So it came to this. When I last wrote I was also in Amsterdam-- but that was 5 months ago. Since then Europe has become my playpen and I a baby. The continent had been both magnificently generous and immeasurably cruel to me.
But it was time for a change...the bottle I was sucking on seemed infinite but it wasn't me. I needed to get back to a more...bucolic age, where alcohol wasn't polluting my blood and sickening my thoughts. A place with more greenery, plant life, and nature. I had to get back to Amsterdam. So here I am. I took the train overnight from Berlin and arrived at the Central station around 7 in the morning.When I got into town I established a small residence just north of the Jordaan.
Logging on at what seems to still be the town's only internet cafe, I discovered 3,900 emails from lonely women. Damned Steele and his mailing lists. Maybe I forgot to mention that everyone at usounds shares one email box except of course for the publishers. Thanks, guys.
Sorting through the avalanche of mostly e-bullshit, I discovered a transmission from my editor, Bernie. "Lance," it read in part, "Get your fucking head together and review that goddamned Cypress Hill Album already." Somehow the two seemed incompatible, but nonetheless I wrote back that I was already on it. I decided to throw a classic of the ganja genre in with it for my listening pleasure.
There was a coffeshop I remembered from the last time I was in town. It was owned by a fat, bearded Canadian and his Dutch wife. I headed over with my discman and settled into the upstairs lounge-- actually a loft with some huge pillows and a couch. I started with Tosh's legendary "Legalize it" album and some pretty nice weed called space bud. I added some super polm hash and a little Drum tobacco and lit it up my first taste of actual weed (not hash) in months.
The smoke felt so good that I coughed violently for about a half an hour. The haze cleared, the sun broke through the clouds, and I was free again. Peter Tosh was the best music I had ever heard. His voice was like sweet magic as it danced through the thick, heavy beats and lilting horns like a dolphin playing in the waves. The album was pure happiness. Usually when I review a CD, I try to listen to it once sober and once...not.
Sometimes I don't always get around to the sober listening session, which has resulted in some embarrassments like the Spacehog debacle of a few years ago. But with Tosh it's like why bother anyway. If you plan on listening to this album without a joint in your hand and then you may as well drink Coors Cutter and watch Women's Basketball.
With Tosh I felt like I was in the perfect place to enjoy the music. Sitting above a coffeeshop with sunlight on my neck, fat hippies playing an ancient Gottleib pinball machine below, 2 rastas at the bar laughing about something or other, a Dutch blonde with big tits reaching out through the smoke to light a new joint-- it was my kind of place and the music was right.
But from the opening song of the new Cypress Album, Eye of the Pig, I was brought to a new reality. A place where weed is just as necessary as Jamaica, but not to keep the good vibes flowin' but to keep the bad ones from creeping in. Cypress's world is one of cops, fat blunts and rat a tat gats.
But who cares about that...To be honest, when I'm stoned I want to hear fat beats and funky verbal assassination-- I could care less what gun or method of smoking is fetishized, I just want to be inside the mente of a crazy stoned genius like DJ Muggs. Muggs is slowly starting to gain the respect he deserves for being an innovator who pre-empted the fall of the post-PE DJ, and anticipated (and always beat) the east coast horrorcore fling. Muggs is dabbling all over the place on this album, from the occasional electronic freak-out to latin guitar and instrumentation.
The best tracks are the ones that slow it down and give Muggs the freedom to weave disparate elements into a creepy, funky shroud that is the perfect backdrop for the Sen-dog/B-Real interplay. The flow keeps going all the way to the last track, which sounds like an attempt to reach out to the socal harcore audience that has helped the group sell millions of records. Loud, abrasive, and annoying, it completely killed the stone I had going and I had to roll another joint to compensate. But it got me thinking because I started looking through the album's liner notes. For all the criticism people have leveled at the Hill over the years, very few hiphop artists have put together a list of albums that can compete with the 4 Cypress Hill records, the Soul Assassins and Pyscho Realm albums, and the remix record. I know that many people (myself included) have had doubts as to the legitimacy of this group...but their music is a testament to the power of the scared herb just as important as that of Peter Tosh
-Lance F. Rockaway in Amsterdam
USOUNDS | 12.1.98
