Songfacts®:

• When Ice Cube needed a song about smoking pot for his 1995 movie Friday, he knew who to call. Many West Coast rappers were known to partake and to celebrate it in their songs, but for Cypress Hill it was more of a lifestyle. They made it their mission to not just to smoke marijuana and write songs about it, but also to legalize it. They teamed with the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) to deliver a coherent message to the media explaining why pot should be legalized, and in many of their interviews it became a main topic.
  
  "Roll It Up, Light It Up, Smoke It Up" doesn't have any political implications but it is a comprehensive guide to various strains of weed (indo, buddha, Bombay...) and how to smoke them.
• Pot smoking is a thread throughout the movie Friday, so this song fits right in - Cypress Hill wrote it for the film. According to the group's lead rapper, B-Real, he was slated to have a role in the movie but couldn't because the group was on tour while it was filming.
• The Friday soundtrack went to #1 and sold over 2 million copies. It's a mix of new songs like "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" by Dr. Dre and old ones like "Mary Jane," Rick James' 1978 ode to the wacky weed. The movie spawned two sequels that did very well at the box office, but their soundtracks didn't make the same impact: Next Friday in 2000 and Friday After Next in 2002.
• Cypress Hill had a falling out with Ice Cube when he released the title song to Friday with a hook that sounds a lot like a song Cypress Hill played for him called "Throw Your Set In The Air."