Cypress Hill - Insane in the Brain

Some songs are too big for the album that contains them. "Insane In The Brain" is one of them: three and a half minutes that took Cypress Hill from a respected underground act to a group whose hook every teenager in America could recite by the end of 1993.

DJ Muggs built it around a chopped drum break and a squealing loop that nobody has ever satisfactorily identified as anything other than pure Muggs, then let B-Real's nasal, unmistakable delivery do the rest. The song was aimed at Chubb Rock in a beef that has long since become a footnote, but stripped of that context it works as pure adrenaline. It carried Black Sunday to number one and has been sampled, covered and licensed relentlessly ever since.

Mr Bongo's reissue programme exists to put exactly this kind of record back in the racks as a proper seven inch single, cut loud and pressed for DJs rather than collectors' shelves.

Seven inch 45 RPM reissue on Mr Bongo. The LP version on the A side, the full instrumental on the flip.