about.

I’ve never rapped on an R&B record, and I never will

B Real pledges allegiance to the mic. He says the phrase “zip-a-dee-doo-dah” in this song. I never got this when I was young. Was B Real just getting bored? Was he guessing that most traditional consumers would never make it that far into album?

No.

He was alluding to a pact with the devil. The saccharine, commercial appeal of Disney and the corporation’s vampiric draw toward young artists. People who give up their creativity for the Faustian Bargain of fame.

The scribe. The Buddha Monk who broke his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive with sellouts and other mark-ass chumps like Ice Cube. He promised to create in one night a scroll of all human knowledge. He asked Lucifer himself for assistance in finishing the manuscript in exchange for his soul.

An inverted prayer in the realm of interlinking Goethe’s Medieval legend. Damnation, mortality, and juvenile delinquency all rolled up in a spliff.

[Reclaimed Timbre Music SubSeries 009]

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1. Credit to Big Pimpin’ on the Dogg Pound song “Big Pimpin’” from the Above the Rim Soundtrack for this amazing turn of phrase.