B-Real Is Working: Cypress Hill & Serial Killers Albums On The Way

EXCLUSIVE: Cypress Hill is also part of the Reggae Rise Up music festival taking place in St. Petersburg, Florida, March 12-15.

Reggae and Hip-Hop go together like Bonnie and Clyde. From a shared love of cannabis to the hypnotic rhythm of the beats, both genres have been intertwined since Kool Herc brought “toasting” from Jamaica to the Bronx in the late ’60s/early 70s.

B-Real, a well-known weed connoisseur, and the rest of Cypress Hill performed at the Reggae Rise Up festival in St. Petersburg on Thursday (March 12) alongside Slightly Stoopid, Pepper, Roots of Creation and The Rhythm-Inya.

Over the weekend, acts such as SOJA, Yelawolf, Iration, De La Soul, Rebelution, Sublime, 311, and Steel Pulse will further illustrate just how well Hip-Hop and modern reggae mesh.

“The connection between Hip-Hop and reggae happened a lot in the ’90s, when a lot of Hip-Hop artists and reggae artists started collaborating,” B-Real tells AllHipHop. “Hip-Hop heads have always listened to reggae in some form or another, and dancehall was like their hardcore, grimy version of what reggae is. It was very street.

“So I would say sometime in the ’90s is when that that bridge really happened. Us as music fans and stuff like that, a lot of us Hip-Hop artists grew up to reggae music, and I would imagine that a lot of reggae artists these days grew up to Hip-Hop s###, so there’s always that connection there.”

 

 

 
 


 
 

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A post shared by Reggae Rise Up Florida (@reggaeriseup_florida)

B-Real has been celebrating cannabis culture for more than 30 years and is looking forward to sharing the stage with like-minded artists.

“We sort of vibe when we’re there,” he says. “If we feel like we want to go watch somebody, we will go. If not, we’re like pretty much on our own and getting into the mood of going out there and stealing the show. At least we try to.”

Anyone who’s caught a Cypress Hill show knows how polished their sets are. From “Insane in the Brain” to “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” their catalog is fraught with nothing but bangers. The group released a new Spanish-language single titled “Wacha Trucha” featuring Mexican rapper Alemán on March 6, marking the first taste of their upcoming all-Spanish album. It precedes a new album from Serial Killers, B-Real’s group with Xzibit and Demrick, called This Thing of Ours, which arrives on April 10. Needless to say, B-Real—who also owns five Dr. Greenthumb’s dispensaries and hosts a podcast—has been working nonestop.

“I’m f###### busy these days,” he says. “I have two significant albums popping off right around the same time as well as singles and videos. Our studio is up. We’re about to release a video for ‘This Thing of Ours,’ which is dope as f###. And we just released ‘Wacha Trucha’ along with the video and stuff like that, which is getting enormous love and feedback.

“I’ve been blessed to be be locked in with two amazing albums, the Serial Killer album and this Cypress Hill Spanish thing, two completely different things, although the root of it is Hip-Hop. I’m blessed to be working like this.”

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