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CYPRESS HILL
Greatest Hits from the Bong
Columbia
***

Cypress Hill stopped making inventive hip-hop a long time ago, but there's still much cash to be made from their stoner shtick, as their ongoing draw as a live act demonstrates. The Latin rap crew worked best when B-Real's wheezy tales of paranoia, aggression and the difficulty of finding a reliable supply of weed went hand-in-hand with the deeply dark and intense beats that Muggs was firing up. Early tracks such as How I Could Just Kill a Man, Ain't Going Out Like That and Insane in the Brain remain bona-fide hip-hop classics, but the crew soon ran out of ideas of their own. As the years went by, they tried to bolster the size of their audience by chancing their arms with bad heavy-metal, awful skater rock, slip-shod Latin ska and poor reggae. It's inevitable, then, that this album steadily goes downhill from about the halfway point on. www.cypresshill.com