Celebrating 4/20 with Cypress Hill - "Hits From the Bong" (Redux)

My favorite stony tune from the Multi-Culti Pro-Pot Hip-Hop Pioneers 1993 sophomore classic, Black Sunday

Image by: Enka Ilustración on Behance

Whenever April 20th comes around each year, potheads around the world rejoice. Finally! We get our own holiday!

I include myself in that “we” even though I rarely partake in the magical herb anymore.

I’m certain that my younger self’s dedication to the craft qualifies me as a “toke’n” member of the Stoner Alumni Association.

I probably shouldn’t admit this in print, despite its legality in California…but for several years, I grew cannabis and found/find the harvesting/trimming process extremely meditative. Maybe I’ll do it again this year! (edit for 2024 post)

Author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell said in his book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become truly skilled at something. It doesn’t matter what. Ship building, origami, baking pies.

I would say I likely passed the 10,000 hour mark in terms of time spent stoned by age 30. Even if I only included time spent smoking, vaping, and ediblizing (should be a word), I likely would have reached that 10k mark.

I often wonder if I would have been such a pothead in my teens and 20s if weed were legal back then. Part of the appeal for me was the taboo nature of it. That me and my friends had to find hidden nooks and crannies to get high behind, around, and inside. If I could simply walk down the street smoking a joint, I wonder if the pleasure of it would have faded for me much sooner.

Probably not. It’s not as if society drinks less alcohol since prohibition. I likely would have rejoiced and lit up a fatty had marijuana been legal back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I might’ve smoked even more pot (if mathematically possible). It’s a sliding doors-type of imagining that AI will surely allow us to explore one day when our brains are fully co-opted (last sentence added for revision).

I’d be curious to know if a reputable study has been done determining whether young people’s cannabis consumption has risen or declined since a majority of U.S. states have legalized or decriminalized the sale and ingesting of it.

I’m sure other countries that have decriminalized and/or legalized weed long before the U.S. are where to look for such information.

Insane in the Membrane

When Cypress Hill appeared on the hip-hop music scene in 1991, I was two years post-college and had just moved to San Francisco from West Hollywood. I had left behind the glitz and glamour of L.A. for the Bay Area, where I had always felt my energy more aligned.

I became obsessed with hip-hop during college. My friend Eric had a radio show at 88.1 KZSC, the UC Santa Cruz campus station. He played mostly R&B, Funk, Rap, and Hip-Hop. He turned me on to early legends like Grand Master Flash, Jungle Brothers, Kool Mo Dee and Kurtis Blow. But it was Public Enemy’s second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, that truly blew my Chi pants off.

The sonic attack of a hundred intertwined samples beneath heavy but funky beats, with Chuck D’s insistent, no-nonsense, baritone flow contrasted with Flavor Flav’s often comical nasal delivery — I’d never heard anything like it.

When Cypress Hill arrived on the scene a couple years later, they sounded like a slowed-down, stoned version of Public Enemy to me. The beats were unrushed, the raps more laconic — but the cacophonic, wall-of-samples production approach that The Bomb Squad developed for P.E. seemed to be a clear influence on Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs.

As a middle-class white kid, I didn’t necessarily relate experientially to a lot of the more political lyrical content, but I recognized (from my privileged perch) the existence of widespread institutionalized racism and the need to fight back against it. Chuck D. and other artists (such as filmmaker Spike Lee) were my education into the U.S. history not taught in public schools or even at supposed liberal colleges like UC Santa Cruz.

But I’m a music nerd above all else. I do value lyrics, but it’s the sound of the instruments all gathered together that reverberates deepest in my bones.

And it was the beats, the inventive use of samples from a wide range of sonic sources, that excited me most in my early exposure to hip-hop. This was a time in my life when I craved NEW. Anything that I hadn’t heard before. And the hip-hop I was getting exposed to was definitely NEW to me in the late ‘80s.

By 1991 I was already heavily into Beastie Boys, 3rd Bass, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, just to name a few hip-hop crews of the time. All of those artists, though, were east coast based. Cypress Hill was west coast. But more than that, they were an amalgam of ethnicities.

Two of the original band members, Senen and Ulpiano Sergio Reyes, were brothers born in Cuba and immigrated to the US when they were still young kids. DJ Muggs was from New York and percussionist Eric Bobo was from Queens. But they all ended up in California and became part of the west coast hip-hop scene.

Maybe what set Cypress Hill apart was the fact that they were able to incorporate their international histories and influences into the burgeoning scene of their new adopted home.

The band’s love and dedication to getting high and celebrating it unabashedly was expressed on their first self-titled LP in 1991. But it was their next album, Black Sunday, where they upped the ante on expressing their appreciation for cannabis. There are no fewer than 3 songs touting the joys of marijuana use. (Many songs mention it; on these three it’s the main topic.)

The album starts with the celebratory “I Wanna Get High” and doesn’t slow down one bit. A few tracks later, we come to the sample-heavy interlude track “Legalize It.” It’s not a cover of the Peter Tosh classic. Rather, it’s a short, 46-second intro to the album’s piece-de-resistance, “Hits From the Bong.”

“Hits From the Bong” begins with a sample of, well, a hit from a bong. The burbling bong-water beat is used throughout the track. The song, like the lyrics attest, is a “skunky, funky” classic, one that deserves to be played loud and proud from the boomiest speakers available on this day of celebration for the magical herb.

I’ve included the lyric video here so you can follow and sing along to the “hits from the bong!”

CYPRESS HILL - HITS FROM THE BONG

Here’s some Wiki info on Cypress Hill for your reading pleasure:

Cypress Hill is an American hip hop group from South Gate, California. They have sold over 20 million albums worldwide, and they have obtained multi-platinum and platinum certifications. The group has been critically acclaimed for their first five albums.^[2] They are considered to be among the main progenitors of West Coast and 1990s hip hop. All of the group members advocate for medical and recreational use of cannabis in the United States.^[3] In 2019, Cypress Hill became the first hip hop group to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.^[4]

Senen Reyes (also known as Sen Dog) and Ulpiano Sergio Reyes (also known as Mellow Man Ace) are brothers born in Pinar del Río, Cuba. In 1971, their family immigrated to the United States and initially lived in South Gate, California. In 1988, the two brothers teamed up with New York City native Lawrence Muggerud (also known as DJ Muggs, previously in a rap group named 7A3) and Louis Freese (also known as B-Real) to form a hip-hop group named DVX (Devastating Vocal Excellence). The band soon lost Mellow Man Ace to a solo career, and changed their name to Cypress Hill, after a street in South Gate.^[5]

To learn more about Cypress Hill, check out the excellent documentary Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain, released in 2022.

Do you have a favorite 4/20 song? A song about the joys of getting high?

Is it “Legalize It” by Peter Tosh?

What is your relationship to marijuana? Never smoked it? Used to but no longer? You use it to help you sleep?

Leave your thoughts and stories in the comments!

May the 4/20 be with you,

Steve