Smoking Dope restored my Sight
Original position in magazine: pages 34-36
Contents: Cypress Hill, Dr Octagon, DJ Spooky
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Cypress Hill
Black Sunday
USA COLUMBIA 474075 2 CD (1993)
Cypress Hill
Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom
USA COLUMBIA 478127 2 CD (1995)
The marijuana experience can be yours even without buying a slab of hash under The Westway. The slowed tempo on every other track just presses you into a ball of mush and spreads you neatly over the pillows. To listen is to reach that mellow high that only the weed can offer. Not that I would know anything about it; personally my recreational drug of choice is a fine bottle of 12% red wine, or 3-4 pints of Stella Artois. I’ve never understood why advocates of the humble hemp can turn into crusading evangelists for the stuff - Charles Bukowski has said the same in a short story, bewildered by two young upstart hippies who seemed to think they’d invented the concept of getting high. Actually I always liked the way the jazz community in the USA - ever since the 1920s I guess - evolved a whole series of slang words for their preferred modes of brain-vacation stimulants. This was simply so ‘the man’ (meaning Whiteys) wouldn’t catch wise; by the time your jazz guys were playing regular gigs at venues, to have been caught with that needle dangling from your arm or that reefer slipping from your lips would have meant instant dismissal. Hence that whole code-word thing becomes a means of survival. It’s only us decadent whiteys who find it at all glamourous!
The secretive tradition continues with Cypress Hill, evolved by this band into an elaborate sign-system expressed through sleeve art, rhymes and texts. The monk ascending the staircase on cover of Temples of Boom tells us that to smoke dope is to join a Holy Order, a brotherhood replete with a liturgical language that outsiders cannot dig. The postage stamps and currency within the sleeve art have been doctored to encode certain holy symbols, including the sacred skull. Black Sunday comes equipped with a stream of printed ‘facts’ about hemp and cannabis plants which the Government don’t want you to know (as if), and these are restated verbally on one track; but in contrast to anarcho-syndicalist punk band Crass, who stuffed their LP boxes with humourless anarchist propaganda, Cypress Hill seem to achieve something far more subversive than merely advocating the consumption of vast amounts of mary jane.
Cypress Hill knock me dead with the apparent ease with which they make records. ‘Hits from the Bong’ offers echoed, whispering vocals just on the cusp of perception, like ghosts of smoke dancing over a hookah; while Temples of Boom throughout is spiked with snatches of Indian and European classical music, plus chants of Buddhist monks from Hamkaimea Temple, scattered between songs to nightmarish effect. Strip the sound apart and you find something like a tooled-up custom hot rod - a perfect mechanical drum beat, a dumber-than-dumb bass sequencer riff, and borrowed segments of old records scratched in to devastating effect. One of my favourites is the use of the harmonica riff from ‘The Wizard’ by Black Sabbath - if you call your LP Black Sunday I guess you just have to sample that band! (This being the 1990s, each sample must be credited by law - no fun at all eh!). Over this framework a trio of Hanna-Barbera cartoony voices - Chooch and Benny the Ball from Top Cat - exude their laid-back nasal whines and exhortations, or spit out venomous street chants with outrageous internal rhymes. The sheer ingenuity of assembling it takes you back to (eg) the first Residents record, resorting to using old records simply because there was no other practical way to do it, thus setting a template of sorts for a whole generation of artistes who no longer feel the need to be a musician, but still want to make a record. In case you haven’t guessed I’m all for it.
Cypress Hill are a trio: Italian New Yorker Larry Muggerud aka DJ Muggs; Cuban Mexican Louis Freeze aka B-Real; and Cuban Senen Ryes aka Sen Dog. All three met in their ‘hood’ in south-eastern Los Angeles and took their name from a local street, Cypress Avenue. Muggs is the producer and one assumes the driving talent behind the project; he has also lent his skills to House of Pain (in spite of declaring ‘House of Pain ain’t down with us!’ on one track). Where Black Sunday is mostly samples razor-bladed together with deft skill, Temples of Boom uses live musicians.
Some records in the Hard-core Gangsta rap genre can give us a steady stream of abusive language about murder, mayhem and misogyny. These elements are not absent from the Cypress Hill universe. Throughout ‘Insane in the Brain’ the singer declaims he feels like Son of Sam and draws you into a vortex of irrational heat, encouraged by the nursery rhyme answer-lines of his cohorts; joyous rioting is only one step away. It’s so comic-strip overstated, exhibiting the braggadocio and insistence on form you associate with a graffiti artist, that you can’t take it too seriously. These guys are no dummies. Cypress Hill are enormous sellers in the USA (due largely to College stations’ airplay), and sell largely it seems to white college kids; perhaps these listeners derive some comforting excitement observing the antics of ‘dangerous niggas’ from a safe vantage point. What it all means to a London dwelling suburbanite like myself is anybody’s guess. Two tracks even wound up on prime-time TV, during a segment of Chris Carter’s Millennium to convey some notion of unknown evil. Judgement Night, a rap movie I know nothing of, also features Cypress Hill on the soundtrack bleating out ‘I love you Mary-Jane’. But then, ‘I wanna get high’ is the first song you hear on the movie Addiction by Abel Ferrarra, which is what persuaded me to buy these CDs in the first place. Now that film really is disturbing!
ED PINSENT
Dr Octagon
Ecologyst
UNITED KINGDOM MO WAX MW046CD CD (1996)
Utterly fucking bizarre. Plenty to enjoy here in the very clean and minimal but enormous sound - drum machine, bass sequencer and very witty scratches and samples, plus a seamless torrent of verbal raptitude. The rhythm tracks are kinda leisurely, and yet laced with an undercurrent of menace; Kool Keith MC assumes the fictional persona of Dr Octagon, he knows he can take his time with you as he alternatively seduces you or regales you with his collection of hard core porn videos. There’s also a very wayward sense of humour here; the whole CD is themed as a nightmare trip through a fiendish hospital where virtually anything can happen. Through raps and samples from alien sources, there’s always that element of mayhem suggested; behind one door there may be fiendish vivisection experiments, behind another some alien mutations to breed new monsters to infiltrate society; elsewhere a man disguised as a female nurse is gleefully penetrating some unsuspecting patient. Snapshot impressions of deformed genitalia and redesigned breeding equipment, a biological horror show to equal anything from the pages of William Burroughs. ‘Earth people, I come from Jupiter’, Dr Octagon informs us on one rap, taking a leaf from Sun Ra’s book but also implying (in true X-Files fashion) the alien conspiracy theory behind this gene-splicing terror. The tracks ‘Elective Surgery’ and ‘A Visit to the Gynechologist’ will fuel your fear of hospitals to the point where you’ll never go near St Thomas’ again, compounded by the grisly cover image of a severed hand (a plaster model used by surgeons). Wait for the coda, a hidden track where Mr Gerbick appears: a creature with the ‘body of a shark, and the arms and face of a man’, a glimpse of what the new world’s mutated population will be like. Kool Keith has been a veteran of the Hip Hop scene for many years and his is the voice you’ll hear rapping start to finish on this disc, supplying much of the identity of the mysterious ‘Dr Octagon’. DJ Q-Bert mans the turntables; DJ Shadow issues ‘Transmissions’. Licensed from Bulk Records.
ED PINSENT
DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Necropolis: The Dialogic Project
USA KNITTING FACTORY WORKS KFW 185 CD (1995)
Subtitled ‘A Compilation of NYC Experimental Trip-Hop Ambient Dub and Jungle’: at time of release this ‘Dialogic’ CD represented a new virus in the turntable empires and introduced the concept of ILLbient, a very arty New York approach to tape samples and editing embodied by Spooky who, besides conducting these experiments with sounds, is also a visual artist, had his own radio show at College, and runs a nightclub. The guiding forces to his project sounded familiar: a response to 20th century urban decay, the idea that the artist is an invisible spirit at loose in the city, leaving only mysterious traces to be uncoded by a chosen few. Spray-can graffiti is one clue; to Spooky that art form is more than just idle kids making a mess of derelict property, it’s a concerted attempt by a clandestine army to change the city’s face, and thus presumably begin to alter its conciousness. The parallels with New York painter Basquiat are fairly clear…among his early manifestations in that city were the SAMO graffiti, which unpacked means ‘Another Day, Same Old Shit’. It’s encouraging people have so much faith in graffiti, but to me it’s rather a closed-off art; its insistence on rules and form undercuts much chance for real expression.
This record is ludicrously dense and almost makes me physically ill to listen to it - that’s not intended as a put-down, but I’m choking on the traffic fumes mingling with the clotted atmosphere of an Amazonian jungle after the rains. The preliminaries take forever before segueing into something with a backbeat, which when it finally appears is surprisingly puny, like a scaffolding made of rubber bars - it couldn’t support a plate of Jell-O. Each atmospheric moment promises much, delivers little. It reminds you of the way TV video graphics nowadays can be overlaid into impenetrable patterns of dense colours, shapes and moving objects. Spooky samples old distressed records with lots of hiss and crackle ‘to have a sense of timelessness’. A Necropolis is of course a Palace of the dead, and the aural landscape does seem very Apocalyptic, delineating a city which expanded beyond chaos into complete inertia, seized up, all trappings of civilisation (cars, buildings, communication links) reduced to utter wreckage. This in spite of the more optimistic cyberpunk-ish hints in the liner notes: ‘the groups in this project are true underground pioneers. Taking their mythologies from the future, they are reality hackers. Tricksters at the end of time, they sing the body electric…’
Spooky, real name Paul D Miller, studied Philosophy and French Literature to degree level. A knowledgeable historian and cultural theorist, his DJ-ing is an ‘extension’ of his writing, reflecting among other things the collapse of rational thought in the 20th century. In Brooklyn he staged the Lolandia happenings with various art-school cronies, building large physical mazes out of ‘urban detritus’ that would bewilder the visitor, which confusion was enchanced by the presence of six DJs playing simultaneously throughout this wayward environment; you’d escape the Metallica heavy metal only to run into a wall of Jungle music. Nice clashes of cultures and musics…on the other hand, if all your neighbours have massive stereo systems I’d imagine that’s what it’s like to live in a New York tenement building anyway!
ED PINSENT