Cypress Hill is from South Gate, California, which was a rough area just outside of South Central Los Angeles. Their lead rapper, B-Real, was in a gang called the Latino Bloods and was shot when he was 17, and incident he details in their 1993 song "Lick A Shot."
"How I Could Just Kill A Man" is about life in South Gate, where gang banging could lead to murder. B-Real had to be ready to kill a man if he had to, or else he could be killed himself. They sum up the sentiment in the chorus:
Here is something you can't understand
How I could just kill a man
"How I Could Just Kill A Man" was Cypress Hill's first single. It was a #1 hit on the Rap chart and helped their self-titled debut album sell over 2 million copies, making them the first big-time Latino rap group. Their next album,
Black Sunday, was released in 1993 and was even bigger, selling over 4 million and crossing them over to a wider audience with the hit "
Insane In The Brain."
Cypress Hill was a trio at this time comprised of rappers B-Real and Sen Dog along with DJ Muggs. They followed West Coast gangsta rappers like N.W.A and Ice-T, but with a very distinctive sound. B-Real has a high-pitched, nasally voice that sounds almost comical, and Sen Dog provides the harsh growl - he's the one who does the line, "How I could just kill a man!" Their DJ/producer, DJ Muggs, was a chemist on the turntables, working in lots of samples and grooves into distinctive sonic collages.
"How I Could Just Kill A Man" hit in 1991 while gangsta rap was trending upward. A year later, Dr. Dre released The Chronic, which brought the genre to the forefront.
This song is chock full of samples, most prominently a looped guitar lick from the 1967 Jimi Hendrix song "
Are You Experienced?" There are also some bass beats pulled from "Tramp" by Lowell Fulson (1966), and some vocal interjections, including the New York politician Fiorello La Guardia saying "What does it all mean?"
The "All I wanted was a Pepsi" line comes from the 1983 hardcore classic by Suicidal Tendencies, "
Institutionalized."
The music video was directed by David Perez Shadi and shot in New York City, far from the group's West Coast stomping grounds. It features Ice Cube and A Tribe Called Quest rapper Q-Tip. It was the first video directed by Shadi, a photographer who did a lot of work for
The Source magazine. He later directed the video for "
Jump Around" by House Of Pain.
The song found a new audience when it was included in the soundtrack to the 2004 video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Rage Against The Machine included their version of "How I Could Just Kill A Man" on their 2001 covers album
Renegades. They released it as the second single from the album, following "
Renegades Of Funk" (originally by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force).
In 2016, B-Real joined members of Rage Against The Machine in the supergroup Prophets Of Rage, which also included Chuck D from Public Enemy. That group lasted until 2019.
Ice Cube, an early supporter of Cypress Hill, shows up in the video, but their bonhomie turned sour a few years later when Cypress Hill claimed they played him an unreleased song called "Throw Your Set In The Air" that Cube then pilfered for the hook to his song "Friday," which was released first.
These lines:
How do ya know where I'm at
When you haven't been where I've been?
Understand where I'm comin' from?
Are quoted from a 1974 episode of the TV series Good Times.
In Cypress Hill's 1993 track "When The Ship Goes Down," they call back to this song with the lines:
I think I got one to the chest hot damn
I didn't want to kill a man
On the group's 2001 track "Here Is Something You Can't Understand" by use many elements from "How I Could Just Kill A Man."
