Sen Dog
Sen Dog performing in 2016
Background information
Birth name	Senen Reyes
Born	(1965-11-20) November 20, 1965 Pinar del Río, Cuba
Origin	South Gate, California, U.S.
Genres	Hip hop rap rock rap metal nu metal
Occupation(s)	Rapper
Years active	1986–present
Labels	Columbia Ruffhouse Sony Suburban Noize

Senen Reyes (born November 20, 1965), also known by his stage name Sen Dog, is a Cuban-American rapper who is best known as a member of the hip hop group Cypress Hill and as the lead vocalist for the heavy metal band Powerflo.^[1] He has been developing a solo career in addition to his work with Cypress Hill and Powerflo, and is the lead vocalist for rap rock band SX-10.^[2][3]

Career

Sen Dog is a member of the rap group Cypress Hill, with whom he has had multiple albums in the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 album chart (including the No. 1 album Black Sunday). Some of the most well-known songs that he performs with Cypress Hill are "How I Could Just Kill a Man", "(Rap/Rock) Superstar" and "Insane in the Brain".

In the late 1990s, Sen Dog took a leave of absence from Cypress Hill to develop a new rock/rap band called SX-10. He wanted the band to have a funk sound with Latin influences. SX-10 released an album in 2000 called Mad Dog American.^[4][5] In 1996, he performed "Quien Es Ese Negro (Who's That Black Dude)" with Mellow Man Ace, MC Skeey, Mr. Rico, and DJ Rif for the AIDS benefit album, Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin, produced by the Red Hot Organization.

On September 30, 2008, Sen Dog released his first solo album, Diary of a Mad Dog, seventeen years after the release of the first Cypress Hill album. In an interview with HipHopDX, Sen Dog described how he felt that he had more control and could talk about personal aspects of his life with this album. He said, "With Cypress, I never really felt that comfortable to put personal aspects of my life into the music. It feels good to have the opportunity to be the quarterback, if you want to call it that, in the studio, and be creative. I definitely found that I had more in me than I thought I did."^[6] He said that he wanted to have fun with this album and that he has tried out a lot of different types of music but had no agenda for the type of music on Diary of a Mad Dog. "We've done the whole dark, morbid thing. The rock n' roll crossover; just a lot of things. I'm not going to have an agenda on this; I'm going to jam and record whatever is fun to me."^[7]

Personal life

In the 1980s, Sen Dog was affiliated with a Bloods gang set known as "Neighborhood Family", and later introduced his younger cousin and later bandmate, B-Real into the set before B-Real was shot in the lung in 1988.^[8][9] Sen Dog is known to be an avid marijuana smoker and Cypress Hill has made songs about the use of marijuana, including “ Stoned is the Way of the Walk”, "Legalize it", "I Wanna Get High" and "Hits from the Bong". Sen Dog gave B-Real his first joint when Sen Dog was 17 years old. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly Sen Dog said, "Pot got a bad name with the flower children of the '60s, and then all these hard drugs came in, and people started dropping like flies. Today, people want to get high on something that's not going to give them a heart attack, like speed or crack."^[10]

Reyes and former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo are childhood friends who attended the same high school.^[11]

He is the older brother of Mellow Man Ace (born Ulpiano Sergio Reyes). Reyes currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Discography

See also

• List of Cuban Americans
• Afro-Latin Americans

References

External links

• Official Cypress Hill website
• Sen Dog discography at Discogs