How we made Cypress Hill's Insane in the Brain
‘It took a day to do the beat, three hours to write the lyrics, and an hour to record. There was a lot of weed being smoked’
Lawrence ‘DJ Muggs’ Muggerud, turntables, samples
I came up with the beat in my apartment in Queens, New York. At first, it was slower, but the stone-age drum machine we had could only go up or down in increments of six BPM. So when B-Real started rapping on it, I had to speed it up from 96 to 102. It went from being a slow groove to a club banger.
The format of. I came up with the beat for Jump Around right after Cypress Hill’s first album. But B-Real, our rapper, didn’t want to go back into the studio so quickly. I offered it to Ice Cube but he passed, so I gave it to House of Pain – and it became huge. I wanted to do more with that sort of sound, so I packed Insane in the Brain with hooks.
