The story behind Cypress Hill’s ‘Insane in the Brain’
Things were moving slowly for Cypress Hill, as they tried to make it during the early ’90s. But then came ‘Insane in the Brain.’ Released as a single from their 1993 second album Black Sunday, the track powered the group from near-total obscurity to global fame. This wasn’t just a hip-hop hit—it broke into the mainstream. But underlying the track’s success was some surprising animosity. ‘Insane in the Brain’ was a diss track aimed at one of their contemporaries.
Throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, one of the more successful hip-hop artists was Chubb Rock. Perhaps known best for his 1991 hit ‘Treat ’Em Right,’ a song largely encouraging listeners to reject bad behaviour and to treat people with respect, Chubb, especially when compared to the gangsta rappers beginning to emerge around that period, could seem like one of hip-hop’s nice guys. That’s why it’s so surprising to learn that Cypress Hill were dissing him on ‘Insane in the Brain.’
In an interview with Spin earlier this year, Cypress Hill member B-Real elaborated on the track’s combative origins. “As we were recording the album, we saw this Chubb Rock song called ‘Yabadabadoo,’” he explained, “and in the song, he sort of quotes a line from [Cypress Hill’s debut single] ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man’ that sounded like a diss. He says something like, ‘And you know we had to watcha, time for some lyrics,’ and in our song, we say, ‘Time for some action, just a fraction of friction.’”
B-Real was, in his own words, “young and hot-blooded” in those days, and he was not very happy about this perceived diss, despite the fact that he was a fan of Chubb’s music. “So when I heard that I was a little taken aback,” he noted, “and I said, ‘Fuck it. If he’s gonna give me a subliminal, I’m gonna give him one.’ At the time he was calling himself ‘The Flamboyant One.’ That’s where I started the line, ‘To the one on the flamboyant tip / I’ll just toss that ham in the frying pan.’”
This was one of the quieter beefs, with neither Cypress Hill nor Chubb Rock ever actually directly addressing it with the other. “Chubb Rock and I never spoke about it,” B-Real said. “We still haven’t. And it maybe was a surprise for him to know that song was directed toward him. But you know, when I heard that ‘Yabadabadoo’ shit—and I loved the song—but then I heard that and I was like, ‘What is that—a fucking diss?’”
Refusing to take Cubb’s diss, real or imagined, lying down, B-Real dissed him right back. In doing so, he inadvertently created a classic and propelled himself and his group into mega-stardom. It’s strange to think that, at the heart of the song, all this time, has been a beef, but, thankfully, it never spilled over into anything serious.
“I still got mad respect for Chubb Rock,” B-Real said. “He was always one of my favorite emcees because he’s really dope. It was just that I felt the need to respond. If I was wrong, I will apologise to my man. I’ll say this, he created another spark. We don’t make the impact without that song, so I gotta say thanks to him… he was the inspiration for that song and it ended up being the shit that launched us.”