Diss Track Review: "No Rest for the Wicked"

The '90s were wild.  Hip Hop was at its peak of diversity, not only in terms of sound but representation. Things got a little stupid at one point.  You had an all-white rap group by the name of "Young Black Teenagers," Jewish Ruthless Records act Blood of Abraham, the Geto Boys featuring Bushwick Bill--the one-eyed Jamaican little person with a history of suicide attempts and mental illness--"crunchy" Afrocentric groups like Arrested Development & A Tribe Called Quest (which were amazing).  It was truly the Golden Age.  For the most part these acts co-existed peacefully.  Mostly.

Young Black Teenagers 🤔

Enter Cypress Hill:  a trio comprised of Sen Dog, Muggs & B-Real from Southgate California--the first major label act to put Latinos, marijuana & gangsta rap on the map together when they came out in '91. They had a unique sound in MC B-Real's nasally delivery & Muggs' haunting beats.  Today they occasionally feature the percussion of Eric Bobo, especially when one of the other guys can't be present on stage.  Cypress Hill's niche was the pothead demographic that watched The Simpsons (which the band appeared on), skateboarded and attended Woodstock '94, an event the group also performed at.  While B-Real had a real history of gangbanging, the group was seen as a chill rap-rock act with a sense of humor that played to mostly white crowds.  

A pre-beef B-Real & Ice Cube

Initially they were buddies with Ice Cube, another heavy in the Cali rap scene.  Cube made a cameo in their very first music video "How I Could Just Kill A Man" and later went on tour with the band in Australia circa 1994.  But somewhere along the way it all came unglued.  As the story goes, Cypress let Cube listen to a pre-release cut of their single "Throw Your Set in the Air" and claim that he stole the idea with his track "Friday" (from the soundtrack to the movie of the same name).  Here's a sample of the lyrics to the choruses from both songs so you can make up your own mind: 

Cube's version:  

Oh yeah
Throw your neighborhood in the air
If you don't care
Oh yeah
Throw your neighborhood in the air
If you don't care

...and the Cypress Hill version:

Throw your set in the air (C'mon)
Wave it around like you just don't care
Throw your set in the air (Throw it up, homes)
Wave it around like you just don't care

Point taken.  This rip-off resulted in the fiery "No Rest for the Wicked," a track on Cypress Hill's dark, gloomy 1995 album "III (Temples of Boom)."  In it the guys call out Cube for a variety of perceived sins, from plagiarism to putting a pipe on an album cover when he doesn't really smoke weed (!!!) to being fat to, uhh... cutting his hair to look like B-Real's?  Not the hardest diss track ever, but it is the only one to casually drop a Yiddish word* in a verse, ask if we know what it means and then define it for us, so it's got that going for it.  It fit nicely on this brooding album laced with exotic-sounding chimes & sitars and no shortage of hard lyrical content.  

Interspersed between verses is a lot of angry ranting by an unknown member of the group--either Muggs or Sen Dog--that contains the n-word.  If it's Muggs this is pretty scandalous because he's white (Italian descent).  And there's a 50/50 chance it is because Sen Dog played a less prevalent role in this album after breaking away to do his own thing while in Australia on tour (a fact Ice Cube alludes to in his comeback diss track "King of the Hill" with the line "when Sen Dog left your bitch ass in Australia").  But that just goes back to the '90s being a different time.  I imagine that even a Latino rapper like B-Real who has light skin & very little African ancestry would draw ire if he were to drop that word in today's climate, but I digress.  

This feud spiraled with more back and forth between Cypress Hill and Ice Cube's group Westside Connection until California's Black and Latino communities were ready to go to war for real over it.  There's an excellent episode of Beef that covers this chapter of Hip Hop History.  Cypress Hill's razor sharp wit came through on their next diss track, "Ice Cube Killa," which stole the beat from "King of the Hill" and featured an Ice Cube soundalike.  (I actually bought my 1st Cypress Hill record after hearing about them on the aforementioned track by Westside Connection, so that song had the opposite effect.  Sorry, fellas). 

While the general consensus at the time was that Cube & Co. had more street cred, now I feel the opposite when I go back and listen to all the tracks in this beef.  Sure, Cypress Hill may have stuck to rapping about weed & mental "illusions" and other not-so-hard things, but at least they were authentic about it.  In the intervening years they've stuck mostly to music and weed products while Cube has put out all kinds of corny family Blockbuster comedies and made some very sus songs/political moves that his younger self would've scoffed at.

Cypress Hill & Cube after squashing the beef.

Eventually the guys squashed the beef to avert disaster as they felt it wasn't worth causing actual tragedy in the streets, which was the right call.  They're friends to this day so the whole episode seems to have been a blip on the radar, thankfully.  But for a minute it got ugly.  Let this be a lesson to anyone thinking of stealing creative ideas from loved ones:  don't.  Especially if said loved ones happen to be rollin' 50 deep and strapped with enough gats to make the military shake in their boots. 

Song Highlights

No rest, no peace, no sleep
Doughboy rolling down the Hill 'cause it's so steep

Shoulda known that you couldn't hang in the alley
Good boy went to school out in the valley

"No Vaseline"
Just a rope and a chair and gasoline (burning your ass up!)

"You know what a chazzer* is, O'Shea?
A motherfucking pig that don't fly straight"
Where ya gonna run to? Where ya gonna hide?
Taadow, look at who's waitin' outside

I got Cube melting in a tray
Pulling up his card and fucking up his "good day"
Unoriginal rap veteran
The nigga who say he don't steal from his friends
Don't trust that nigga named O'Shea
Fuck 'im, and send him on his way!

"No Rest for the Wicked" by Cypress Hill