by Franklin Soults

In the small slew of interviews Cypress Hill gave in advance of the October 24 release of Cypress Hill III: Temple of Boom (Ruffhouse/Columbia), the popular rap crew made a point of distancing themselves from their second album while selling their third with promises that it would be "a lot more gangsta." Newer Cypress Hill fans might find this odd. On the face of it, Black Sunday compromised very little of the crew's original sound and fury, even though it broke big on MTV, moved three million units (twice as many as their debut), and won a solid following of alternative-rock fans on top of the group's hip-hop base.

In fact, with their crossover success Cypress Hill's hip-hop base started to erode. Consciously or not, Black Sunday subtly recast many of the group's hardcore traits in a broader, rock-friendly mold. The album's familiar sound tamed their once-threatening novelty, its cartoon imagery abstracted their in-your-face violence, and its front-and-center glorification of weed dissociated their hemp habit from its disturbing gangbanging context. No wonder they were so warmly greeted at Woodstock II and invited on three Lollapalooza tours in a row - where once Cypress Hill were menacing Latino homies hanging out in a blurry haze of buddah smoke, Black Sunday transformed them into Cheech and Chong acting out their aggression in a comic-horror flick.

No surprise that the band were stung by the ensuing criticism from their hip-hop fans. Sen Dog, B-Real, and DJ Muggs all grew up placing their loyalties, identities, and sense of self-respect firmly on the black side of America's deep racial divide, and no amount of white acceptance could change that. As someone who has lived his entire life on the other side of the divide, I have no idea how the hip-hop community will react to their new attempt to "keep it real." But as a huge fan of their debut, I see Temple of Boom taking them even farther from that stunning album than did Black Sunday.

Problem is, the crew set themselves the impossible task of proving they're still innovators while at the same time demonstrating they're down with the sound of the 'hood. DJ Muggs jettisons the tightly looped samples that once defined Cypress Hill's swaggering sound and replaces them with doomy synth textures and other standard hardcore gimmicks. B-Real and Sen Dog match the formula with mocking raps - clipped tighter than ever - about murder, mayhem, and all the fools that dissed them (like the Source magazine). The only relief comes from the few cuts where Muggs mellows the groove into ambient, psychedelic hip-hop and B-Real and Sen Dog follow his lead, dropping their homicidal fronting to celebrate once again the herb or explore the cranial membrane of an angry young loser. These experiments actually come closer to recapturing the transgressive thrill of early stuff like "How I Could Just Kill a Man" than all the raps that play by the hardcore rules.

You have to go to the edges of the hardcore scene, where rap mixes with dancehall reggae, to find an area where those rules are yet to be written. Reggae and rap have informed each other just about forever, but in the past year or so, the marketing gates between the genres have broken wide open. Struggling reggae artist Ini Kamoze was one of the first to benefit with "Here Comes the Hotstepper," a 1994 one-shot that lay a reggae-flavored melody and gangsta-flavored lyric on top of the beat to Taana Gardner's 1981 disco classic, "Heartbeat." The combination proved irresistible; a full year after its release, downtown office girls are still requesting the single during their coffee breaks.

Recently, Columbia tried to squeeze the song further by sticking it on a compilation of older material and titling the album after the hit. If nothing else, Here Comes the Hotstepper shows that Kamoze didn't get beyond the influence of Sly and Robbie, the famous production team who discovered him in 1983, until "Hotstepper" itself. But on his first album with EastWest Records, Lyrical Gangsta, he jumps at the opportunity to mix hardcore rap with reggae in every way he can think of.

It's more than a little disheartening to hear an artist who once sang about the tears caused by fools with guns (on Hotstepper's "Gunshot") now waxing romantic about his sidearm on "Ballistic Affair." But at least Kamoze's raps are informed with the world-conscious politics that he always cultivated as a reggae artist. It's enough to let you concentrate on the formal pleasures: how the American guest rappers do the toasting as the Jamaican Kamoze sticks to the hip-hop; how Kamoze's delivery is more reggae sing-song than hardcore declamation; how the smooth backing tracks draw equally from hard rap, R&B, and traditional reggae. These pleasures don't carry the whole album - starting with the lame "Hot Steppa," Kamoze slips into ragamuffin snoozeville - but Lyrical Gangsta still lifts higher than Temple of Boom. Put that down to the buoyant freedom gained from never looking back.