Conducted in March 2012. Read the full article.
From the piece
You recently said that dubstep could be seen as a progression of hip-hop.
When you take it down and you dissect it, and you get to the foundation of it all, there’s something…you can definitely rhyme to it.
Dubstep is still something that’s mainly performed by DJs. And DJing, it’s an element of hip-hop, so when you take a cerebral outlook towards it you can find that you can still be yourself as a hip-hop person. It’s not…we didn’t take it to a point where it wasn’t going to have a strong presence of Cypress Hill in it.
The cultural aspect of hip-hop is something that can lend itself to dubstep?
Exactly. When you get that hip-hop element in it, you start giving it another identity. With ‘Roll It, Light It’, and with the video — it’s a great song and everything but there’s other stuff going on in that that makes you go: “Oh shit.” It’s taking it to another fucking level, you know what I mean?
Cypress Hill has often experimented with genre. Do you think that kind of experimentation is important in music?
It’s all a part of musical evolution and musical styles growing. I’ve always been into the whole experimental sound, just trying something new, and different, to see what happens – I’ve always been down for that. I mean, way back when Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. did their thing…I’ve always been interested in that kind of work. Right back to the stuff Afrika Bambaataa was doing: all that stuff worked.
As a kid that was the stuff that caught my attention. I didn’t know it then but when I eventually got around to recording my own music, I was always down for “Let’s try something different”; “let’s rap over AC/DC, over ‘Back in Black’.” We were always trying to do something different, back when we were growing, as kids, and when we got to a point where we could do different things – I thought it was great, and I thought it was good, and it worked for us, and for that reason I’ll always take that chance and take that risk and see what comes up, because most of the time, you’re going to come up with some really interesting stuff. And, I think, such is the case with the Cypress Hill-Rusko EP.
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