The Soul Assassins

The Soul Assassins were a crew of hip-hop artists under the guidance of Cypress Hill’s DJ/producer, Muggs. The main groups associated with Soul Assassins were Cypress Hill, House of Pain and Funkdoobiest. All three groups consisted of the following line-up: a lead MC that rapped 90% of the time, a useless 2nd MC that just repeated lines here and there, and a DJ. All three groups incorporated their ethnicity into their image and lyrics, even if it wasn’t always necessarily true. Cypress Hill has always been presented as a Hispanic group but Muggs himself is a NYC Italian. House of Pain’s DJ Lethal is LATVIAN! not Italian.

All of the beats were either by Muggs, the group’s DJ’s, or a dude named T-Ray, but they were all in Muggs’ style. This situation reminds me of the old days of Image Comics when guys like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld would hire up and coming artists and make them draw just like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld. House of Pain and Funkdoobiest each released 2 albums before they tired of Muggs basically being in charge of their albums and left Soul Assassins. Other artists, including Fatal, The Whooliganz and Call o’ Da Wild joined Soul Assassins but none of them could secure record deals. In 1997, Muggs released a solo album under the Soul Assassins name, featuring heavy hitting MCs of the day like RZA and Dr. Dre. In the end, this proved to be the last good Soul Assassins album, as Cypress Hill became lame only a year later with synthesizer beatz. Still, the Soul Assassins albums from 1991-1997 are all very good and represent an interesting period in hip-hop.