The story behind Cypress Hill’s ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man’
For Cypress Hill, it all started to take off with the release of the song ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man’ in 1991. The track received a lot of radio airplay, and it hit number one on the Billboard Hot Rap Tracks chart—in essence, it marked the group’s entry into the big time.
The song went on to enjoy a long life following its initial chart success. It was used in the Tupac Shakur-starring movie Juice, it was released again in 1999 with Spanish lyrics, it was covered by Rage Against the Machine for their Renegades cover album in 2000, and it featured in the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas video game. It’s a classic.
But despite the long-lasting success of the song, the Cypress Hill members were very much only finding their feet when they made it. They were very early into their careers, and they had not yet matured as artists. They were, as B-Real explained to Music Week in 2022, still learning their craft, but, because of the inexplicable chemistry that he shared with his bandmates, they managed to create something great.
“Myself and Muggs,” B-Real said, referring to his bandmate and producer DJ Muggs, “we are the yin and yang, the positive and negative energy together. Somehow that magic happens when we work.”
Without much in the way of experience or formal training, the young Cypress Hill members had to rely on listening to other artists to pick up on their tricks and skills. “I was learning how to write songs as we were going,” B-Real admitted. “The only inkling we had on how this was done was by listening to the other guys. We were students of the game, we would listen to what NWA, Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One and Public Enemy were doing. They were huge in our world, they gave us the blueprint.”
In a separate conversation with Complex a decade or so earlier in 2011, B-Real recounted how ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man’ had been “one of the first five songs that came out the box.” But it hadn’t come out fully formed. It had, to the contrary, been pieced together by lifting elements of other songs that the young group had been working on and knitting them together.
“It was actually comprised from three different songs that had lines that Muggs liked in each song,” B-Real explained. “Muggs came up with the beat and he said, ‘Man, say that one line from this song on this song.’ So I started saying it. Then he said, ‘Okay, now put the verse from this other song after that.’ So we pretty much pieced it together like a puzzle.”
As the song reaches its end, a voice can be heard saying the phrase, “All I wanted was a Pepsi.” This was lifted from a song by Suicidal Tendencies called ‘Institutionalized,’ but, because the group didn’t want to gett bogged down by issues with licensing, they found a workaround.
“We didn’t end up sampling the record,” B-Real admitted. “What we did was we had one of our boy, Dante Areola, who actually created the logo for Cypress Hill, say it at the end so we didn’t have to deal with sample clearance.”
B-Real recounted how this period in their lives had been “a pretty trippy time,” surrounded by other old-school artists including Coolio and Ice-T. There were a lot of faces around and a lot of weed was smoked, and, in light of the nostalgic way B-Real speaks about it, it seemed like a fun, creative time.
“Eventually,” B-Real said of their playful approach in the early days, “when we got in the studio, it was the same thing. Only we were a little bit more selective because we didn’t want to be wasting time and money on shit we didn’t like. So whatever we liked from Muggs’ bedroom, that’s what we took to the studio and eventually laid.”
Lyrically, as B-Real discussed in yet another feature, this time with The Guardian in 2022, the song was quite violent and gritty, which, as he explained, served a specific purpose. By painting such a vividly violent picture through the song, Cypress Hill were telling “people in the mainstream what it was like in our communities.”
“When you live in a place with a lack of opportunities,” he said, “one option is selling drugs and one way to have your back is to be in gangs. We tried to explain why things were like that.”