‘Cypress Hill: Insane In The Brain’ Review: A Wild Tour Of Trips, Tracks & Trailblazers

If there’s one defining clip from Showtime’s “Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain,” the new documentary about the pioneering hip-hop group, it’s the sight of a 30-foot inflatable stage Buddha emerging from the bong smoke like the beast from the fog in The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the landing of the mothership in Spielberg’s “Close Encounters.” It’s excessive and ridiculous and eerily Spinal Tap-ish, but it captures all the bravado and hijinks and ‘give-it-a-go’ attitude of a group trying to make sense of the landscape they’ve invented. Cypress Hill were a group of firsts: first hip-hop group to headline Reading Festival; first group to (successfully) transition from hip-hop to rock; first hip-hop group to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On this commercial point, director Estevan Oriol’s whirlwind portrait is dead-on; the catch, however, is that it frequently loses sight of the individuals.

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The first person we meet is Oriol. An avid photographer and lover of hip-hop, Oriol recorded the rise of many East and West Coast superstars, including House of Pain, Beastie Boys, No Doubt, and The Fugees. He also worked as tour manager for Cypress Hill in the early ’90s, and in that time he picked up more than a few knick-knacks. His office has graffitied walls, old cassettes, stacks of DVDs, and 38 sticker-covered file cabinets chock-full of tour diaries, laminate passes, and other Cypress Hill memorabilia. It’s pretty overwhelming to look at, and there’s a fear that it’s all about to get dumped on us. Mercifully, Oriol introduces us to the world he’s been immersed in for over 30 years tour by tour and city by city. He splices never-before-seen concert footage from every continent with behind-the-scenes snaps, sound bites from music journalists Rigo Morales and Sheena Lester, ’90s news bulletins, and, of course, present-day interviews with the members of Cypress Hill: vocalists Louis Freese (B-Real) and Senen Reyes (Sen Dog), mixer and producer Lawrence Muggerud (DJ Muggs), and percussionist Eric “Bobo” Correa. The result is ostensibly chronological, but you feel as though their wild rise to fame would make just as much sense scrambled up.

Before the crowd surfing and globetrotting and sun-eclipsing totemic Buddhas, we learn what each member was like at the start (and we also find out what mellowing plant brought them together). Sen Dog, a street kid whose family moved from Cuba to California, helped turn his neighborhood, Cypress Avenue—which gave the group its name, into a party block of weed smokers and music lovers. In that milieu, he met Cuban- and Mexican-descended B-Real, and then, a little later, turntable hotshot DJ Muggs, a native of Queens, NY. The trio bonded over Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin records in an LA dominated by gang culture. It was around this time—and in this LA, too—that a new sound was developing in the streets and backyard gigs, and on radio stations like KDAY: a sound grittier and punchier than anything that had come before it. There, on the cusp of the ’90s and the birth of a new genre, we see how Cypress Hill put together the early demo tapes and experimental tracks—including an early version of “Real Estate,” which we get a snippet of in the documentary—that would soon morph into the thumping ganja-rap records that took the world by storm. (American producer Alchemist calls the early mixes “beautiful train wrecks.”) For Cypress superfans, all the era details are here: from the group’s meetings with Ruffhouse Records producers Chris Schwartz and Joe “The Butcher” Nicolo, to their acquisition of Bobo from Beastie Boys (the deal-maker being: “We had the better weed”), to their audience-broadening “Shoot ‘Em Up” feature in the movie “Juice” in ’92. What’s frequently missing, though, are the emotional details. Sen Dog mentions the grind of the early days, the lack of attention and the going hungry; but that’s it, there’s no elaboration (other than that they toured a lot), and there’s no mention of what it meant for their families—or indeed themselves—when things started to take off.

As Bill Stephney (former President of Def Jam Recordings and signer of Public Enemy) told Muggs, every hip-hop group at the time needed a “concept.” (As Ice-T puts it, “When you went to see The Fat Boys you saw some fat boys.”) Up-and-coming artists had to stand out far more than they do now, hence the diversity in looks and rapping styles between LL Cool J and Slick Rick, or between Public Enemy and Run-DMC. It’s maybe not surprising then that Oriol mainly chronicles the formation and evolution of Cypress Hill’s image—a weedswept “New York hardcore with LA swag”—rather than how the members themselves changed as men or artists. For example, we get a brief insight into how Cheech and Chong influenced the group’s love for and advocacy of marijuana, but B-Real’s personal endeavors into the cannabis dispensary business—under the name of his alter-ego, Dr Greenthumb—are glossed over; all we see are shots of B-Real standing among what looks like an aircraft hangar’s worth of cannabis (roughly equivalent to an afternoon’s supply for the members of Cypress Hill). The same short-changing happens for two of the band’s most significant reshufflings: Sen Dog’s hiatus from the group in 1995 and the group’s forays into nu-metal at the turn of the century. Both segments are stocked with ‘how-the-hell-is-there-a-recording-of-this’-type footage, but the personal stories are blindsided in the rush. What is documented here is the group as a phenomenon—the remodeling of their various personae.

“Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain” is a treasure trove of unseen footage, unheard mixes, and untold tour shenanigans. And just like the video profiles in his 2020 Netflix doc “LA Originals,” Oriol somehow manages to piece together the chaotic origin story of a hip-hop sensation who had no history to lead them. (You get the sense that Cypress Hill was the first and last of a generation—a group nestled between radio and Napster.) Although some of the emotional and familial nuances are omitted here, as is any attempt to recontextualize the group and its legacy in hip-hop today, the movie has a bounce and a buzz the entire time, as though the frenetic surplus energy of the ’90s had finally found a place to go. [C+]