It is the best - or one of the best - rap group I know because their words are perfect in their violence and yet deeper than just plain violent ? They contain suffering that gives the violence a density it wouldn't have otherwise. But the best part of this group is the musical background which is an essential part of the work, of the art of theirs. Their music has a classical dimension that we could easily compare or trace back to some great classical, romantic or even baroque music. The metallic drums are of course fooling no one. The other instruments or sounds are very close to what they could be in - to shock if I can some classicists - Tachaikovsky and other Russian composers of that generation, but also the whole palette of the American symphonists, or Dvarak, and so many others. They mix musical sounds with the greatest pleasure in the musical orgy they create this way. Don't be afraid if you get some mexican atmosphere, suddenly, in one piece. But is this CD, is this musical score, concert, work, what its title announces ? Is it a death rite, a funeral danse, a danse macrabre, a requiem of modern times, what we also called a long time ago a Descente aux Ténébres, a Descent into Tenebrae ? Yes it sure is, yes, definitely yes. A descent into Hell and an attempt to come back alive from that voyage to the Kingdom of Death and Hecate. And the darkness is not only in the destination. It is everywhere in the language, in the accents, in the intonations, in the looks of the sound. Everything slightly colorful has its place here no matter how little. This is a CD of darkness, of all the shades of black and dark grey, a voyage underground to better know what is on top of this bloody earth, I mean an earth where blood seems at times to be running in the riverbeds or in the city gutters just as if the monsoon were coming from the exhaust pipe of a slaughterhouse, and guns are at hand everywhere grasped by angry fingers that only want to compensate their frustration by pulling on the trigger or by stabbing a back with a blade. Sure signs of an impotent world in which fertility has been reduced to sterile masturbation of a mind completely sterilized by the cult of weapons and violence. This is the vision Goya has made famous in so many of his drawings. Picasso made it a masterpiece with his Guernica. Bosch and Brueghel have made all that apocalyptic chaos more famous than any painting about the descent into Hell or the Last Jusgment adorning so many walls of so many romanesque churches in Europe. That's the inspiration of these Cypress Hill and they real give you the desire to ****** (there will never be enough stars) this cynical world.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne