Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain’ on Showtime, Telling The Story of the LA Rap Group’s 30-Year Journey

The real ones, yes, the phunky feel ones explore their own three-decade history as a landmark West Coast hip-hop group in Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain, the latest installment in Hip Hop 50, Showtime’s ongoing celebration of the genre’s cultural impact. Directed by Estevan Oriol, their longtime collaborator, Insane features interviews with all of the Cypress principals, unheard demo recordings, and a wealth of archival footage. 

CYPRESS HILL: INSANE IN THE BRAIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “What I do is, I preserve memories for people,” Estevan Oriol says at the outset of Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain, and from his industrial storage space the remembrances emerge. Thousands of negatives stored in filing cabinets emblazoned with stickers that proclaim allegiances to a cross-section of bands and music from California. Stack after stack of archival photos, tracking the emerging entity that became Cypress Hill. And physical artifacts from after the group’s 1991 breakthrough, the backstage lanyards and scrapbooks that represent national and international jaunts alongside everybody from Public Enemy and House of Pain to Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Sonic Youth. Cypress Hill, the furiously unique trio of Louis “B-Real” Freese, Senan “Sen Dog” Reyes, and Lawrence “DJ Muggs” Muggerud, built their concept from the streets of South East Los Angeles outward, developed their dynamic, distinct sound (“They sounded like the crazy Mexicans that were on angel dust,” Ice T says. “But it was dope…”), laced the whole bit in omnipresent, unrepentant purple clouds of marijuana haze, and helped make West Coast hip-hop break worldwide. Bow to trends, or abide by the rap status quo? Cypress Hill ain’t goin’ out like that.

After some early sketching of biography – who met who first, and when, and where – and highlighting the significance of heritage – Sen Dog’s father and B-Real’s mother immigrated to LA from Cuba, and DJ Muggs himself was transplanted from NYC to Cali – Insane moves quickly into Cypress Hill’s early metal shop phase, when they perfected the sound that would propel them to stardom. B-Real recalls how Sen “came up with the beta voice” that complimented his own high-pitched style, and Muggs plays a few unreleased demos at Soul Assassin Studios, early versions of songs like “Real Estate” that came to define the group. The search for a record deal initially proved fruitless, since rap at the time was almost exclusively an East Coast phenomenon. But then Joe Nicolo and Chris Schwartz of Ruffhouse Records heard their demo. “It sounded like they set up a boombox and put rap on it,” Joe the Butcher says, and that grittiness, that punch, became Cypress Hill’s calling card.

Along with weed, of course. Cannabis is a constant presence in Insane in the Brain. Cheech & Chong make a cameo appearance. Producer and rapper The Alchemist is interviewed alongside a joint that resembles a fence post. And the Cypress Hill guys light up with an abandon apparently unabated since their formative days three decades past. B-Real is even interviewed on the production floor of his “Mr. Greenthumb” brand of high-end cannabis.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Insane in the Brain director Estevan Oriol also helms and co-stars in the Netflix doc LA Originals, which chronicles his artistic work alongside his fellow Angeleno and Chicano, tattoo artist Mark “Mr. Cartoon” Machado.

Performance Worth Watching: Each member of Cypress Hill speaks openly about their experiences with the group, but it’s Senan “Sen Dog” Reyes who seems most willing to offer his personal perspective on the physical and mental costs of the unrelenting album/tour/album/tour cycle. Sen Dog says his eventual burnout wasn’t unique, but ultimate return to the fold was. “Take a break,” he tells any artist watching. “Learn to love it again.”

Memorable Dialogue: “The fact that you had a Black man who is — guess what? — also Latin,” former Rap Pages and XXL editor Sheena Lester says of Sen Dog, “that’s what made Cypress Hill so dope, is that they represented the diversity of what California represented.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing too nuts. Some autographing of groupies’ body parts during the heady years of Woodstock ‘94 and the early Lolla festival tours.

Our Take: In the glut of music documentaries that have appeared since COVID and the global pandemic began, there is a range from the nakedly promotional to the achingly confessional, but the ultimate goal is always to stay visible. What’s interesting about Insane in the Brain is how it engages with biographical boilerplate – the facts of Cypress Hill’s founding and fostering, and the pride they feel as representatives of LA’s Chicano community – and then quite happily strays from that to instead carry its narrative on a trailing line of joint smoke. When percussionist Eric “Bobo” Correa jumped ship from the Check Your Head-era Beastie Boys to join up with Cypress, B-Real knew he’d stay. “We had better weed.” When producer Joe the Butcher scoffs at anyone who bites on the wavering rhythms of “Hits from the Bong,” he illustrates how purpose-driven that beat was for a group catering to listeners partaking of mind-altering substances. And performance footage from Woodstock and “MTV’s Spring Break” to Saturday Night Live and a hundred clubs in between becomes a supercut of the group’s ongoing communion with cannabis and weed feats of strength. Insane in the Brain even asserts that hip-hop’s wider embrace of marijuana exemplified by Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic would never have occurred were it not for Cypress Hill. But after all the blunts smoked and bongs ripped, what does come through is the camaraderie that’s always bound B, Sen, Muggs, and Bobo together. Not every music doc needs to be a rise and fall chronicle marked with triumph and tragedy. Sometimes, it can just be about how a dream became reality. “We were just trying to make music that meant something to us,” Sen Dog says. And thirty years on, Cypress Hill remains proud to have always done it their way.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Insane in the Brain includes a ton of cool archival material for all the Cypress Hill heads to eat up. But in a larger sense, it’s also a story of hip-hop’s continued popular emergence in the early 1990s.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges