Geto Boys' The Geto Boys 9781628929461, 9781501305214, 9781628929485

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THE GETO BOYS

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: Dig Me Out by Jovana Babović Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly and many more …

The Geto Boys

Rolf Potts

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Rolf Potts, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Potts, Rolf, author. Title: The Geto Boys / Rolf Potts. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: 33 1/3 Identifiers: LCCN 2015043358 | ISBN 9781628929461 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Geto Boys (Musical group) | Rap musicians--Texas--Houston--Biography. | BISAC: MUSIC / General. | MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Rap & Hip Hop. | MUSIC / History & Criticism. Classification: LCC ML421.G465 P68 2016 | DDC 782.421649092/2--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043358 ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2946-1 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2948-5 ePub: 978-1-6289-2949-2 Series: 33 13 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

The need for escape and self-definition through detachments from the familiar is rooted in a history that has generated an ideology requiring alternative realities, in which the self can assume its uniqueness and recover its freedom in the climate of the new and unexpected—just when history has all but terminated the possibility of that alternative. — Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler (1991) While blues obsess over the theme of mobility, hip-hop is as local as a zip code. In hip-hop … there are no references to highways or trains; railroads have been replaced by another central reference: the City. Or, more specifically, the fractured territories known collectively as the Ghetto. — William Jelani Cobb, To the Break of Dawn (2007) I have never shot anybody, never killed anybody, never raped anybody. But we have to tell you about the violence because I don’t know any kid who gets up in the ghetto and the neighborhood is quiet. — Bushwick Bill, on TV One’s Unsung: The Geto Boys (2013)

Track Listing

1. Fuck ’Em (4:03) 2. Size Ain’t Shit’ (3:34) 3. Mind of a Lunatic (5:10) 4. Gangsta of Love (5:14) 5. Trigga Happy Nigga (3:47) 6. Life in the Fast Lane (3:27) 7. Assassins (5:09) 8. Do it Like a G.O. (4:25) 9. Read These Nikes (3:38) 10. Talkin’ Loud Ain’t Saying Nothin’ (3:55) 11. Scarface (4:54) 12. Let a Ho Be a Ho (3:42) 13. City Under Siege (4:29)

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Contents

Track Listing vii Introduction 1 Fuck ’Em 7 Size Ain’t Shit 15 Do it Like A G.O. 23 Scarface 31 Let A Ho Be A Ho 45 Life In The Fast Lane 53 Mind Of A Lunatic 60 Gangster Of Love 68 Trigga Happy Nigga 77 City Under Siege 85 Assassins 93 Talkin’ Loud Ain’t Saying Nothin’ 101 Read These Nikes 109 Acknowledgments 118 Notes 119  ix •

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Introduction

Hip-hop, particularly gangsta rap, also attracts listeners for whom the “ghetto” is a place of adventure … an imaginary alternative to suburban boredom. —Robin D. G. Kelley, “Lookin’ for the ‘Real’ Nigga” (1997)

One year after I graduated from college, having saved up some money from a landscaping job in the Pacific Northwest, I set out to explore North America by Volkswagen Vanagon for what eventually became eight months. At that point in my life I’d traveled so little that most every place on my itinerary felt laced with novelty and excitement. Over the course of that year I would survive the devastation of southern California’s Northridge earthquake, subject myself to the drunken scrum of a New Orleans Mardi Gras, and set foot in New York City for the very first time. I would hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, raft North Carolina whitewater, camp in the mountains of Vermont, and backpack through fire-scarred Yellowstone backcountry. Of all the places I was about to experience that year, however, no metropolis or national park topped the  1 •

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THE GETO BOYS

sense of anticipation—and foreboding—I felt whenever I considered my plans to visit Fifth Ward, Texas. Known locally as the “Bloody Nickel,” Houston’s notoriously violent Fifth Ward was anything but a tourist destination. It was, as the Texas Monthly put it, “Texas’ toughest, proudest, baddest ghetto.”1 My fascination for this place was connected to its real-life reputation for danger, but its allure went beyond its day-to-day reality as a gritty, sprawling slum on the northeast edge of downtown Houston. In my imagination, the Fifth Ward was a mythic territory on a par with Mordor or Tombstone, a place where deranged killers wielded chainsaws, drug-trade gun battles wiped out gang bangers by the dozens, women rewarded brawn and cruelty with sex, and all signs of weakness were punished with beatdowns. This violent, fantastical vision of the city—a vision so arresting and so unsettling that I wound up setting out to see Fifth Ward for myself—was the result of my brief obsession with a 1990 gangsta rap album entitled The Geto Boys. I’d first become aware of The Geto Boys a few years earlier, in July of 1991, when two Kansas teenagers claimed that listening to the album had inspired them to murder a 26-year-old man in Dodge City. I was living in my hometown of Wichita that summer, working as a news intern at the local ABC affiliate. Each morning, as I edited video and rehashed AP wire reports for the Good Morning Kansas show, I kept track of developments in the Dodge City case. According to defense lawyers, the song “Mind of a Lunatic” had driven 16-year-olds Christopher Martinez and Vincent Perez into a state of temporary insanity, leading them to shoot a stranger  2 •

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I ntroduction

named Bruce Romans in the head as he walked across a bridge at the edge of town. “It was partly liquor, partly marijuana, and—probably most of all—it was a rap tape of the Geto Boys,” Martinez’s attorney had told the court while outlining the teens’ motivation for the shooting. “There is an imminent danger to young people getting hold of this thing,” Perez’s lawyer added, brandishing a cassette of The Geto Boys. “It can literally mesmerize you from the repeated bass sounds. The words are horrible— it’s about raping and killing.”2 Both lawyers argued that the lyrics to “Mind of a Lunatic” read like an incantational prescription for murder. That August, when I returned to the college I’d been attending in Oregon, I discovered that one of my dormitory roommates had just bought a CD copy of The Geto Boys. Its black-and-white cover art displayed realistic-looking mugshots of four tough-looking black men; its track listing featured songs like “Fuck ’Em,” “Let a Ho Be a Ho,” and “Trigga Happy Nigga.” The lyrics—angry, graphic celebrations of violence and depravity—were unimaginably offensive. Within a week, my roommates and I were blasting the album on a nightly basis. It is difficult, when you’re a middle-class white guy, to describe the experience of listening to hardcore gangsta rap without making yourself sound a bit ridiculous. For all of the high-stakes scenarios that underpinned the Geto Boys’ tracks—drug deals, beat-downs, murder—I rocked those songs in the low-stakes environs of my dormitory suite. While in real life the Geto Boys presumably worried about drive-by shootings and police brutality, my world revolved around homework and track  3 •

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THE GETO BOYS

practice, tentative female flirtations, and dipshit male rivalries. In a certain sense, I cranked the tracks on The Geto Boys not to reflect on their meaning, but because (as was the case with songs by Pantera and Ministry) they made me feel faintly off-kilter, amped-up, larger than the moment I was living in. Unlike those metal and industrial bands, the Geto Boys’ unabashed raunch and brutality also pushed me into uncomfortable emotional directions. The more offensive the song was, the more I responded to it; I felt hilarity and shame when I listened to “Gangster of Love,” thrill and horror when I cued up “Mind of a Lunatic.” And, fantastical as the Geto Boys’ lyrical narratives sounded, the fact that they were pegged to a real place—Fifth Ward—made their angry rejection of social rectitude feel more real somehow. I’m not sure when I first got the idea to travel to inner-city Houston in person. It probably started out as an off-hand joke with my roommates, since the Geto Boys’ vision of Fifth Ward had grown into a metaphor of sorts to us—an action-packed inversion of the life we led on our safe, sleepy, exurban Oregon campus. Moreover, given the insipid pop-culture atmosphere of the time, when corporate record labels were still pushing lame rock and rap acts like Warrant and Vanilla Ice (Nirvana’s game-changing Nevermind wouldn’t drop for another month), I thrilled at the Geto Boys’ profane, provincial, neighborhood-specific urban hauteur. Their Fifth Ward gangsta pose was, in many ways, an echo of N.W.A’s mythified Compton, but by late 1991 (after John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood had been a huge box-office success) inner-city Los Angeles felt like a known entity, a place of palm trees, barbecues, and  4 •

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I ntroduction

tricked-out low-riders. By contrast, Fifth Ward felt raw, gritty, devoid of glamour. A few years later, as I planned out my multi-month journey around North America, the fascination for Fifth Ward remained. My itinerary for Texas included a number of iconic travel attractions (including Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch and Austin’s Sixth Street indie-rock clubs), but no destination held the same appeal for me as did the run-down urban area northeast of downtown Houston. Hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose has described white consumption of commercial hip-hop as “ghetto tourism,”3 and my desire to visit the Fifth Ward might be seen as a literal manifestation of that complicated notion, no doubt intertwined with a degree of crosscultural voyeurism and “exoticism” (i.e. the desire for a brief experience that “posits the lure of difference while protecting its practitioners from close involvement”).4 But my motivation was just as much tied to frustration with the prescribed rituals of tourism, which invariably steer visitors to comfortable, class-appropriate attractions that underscore America’s idealized vision of itself. Though I might not have articulated it quite this way at the time, the parts of Houston that had benefited from Cold War-era investment (like the tourist-friendly Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) felt far less worthy of my attention than parts of the city that had suffered from Cold War-era neglect. As a middle-class urban consumer, I’d been urged to ignore places like the Fifth Ward; as a fan of The Geto Boys, I felt compelled to see it for myself. On a practical level, wandering uninvited into the most dangerous neighborhood in Texas posed a problem. I spent the weeks leading up to my visit stewing over this  5 •

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THE GETO BOYS

challenge before a late-night viewing of Cops gave me an epiphany. The following morning I dialed directory assistance, tracked down the northeast substation of the Houston Police Department, and reserved myself a citizen ride-along. Like any travel experience, Houston proved surprising in ways that simultaneously confirmed and refuted my Geto Boys-tinged expectations of the place. Moreover, despite the fact that my career as a writer would take me around the globe many times over the next two decades, I’ll confess that I’ve never quite had a travel experience like the one I had in Houston, in part because no other album has disturbed and enthralled me quite like The Geto Boys. And, despite the fact that Nirvana’s Nevermind is the album most strongly associated with the early 1990s, I’d argue that the Geto Boys achieved something far more emblematic. By the end of the decade, grunge had long since burned itself out, while hip-hop had burst free of its East Coast–West Coast polarity to become the most popular style of music in America. One could argue, with good reason, that any of a dozen hip-hop albums from the early 1990s (including the Geto Boys’ 1991 We Can’t Be Stopped) might be considered more influential than The Geto Boys. But, in creating an album that was both sonically innovative and unprecedentedly vulgar, the Geto Boys had accomplished something that went beyond music. To paraphrase a sentiment from Don DeLillo’s Mao II, this group of young men from Fifth Ward, Texas had figured out the “language of being noticed”—which is, in the end, the only language America understands. This book explores how that happened.  6 •

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Fuck ’Em

What are they gonna do? Put us in jail for making a record? —Eazy E of N.W.A in a Spin interview (1990)

If moral panic is the metric by which one can measure the mainstream arrival of a new music genre in America, rap came of age somewhere in the eighteen-month window between the independent release of the Geto Boys’ Grip It! On That Other Level in March of 1989, and that album’s reincarnation as an eponymously retitled, Rick Rubin-supervised major-label remix that hit stores in the fall of 1990. Though the Geto Boys would eventually play a prominent role in the uproar, the media initially fixated on two groups to whom the Texas rap group would often be compared—southern California’s pioneering “gangsta rappers” N.W.A, and south Florida’s raunchy, bass-heavy 2 Live Crew. As with ragtime, jazz, and rock before it, hip-hop music had seized the attention of America’s moral guardians at the very moment its more salacious-minded practitioners found an eager audience among middle-class white teenagers. Miami’s 2 Live Crew had previously  7 •

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THE GETO BOYS

released two albums full of sexually explicit rhymes on its independent Luke Skyywalker Records label, but politicians paid the group little mind until “Me So Horny,” a single from its 1989 album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, fell into heavy rotation on a Miami Top 40 station and began to ascend the Billboard Hot 100. Jack Thompson, a conservative lawyer from Coral Gables, spearheaded a campaign to restrict sales of the album in Florida’s Broward County, eventually leading to a US District Court ruling that declared the album’s lyrics obscene. A record store owner in Ft. Lauderdale was subsequently arrested for selling As Nasty As They Wanna Be, and members of 2 Live Crew were detained and charged with obscenity after a show at an adults-only club in Hollywood, Florida.1 Though Thompson’s Florida-based censorship campaign eventually went on to target N.W.A’s million-selling Straight Outta Compton album, the Los Angeles-based gangsta rappers had already been the subject of scrutiny at the federal level. In a 1989 letter to distributor Priority Records, FBI Assistant Director Milt Ahlerich had condemned the group for its song “Fuck Tha Police,” asserting that “recordings such as the one from N.W.A … [encourage] violence against and disrespect for the law enforcement officer.” According to a report in the New York Times, local police departments had taken to faxing a version of the song’s lyrics from city to city, “and since off-duty police officers often double as concert security personnel, promoters found it increasingly difficult to put on N.W.A. concerts.”2 Shows were canceled or disrupted in Chattanooga, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Tyler, Texas, and police officers  8 •

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F uck ’ E m

at a Michigan concert stormed the stage and ended the show when the group attempted to sing the offending song. “We just wanted to show the kids that you can’t say ‘fuck the police’ in Detroit,” an officer later told the Hollywood Reporter.3 The furor over 2 Live Crew’s puerile celebration of sex and N.W.A’s menacing depiction of gang violence was inseparable from the fact that hip-hop music was no longer a provincial novelty built around staccato party rhymes and disco-era breakbeats. Just over one decade after the first rap singles were pressed on to vinyl, hip-hop was a multifaceted (if largely East Coast-based) genre that had come to encompass LL Cool J’s energetic new-school raps, Salt-N-Pepa’s danceable girl-pop, Ice-T’s hard-edged street narratives, Public Enemy’s densely produced political provocations, the Digital Underground’s whacked-out party grooves, Queen Latifah’s socially conscious feminist rhymes, the Beastie Boys’ ebullient sonic pastiche, and De La Soul’s jazz-inflected Afrocentrism. Radio-friendly dance-pop acts like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice dominated the Billboard charts for much of 1990, and Yo! MTV Raps was firmly entrenched as the highest rated show on cable TV’s hugely influential twenty-four-hour music-video channel. Just as significantly, rock ’n’ roll, which had once been the soundtrack of transgressive youth, was aging along with its Baby Boomer fans. With punk dead and heavy metal lost in a haze of hairspray, hardcore rap was becoming the high-octane sound of adolescent rebellion. Rap’s new strain of nihilistic anti-authoritarianism didn’t just rankle the likes of Tipper Gore  9 •

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THE GETO BOYS

(who suggested that hip-hop would lead American girls to “think of themselves as ‘bitches’ to be abused”) and Newsweek (which declared the attitude underpinning rap to be “repulsive”)4; it also unsettled political progressives, the black middle class, and hip-hop’s East Coast gatekeepers. Left-wing academics wrote despairing letters to the New York Times, insisting that the likes of 2 Live Crew were “dangerous to the status and safety of women”, aging black jazz aficionados took to the pages of Billboard to condemn rappers as “irresponsible and inarticulate,”5 and the New York-based rap establishment, startled equally by N.W.A’s violent lyrics and multi-platinum success, responded to Straight Outta Compton with a mix of high-minded finger-wagging and outright hostility.6 This reaction was, of course, very much in keeping with a time-honored American tradition of alarm and outrage in the face of boundary-pushing new music. When syncopated ragtime music became a craze in the late nineteenth century, cultural commentators insisted that its euphemistic allusions to promiscuity and violence were an “evil influence on morals and tastes,” while black intellectuals worried that this “low and degrading class of music” would reinforce racist stereotypes about African Americans.7 Two decades later, jazz was condemned as regressive by radio evangelists and academic Marxists alike, and when rock ’n’ roll became popular in the late 1950s it drew the scorn of everyone from Frank Sinatra (who called it a “brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression”) to the civic authorities of Santa Cruz (who banned rock performances in 1956, citing “the provocative rhythms of an all-negro band”), to J. Edgar •

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Hoover’s FBI (which, no joke, spent two years scrutinizing the lyrics to “Louie, Louie”).8 Curiously, the backlash against rap found its most salient historical parallel not in music, but in comic books, which became wildly popular by tweaking the assumptions of mainstream taste in the years after World War II. Like the upstart rap groups of the late 1980s, the pulp comics of the late 1940s appealed to young consumers through their vivid depiction of vice, lust, horror, and lawlessness, often told from the perpetrators’ points of view. As David Hajdu notes in his book The Ten-Cent Plague, these comics expressed “a cynicism toward authority of all sorts, and a tolerance, if not an appetite, for images of prurience and violence.” Predictably, parents and authorities became convinced that comic books would lead to an outbreak of low-class licentiousness and copycat brutality. Editorials in national newspapers called for action, and by the early 1950s vendors in dozens of American cities were subject to arrest for selling certain crime- or sex-themed comics.9 Implicit in this censorship push was the conviction that comics were being “sold” by exploitative publishers rather than “purchased” by young people who enjoyed the raw nature of the content, understood where it converged with (and departed from) reality, and thrilled at its rejection of Middle-American propriety. When activists showed up at schools to confiscate comics and decree that “America is a land of good, strong, law-abiding people who read good books” (as happened in Wisconsin in 1954), teens were not blind to the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the sentiment. Despite a loyal national readership in the tens of millions, however, comics •

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publishers ultimately bowed to government pressure to self-police their content, adopting an industry-wide “Comics Code” in the fall of 1954. By 1955, American comic books were effectively censored, and the industry’s more adventurous artists found themselves out of work. As it happened, N.W.A and 2 Live Crew (and, soon thereafter, the Geto Boys) came to prominence when the American music industry was engaged in its own debate over the extent to which it would police its own content. Black-and-white “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” stickers became standardized early in 1990, and by April of that year WaxWorks, a major music retailer with stores in thirty-seven states, had announced it would no longer stock albums bearing the stickers. Activists on both ends of the political spectrum were pushing corporate record companies to adopt more concrete methods of preempting offensive material, and Arista, Atlantic, Columbia, Elektra, Epic, EMI, MCA, and RCA had all developed protocols that warned artists of the possible “consequences” of their material.10 N.W.A and 2 Live Crew had reached national prominence in part because their songs were shocking, yet a big reason why they had the creative freedom to shock so unapologetically is that their music had been originally released on non-corporate, self-affiliated regional labels: Compton, California’s Ruthless Records, and Liberty City, Florida’s Luke Skyywalker Records. Roughly halfway along the 2,700-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that separates Compton from Liberty City sat a third provincial urban district—Fifth Ward, Texas, which rose to notoriety when the Geto Boys blew the lid off the rap–morality debate in the summer of 1990. Birthplace •

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to the upstart indie Rap-A-Lot Records, Fifth Ward was the narrative tableau for the tracks on The Geto Boys, the lyrics of which went far beyond the raunch and violence that had gotten N.W.A and 2 Live Crew into so much trouble. “With songs about mutilation, rape, and murder, graphically described and shouted over ominous funk,” the New York Times noted, “it makes the 2 Live Crew’s lewd scenarios sound like a society luncheon.” On the eve of the album’s release, in August of 1990, Geffen Records announced it would renege on its plans to distribute The Geto Boys, citing concerns that its content endorsed the depraved acts it described. “I was flabbergasted that people would describe violence that graphically in music,” Geffen Vice President Bryn Bridenthal told the Associated Press. “People will think this is like 2 Live Crew, which is kind of silly, just pure sex; I was frightened by this.”11 The fact that the Geto Boys were ever in a position to rattle America’s cultural gatekeepers represented a hard-won milestone for the Houston-based group, a coming out of sorts for southern hip-hop, and the beginning of the end of the discussion about where rap belonged in the popular music marketplace. In the months and years that followed, hip-hop was destined to become more than a New York-centric folk movement, or a politically conscious race genre, or a corporate–assimilationist pop phenomenon constrained by the music industry equivalent of the Comics Code. As of 1990, when The Geto Boys doubled down on all the controversy that had come before it, rap had arrived as a truly national music that (among other things) reserved the right to say whatever the fuck it wanted to say, and be whatever the fuck it wanted to be. •

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For the young men behind the creation of The Geto Boys, this was the realization of a complicated artistic journey that had begun nearly half a decade earlier in a little-known corner of a Texas metropolis that had never been known for its hip-hop.

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Size Ain’t Shit

Rap’s gone national, and is in the process of going regional … Rap spread out from New York to attract a loyal national audience. Now America is rapping back. —Nelson George in the Village Voice (1988)

The story of the Geto Boys is inextricably tied to a diminutive, calm-voiced, coolly intimidating Fifth Ward entrepreneur named James Smith, who founded the earliest incarnation of the group while working as a used car dealer on a lot north of downtown Houston in 1986. Though Smith’s career would later draw comparisons to that of Death Row Records strongman Marion “Suge” Knight, his success story played out more like a hip-hop version of The Great Gatsby. Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dakota-born James Gatz harnessed a “Platonic conception of himself” in transforming into Jay Gatsby, Houston-born James Smith (who would eventually rechristen himself “J. Prince”)1 resolved at an early age to overcome the poverty of his youth and reinvent himself on more glamorous terms. As with Gatsby, Smith’s career arc came to be intertwined with •

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rumors of underworld investment (including $200,000 in alleged seed money from drug kingpin Michael “Harry-O” Harris),2 suspicions of illegal commerce (a DEA investigation into his business practices would last for much of the 1990s),3 early professional ventures in New York City, and the joys of flashy cars and high living. Unlike Gatsby, however, Smith never lingered on the East Coast, electing instead to build Rap-A-Lot Records, the enterprise that would come to define him, in his hometown. To this day he is considered to be the godfather of hip-hop in Houston. In 1986, however, James Smith wasn’t setting out to become a music mogul so much as appease a pair of school-skipping teenage battle-rappers who’d heard he was interested in hip-hop and had lobbied him to sponsor their act. Smith, the eldest of five children, had been raised by a mother who’d often struggled to make ends meet. He’d focused his energies into earning money since, as an eight-year-old, he went door to door offering to mow his neighbors’ lawns. As an adult he’d worked as an insurance clerk and bank teller before moving on to the used car business in his early twenties. He had toyed with the notion of music promotion as a sideline to keep his rap-obsessed stepbrother out of trouble, but ultimately it was the two truant high schoolers, Juke Box (Keith Rogers) and Raheem (Oscar Ceres), who sought him out at his used car lot and wheedled him into financing a rap recording. “I made a deal with them,” Smith recalled later, “y’all go to school, I’ll support you in rap. They put me in a position where I had to honor my word because every day after school they would show up at my grandmother’s house and be performing on the •

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porch. I wasn’t aware of the money that could be made in the music industry.”4 Smith paired Juke Box and Raheem with his stepbrother, Thelton Polk, who rapped under the name K-9. Raheem suggested that the trio call themselves the “Hip-Hop Vigilantes,” but Smith already had a name in mind—the “Ghetto Boys,” which aimed to evoke both the specific reality of life in Houston’s Fifth Ward and the universal reality of inner cities everywhere. “I fell in love with the name first,” he said. “That was a name that I came up with because I felt like there were ghettos all over the world and I thought that it was a name that I could replenish over and over again if I wanted to.”5 In early 1987 Rap-A-Lot released its first record, a twelve-inch single by the Ghetto Boys, entitled “Car Freak.” Simplistic and catchy, with a bouncing electrofunk beat, the song is a self-deprecating critique of women who are only interested in guys who have nice cars. The Ghetto Boys’ debut single hit Houston’s record shops and swap meets at a moment when rap music was enjoying a watershed moment of mainstream exposure. Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell had just become the first ever platinum-certified hip-hop album, and the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill was a few weeks away from being the first rap LP to reach #1 on the Billboard pop charts. Despite nationwide popularity, however, rap recordings were overwhelmingly a product of the East Coast. Apart from a couple one-off novelty singles recorded a few years earlier, “Car Freak” was the first locally produced rap record to appear in Houston. Many rap fans still saw hip-hop records as a New York thing, and the •

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Ghetto Boys initially drew a mixed reaction in their own hometown. “Houston, believe it or not, was a hard nut to crack back then,” Smith said. “Just because you put out a record, everybody didn’t embrace you. At the time, [local radio stations] played nothing but East Coast music. We were considered country and laughed at, as if our raps wouldn’t qualify.”6 Without a mainstream radio outlet, Smith focused on getting “Car Freak” exposure in Houston’s nightclub scene. Hip-hop had been blossoming in local nightclubs since the mid-1980s, first at a place called Boneshaker’s, and later at clubs like Flashes, Gucci, and the cavernous Rhinestone Wrangler (where a weekly diss contest called “Rap Attack” was becoming a key showcase for local MCs). Since a significant portion of rap’s local fan base was too young to get into nightclubs, DJs at inner-city teen hangouts like Super Skate and Rainbow Roller Rink also helped spread the word about the Ghetto Boys. Perhaps most importantly, “Car Freak” got significant airtime on “Kidz Jamm,” a Saturday morning music show on Texas Southern University’s nonprofit radio station. Originally conceived in 1982 as a way to give high school students hands-on radio experience, Kidz Jamm and its exuberant teenage DJs wound up pioneering hip-hop programming in the city, and soon became a key outlet for local acts. By the summer of 1987, the Ghetto Boys had recorded a radio commercial for the Houston Metro, and won a coveted spot opening for LL Cool J at Delmar Stadium.7 Sensing financial promise in his music label, James Smith partnered with Cliff Blodget, a white hip-hop enthusiast and computer-tech engineer who’d recently •

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moved to Texas from Seattle, and together they moved the record company to New York City. Though Rap-A-Lot’s East Coast experiment lasted under six months, it helped give Smith a sense for how the music business worked. “I would go to Def Jam and [music industry executive] Lyor Cohen actually opened up check books and showed me the numbers,” he recalled later. “I was like ‘Whoa—it’s some money in this shit!’”8 When Rap-A-Lot found no traction in New York, Smith and Blodget moved back to Houston to recruit talent and produce a handful of new recordings, including Making Trouble, the Ghetto Boys’ first full-length album. By this time, K-9 had landed in jail on a burglary charge, so Smith recruited Ready Red (Collins Leysath), a promising turntable talent from the Rhinestone Wrangler’s DJ contests, into the Ghetto Boys fold. Whereas the group’s previous members had cut their teeth on Texas schoolyard battle-rap, New Jersey-born DJ Ready Red had a music pedigree that traced back to the seminal days of hip-hop, when his cousins from the Bronx and Long Island introduced him to the early work of Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizzard Theodore. After getting a pair of Technics SL-B101 turntables and teaching himself how to DJ, he spun records for a Trenton-based group called The Mighty MCs as a teenager before moving to live with his sister in Houston in early 1987. In addition to Red’s skill on the turntables, he also owned a Roland 909 drum machine; with Smith’s help he added an eight-channel mixer and an SP-1200 sampler that (among other things) allowed him to loop snippets of Brian De Palma’s 1983 gangster movie Scarface into •

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his mixes. When Raheem withdrew from the Ghetto Boys to concentrate on his solo career, Red talked his old Mighty MCs collaborator Johnny C (Jonathan Carmichael) into moving to Texas to lay down tracks for the Making Trouble album.9 By the time Ready Red, Johnny C, and Juke Box began recording in a makeshift studio at Smith’s car lot in late 1987, Rap-A-Lot Records had signed three other acts and attracted the attention of A&M Records, which was looking to expand into the increasingly popular rap genre. A&M had previously put out albums by artists like Janet Jackson and Bryan Adams, and balked at the Ghetto Boys’ hard-edged style, opting instead to promote former Ghetto Boy Raheem, whose good looks and lyrical delivery drew comparisons to LL Cool J. Raheem’s pop-inflected album The Vigilante debuted on A&M in early 1988, and his single “Dance Floor” received airtime on MTV. Rap-A-Lot released Making Trouble around the same time, and, while the Ghetto Boys didn’t enjoy the same degree of national exposure as their former MC, they did win a slot on the Fat Boys’ summer Wipeout Tour, where they opened for groups like Salt-N-Pepa and Ice-T.10 Nearly three decades after its release, Making Trouble sounds like an antiquated curiosity compared to the music that would come to define the Geto Boys’ later efforts. A mix of braggadocio, hardcore, and political tracks, the album’s simple beats and tag-team shouting made it sound like a fairly orthodox (and outdated) Run-D.M.C. knockoff. Though the deftly mixed Scarface samples and lurid gore of tracks like “Assassins” hinted at where the group was headed, the •

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Ghetto Boys’ sound was not distinctive enough to stand out from the rap that was already coming out of New York. “We were trying to be commercial,” Ready Red recalled later. “We did what we heard Run and them doing, what we heard the Fat Boys doing. We was trying to be commercial, acceptable, until we found out that that wasn’t gonna happen from a Houston-based rap group.”11 In the face of modest sales for Making Trouble and Rap-A-Lot’s other 1988 releases (Royal Flush’s Uh Oh! and Def IV’s Nice and Hard), James Smith talked of phasing out his music business and returning his focus to automobile sales. Instead, he decided to go against the received wisdom of rap’s East Coast trendsetters and reinvent the Ghetto Boys as the unapologetically raw gangsta-mythologists of Houston’s Fifth Ward. “I had invested so much money into the group I came to a stage where I said, ‘This is my last piece of money and I’mma do this my way,’” he noted. “I didn’t want to be nobody else. I wanted to be us. I wanted to be country. Everything that we was and we represented, that’s what I wanted to do. So I had to create something that would cause controversy and get publicity in order to sell records.”12 Whether Smith’s epiphany was the result of gut instinct or a calculated business strategy (Blodget later told the New York Times that “market research had shown demand for harsher lyrics”13), the erstwhile used car salesman wasted little time in recruiting new rappers and recasting the Ghetto Boys as an in-your-face Houston hardcore supergroup. By the end of 1988, DJ Ready Red was the only Making Trouble-era member left in •

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the group, which was by then hard at work writing and recording Grip It! On That Other Level—an album that would come to set a new standard for raunch and brutality in the newly emergent genre of gangsta rap.

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Do It Like A G.O.

In battling, the rapper is gambling with the most valuable commodity available: one’s rep and the respect that flows from it. —William Jelani Cobb, To the Break of Dawn (2007)

Of all the moments in James Smith’s quest to “shake Houston inside out” and find the city’s toughest MCs, the most significant took place in DJ Ready Red’s northside apartment. Smith’s stepbrother K-9 had just been released from prison and wanted to rejoin the Ghetto Boys, but the Rap-A-Lot CEO had also been scouting the skills of Akshen, a 17-year-old rap prodigy from the city’s south side. Smith’s solution was to have K-9 battle Akshen for a spot in the group. “I told my brother I have a decision I have to make,” Smith said. “I’ll let y’all compete and whoever the best is I’ma have to go with. It’s not personal; it’s just business.” Up in the apartment, as the two competitors began to spit rhymes back and forth, it became clear to everyone present that Akshen wasn’t just the best rapper in the room—he was one of the most skilled, cerebral MCs they’d heard anywhere. “My brother looked at me when they got to going into •

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them deep topics,” Smith recalled later. “He looked at me like, ‘Damn, I understand.’ [Akshen] had overwhelming talent, even back then.”1 Akshen, whose birth name was Brad Jordan, had grown up in Houston’s South Acres and South Park neighborhoods. His mother worked for a hospital and his stepfather was a data coordinator; as a kid he’d enjoyed middle-class amenities like a stereo, a waterbed, and cable TV in his bedroom. Always a loner with a taste for dark music like heavy metal, Jordan began to suffer from depression as he entered adolescence. He slit his wrists with a box cutter at age 13, and found himself in and out of Houston International Hospital’s adolescent mental ward for the next two years. He dropped out of school in the 10th grade and wound up living on the streets of South Park when his parents kicked him out of the house at age 15.2 Though South Park had started out as a quiet postwar suburb that gave rise to local celebrities like NBA star Clyde Drexler and Big Chill actress JoBeth Williams, by the late 1980s the neighborhood had deteriorated to the point that it rivaled northeast Houston’s Fifth Ward as a staging ground for drug deals and drive-by shootings.3 As Jordan hustled for a living, selling dope and sleeping at various friends’ houses, his emerging skills as a rapper eventually caught the attention of a crack dealer named Lil’ Troy (Troy Birklett), who was looking to start a music label with the money he’d made selling drugs. In 1988 Lil’ Troy released a gangsta-themed Akshen single that found heavy Houston rotation in nightclubs and on Kidz Jamm. The song’s name (which would eventually come to replace Akshen as Jordan’s performance persona) was “Scarface.”4 •

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Akshen wound up battling his way into the Ghetto Boys, but he was not the most experienced battlerapper in the group’s newly reconfigured lineup. This distinction belonged to Willie D (William Dennis), a former amateur boxer who had come to dominate the weekly hip-hop diss contests at the Rhinestone Wrangler. Though the nightclub’s popular MC competition had a lot in common with the old African American spokenword tradition of “the dozens” (in which rivals spar in a kind of improvisational insult contest),5 it was the brainchild of a stocky white DJ named Steve Fournier. A tireless hip-hop promoter since the early 1980s, Fournier had organized live performances by out-oftown acts like Sir Mix-A-Lot and De La Soul, partnered with Def Jam Recordings to distribute rap to southern radio DJs, and debated Houston’s anti-rap police chief on public television.6 His Sunday night “Rap Attack” showdowns attracted contestants from around the state, including MC Vanilla, a brash white kid from suburban Dallas. Though MC Vanilla would later make millions as a faux-Miami performer named Vanilla Ice, he never could defeat the Rhinestone Wrangler’s reigning diss champion. “He was OK,” Willie D said of MC Vanilla, years later. “What I liked about him was his cockiness. He was always the one white guy in a sea of black. He just rolled, he didn’t care. I didn’t discriminate. I fucked him up like I fucked everybody else up.”7 For all the Fifth Ward references that would appear on the Grip It! album, Willie D was the only member of the new Ghetto Boys lineup who had grown up in that part of Houston. One of five kids raised by an abusive single mother, Willie earned a reputation as a bully from

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a young age. “Everybody was scared of me,” he recalled. “Probably why I was beating people up was because I couldn’t win a fight at home.”8 He moved around a lot growing up, usually to dangerous neighborhoods; during a three-year period in his late teens he attended the funerals of a dozen different friends. “None of them died for a reason,” he said. “They all died [for] stupid stuff.”9 Willie’s life bottomed out not long after high school, when he did jail time for armed robbery after a botched heist at a Texaco gas station. When he got out, he found work selling newspaper subscriptions, and embraced two disciplines to keep himself out of trouble: boxing, which was a family tradition (his uncle, Melvin Dennis, fought Wilfred Benitez on Wide World of Sports in 1977), and freestyle rap, which he’d performed on street corners and at talent shows since he was an adolescent. Willie eventually went on to win Rap Attack an unprecedented thirteen weeks in a row, although it was his barber— not someone from the Rhinestone Wrangler—who put him in touch with James Smith. Initially signed as a Rap-A-Lot solo artist, Willie D’s drawling, muscular flow, and bombastic songwriting eventually inspired Smith to make him a Ghetto Boy. Part of Smith’s strategy in recording the Grip It! album was to foster a sense of creative tension by making sure the new Ghetto Boys didn’t get too comfortable with each other. Willie D and Akshen didn’t meet in person until they got into a van for the 45-minute drive from Houston to Smith’s home studio outside of Prairie View, Texas. By this time Johnny C and Juke Box had quit the group,10 citing disagreements over Smith’s new creative direction, leaving the Ghetto Boys shorthanded. •

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What happened next is a matter of some disagreement, but someone in the studio (Willie D claims it was him) heard Ready Red’s roommate, Richard Stephen Shaw, spitting Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” and suggested he fill in as a Ghetto Boys MC.11 Shaw, a wry, charismatic dwarf who stood 3’8” tall, had been brought on as the group’s dancer and hype man the previous year. He’d appeared next to Ready Red on the cover of Making Trouble, and he could be heard joking around on the album’s outro skit. His breakdancer name had been “Little Billy”—and in a few years’ time he’d have his name legally changed to “Dr. Wolfgang Von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother-Funky Stay High Dollar Billstir”—but in 1988 he had taken to calling himself “Bushwick Bill,” after the gritty Brooklyn neighborhood where he’d grown up. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Shaw was six when his family relocated to New York, where his mother cleaned hotel rooms and his father worked in the merchant marine. Remembered by his middle school teachers as “intelligent, streetwise, very glib and somewhat dangerous,”12 Shaw got involved in all four pillars of New York hip-hop (graffiti, DJing, MCing, and breakdancing). In the early 1980s, as a member of the Linden Crash Crew, he competed in the Swatch Watch breakdancing competition in Times Square. At age 15 his family sent him to a bible school in Minnesota, and he had plans to do missionary work in India when, as a high school sophomore, he moved in with a sister in Houston’s Fifth Ward. As it turned out, Shaw never made it to India; instead he dropped out of school and found work as a busboy at the Rhinestone Wrangler, •

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where he wowed customers with his breakdancing skills. Though he’d been hesitant to try his hand as an MC during his early stint as the Ghetto Boys’ hype man, he threw himself into the task when James Smith gave him a chance during the Grip It! recording session. “You pick your own lane and create your own character,” he recalled later. “When I became a rapper, it’s like if you heard the name Bushwick Bill and heard my voice I promise you’d never forget that you’d heard me.”13 Bushwick, Willie D, Akshen, and Ready Red began recording Grip It! On That Other Level in November of 1988, and the sessions continued into early December. The Ghetto Boys lived exclusively at Smith’s 30-acre Texas ranch while working on the album, and the rural environment at times made a surreal setting for the creation of what would ultimately be categorized as gangsta rap. According to Akshen, when a given track required the sounds of gunfire, the crew would carry microphones and firearms outside (where Smith’s horses could be seen grazing in the pasture) and fire rounds into the air until they got the sounds they needed. Apart from a VCR and a stack of videocassettes, there wasn’t much to distract the group from the task of recording the album. “James didn’t care,” Akshen recalled. “He left us out there in the middle of fucking nowhere. Every once in a while, he would come through and break us off with a few hundreds. We’d go record shopping and buy a whole bunch of shit and then he’d take us back out to the ranch and we’d be stuck. There was a drum machine, a four-track, a microphone, and some records, and that was it. There wasn’t shit to do but make music.”14 Though Ready Red built the album’s beats and •

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Akshen collaborated with Willie D on the lyrics, Grip It! On That Other Level was ultimately the brainchild of Smith. “James was a genius,” Akshen said. “Not only did he know that he could take us and put us in a group; he knew that if he encouraged us to speak to the streets and fed us stories and material, the streets would listen. He was very instrumental in the writing.15 We’d start out writing a record and then he’d come in and say things like, ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s strong, but it’d be a lot stronger if you talked about this,’ and then he’d feed us different scenarios and we’d have to go do our research on what had happened, chop it up, and write a verse about that. All that early, controversial shit about abortion, homosexuality, snitches, drugs, whores, niggas crying and dying over bitches—it all came from him.” The opening track on Grip It! is Willie D’s “Do it Like a G.O.,”16 a profane and energetic cluster-bomb of a song that mixes political commentary with pimp wisdom, beat-down threats with braggadocio. Anchored by a bouncing funk-groove from Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” the Ghetto Boys take aim at everything from the insipidity of black radio stations to New York’s hip-hop egotism to the fact that KKK members wear what appear to be dresses. Bushwick Bill calls out the treachery of gold-digging bitches and declares himself invincible; Willie D bewails the legacy of slavery and begrudges the fact that Colombians control Houston’s drug trade; Akshen calls anti-rap politicians “tie-wearin’ bitches” and invites them to suck his dick. The most notable vocal appearance on this track comes from Smith, who bookends the song with a couple of phone call skits, first to the members of the Ghetto Boys (“I’m tired of •

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motherfuckers disrespecting us,” he tells them), and later to the hypothetical owner of “White-Owned Records” (who sneeringly offers Smith a five percent stake in his own company). Whereas the Rap-A-Lot mogul was scarcely present on Making Trouble, the opening skits on Grip It! advertise the bravado of his new-found corporate mission statement: “I ain’t to be fucked with,” he intones at the end of the track. “If you wanna go to war, I’ll take you to war.” The songs that followed “Do it Like a G.O.” offered up a blend of violence, gore, and misogyny that guaranteed the Geto Boys would find no shortage of battles in the years that followed.

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Scarface

In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects “Americanism” itself. —Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Partisan Review (1948)

James Smith had been instrumental in sending the Ghetto Boys into a new creative direction, but this change didn’t happen in a vacuum. Hip-hop’s beats, flows, and narratives were undergoing revolutionary changes in the late 1980s, and the influence of East Coast innovators like Public Enemy and Eric B. and Rakim could be heard on Grip It! tracks like “No Sellout” and “Seek and Destroy.” But by far the most important impact on the album’s sound (and attitude) came from the West Coast, and was literally embedded in the song “Scarface,” which Akshen wrote before he was ever involved with Smith or Rap-A-Lot Records. “Scarface” featured a denser lyrical flow and a clearer narrative arc than anything the Ghetto Boys had done •

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on Making Trouble. Built around a funky hook from James Brown’s 1971 “Blues and Pants” and a bass groove from Le Pamplemousse’s disco-era “Gimme What You Got,” Akshen’s booming baritone traces the career of a Houston drug dealer from small-time hustling to a fateful cycle of revenge against a rival, resulting in the deaths of twenty-one people, including a cop. The titular character comes off as ruthless, loyal to his posse, emotionally distant from his girlfriend, and not a little bit unhinged, especially when he smokes “fry” (Texas slang for marijuana soaked in embalming fluid, which creates a high that can result in euphoria, hallucinations, increased pain tolerance, and feelings of invincibility). Between the song’s verses, which play out like acts in a movie, we hear snippets from two records: Syl Johnson’s 1968 soul classic “Different Strokes,” and a rap song that at the time was under six months old—N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton.” From a wide-angle perspective it makes sense that Los Angeles-based N.W.A would become a key influence on a Houston rapper like Akshen. The African American “Great Migration” of the early–mid twentieth century had sent tens of thousands of Texans to the West Coast in search of economic opportunity, and kinship ties remained; some black residents in southern California still attended community socials at “Texas Clubs,” spoke in bayou drawls, and sent their children back to visit family during the summer.1 Historical connections aside, however, N.W.A’s regional appeal lay in the way it had begun to uncouple rap from its East Coast iconography, spinning lyrical tales that were defiantly local. The year before Straight Outta Compton dropped, Long •

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Island-born Rakim had famously declared “It ain’t where you’re from; it’s where you’re at,” but his implication was that MCs the world over were welcome to come to New York and try their luck on the mic. N.W.A, in choosing to mythologize Compton, had declared Rakim’s invitation irrelevant. “N.W.A made hip-hop narratives more specific, more coded in local symbol and slang than ever before,” music critic Jeff Chang noted. “N.W.A conflated myth and place, made narratives root themselves on the corner of every ’hood. And now every ’hood could be Compton, everyone had a story to tell.”2 As it happened, the violence-tinged stories on Straight Outta Compton were irrevocably tied to the crack cocaine epidemic that (coupled with poverty, deindustrialization, and government neglect) had recently come to ravage America’s inner cities. African American poverty levels, which had fallen in the 1960s and 1970s, had spiked upwards in the 1980s, as had rates for murder and incarceration.3 Whereas blues music had reflected the preoccupations of a black population that was migrating from the rural South to the urban North, this new form of rap centered on the dark realities that came with being stuck in one place. “The sound [of Straight Outta Compton] was of a whirlwind in our midst,” noted poet Kevin Young, “saying the unsayable and saying it loud, making the listener as deliriously uneasy as the unrest that N.W.A hinted was the music’s real source. This was the sound of a genre being born: where the Sex Pistols chanted ‘no future,’ gangsta rap said there wasn’t even a present.”4 That “gangsta rap” became the catchphrase for the music was an accident. N.W.A preferred the term “reality rap,” but when Ice Cube threw out the phrase (in the •

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context of the song “Gangsta Gangsta”) in a 1989 Los Angeles Times interview, the name stuck.5 In a sense, the songs on Straight Outta Compton did seek to document inner-city reality (gang-related and otherwise), in keeping with the oft-quoted assertion, ascribed to Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, that rap was “CNN for black people.” As Jeff Chang would later observe, N.W.A brought a raw sense of reportorial authenticity to hip-hop, implying that “rappers had to represent—to scream for the unheard and otherwise speak the unspeakable. Life in the hair-trigger margin—with all of its unpredictability, contradiction, instability, menace, tragedy and irony—needed to be described in its passionate complexity, painted in bold strokes, framed in wide angles, targeted with laser precision.”6 The ghetto narratives on Straight Outta Compton did not, however, offer a purely empirical depiction of reality. As with seventeenth-century travel writing and nineteenth-century frontier journalism, gangsta rap blended field reportage with exaggeration, speculation, and legend to create a reality-inspired form of pulp fiction. When, in “Gangsta Gangsta,” Ice Cube asserts that “takin’ a life or two that’s what the hell I do,” or that he “never shoulda been let out the penitentiary,” he’s not speaking autobiographically. In real life, O’Shea Jackson had grown up in a stable two-parent home and had studied architectural drafting at an Arizona technical college; as Ice Cube, however, he could embody all of the social pathologies of South Central Los Angeles within one fictive, first-person persona. Chuck D had not, as it turned out, compared rap music to CNN specifically— he’d called it “black America’s TV station”7—and gangsta •

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rap, like TV programming, offers a sensationalist blend of fact and fiction that is as beholden to the tropes of cinema as it is the rules of documentary journalism. Propelled by the lyrical skills of Akshen, the gangstathemed tracks on the Ghetto Boys’ Grip It! On That Other Level took the storytelling template from N.W.A and pushed it in an even more cinematic direction. “Life in the Fast Lane,” which echoes “Scarface” as a first-person recounting of life as a drug dealer, plays out in three self-contained acts. Buoyed by the upbeat guitar groove and southern-fried harmonica sample from “Hot Pants” (a 1971 song by Houston funk pioneers Soul Brothers Inc.), the first act employs a dense blend of internal rhymes and true rhymes to detail the thrills and dangers of a player in the dope game. The offhanded murder of two police officers after a racial profiling incident catapults the song into its second act, which descends into more violence—another cop and a witness are killed, and the protagonist arms himself with grenades and an AK-47 after an associate is double-crossed by Colombian drug lords. Pulpy as this gangsta narrative sounds, Akshen underpins it with stylistic acuity: as the tale moves from order and control to disorder and violence, the true rhymes give way to inexact slant rhymes, creating a poetic tension that parallels the texture of the story itself. The final act of “Life in the Fast Lane” serves as a denouement, as the protagonist reflects on his life in the game and declares that he’s lucky to have made it out. “Scarface” and “Life in the Fast Lane” are followed on the album by “Trigga Happy Nigga,” the finale in Grip It!’s trilogy of straight-up gangsta songs. Unlike •

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the previous two tracks, which are narrated exclusively by Akshen, “Trigga Happy Nigga” is tag-teamed by the whole Ghetto Boys crew, and features an ebullient call-and-response intro led by James Smith. Riffing on “Memphis Soul Stew,” a 1967 R&B hit by Texas-born bandleader King Curtis, the Rap-A-Lot CEO swaps out Curtis’s culinary metaphors for drug-trade lingo. “Today’s special is Ghetto Dope, processed in Fifth Ward, Texas,” he announces. “We sell so much of this, until they wanna know what we put in it.” Akshen spits the first two verses of “Trigga Happy Nigga,” spinning a tale of revenge against corner dealers who were moving fake product. The third verse features Bushwick Bill beating the shit out of a female clerk and a male manager while robbing a liquor store, and the final verse depicts Willie D committing armed robbery, taunting the police, and killing a snitch. The breaks between verses are punctuated by the sounds of gunfire, and a familiar voice screaming “You die, motherfucker!” and “I take you all to fucking hell!” and “Say hello to my little friend!” This voice belongs not to a Ghetto Boy, but to Al Pacino— or, more significantly, to Tony Montana, the iconic antihero of Brian De Palma’s 1983 cocaine-gangster movie Scarface. In sampling Scarface, the Ghetto Boys were creating the earliest of what would become countless hip-hop tributes to the sacred cinematic text of gangsta rap. In the years to come, artists like Ice-T, Ice Cube, Biggie, Tupac, Raekwon, Nas, and Jay-Z would reference, sample, or otherwise allude to Pacino’s Tony Montana as a rags-to-riches ghetto superhero. “In Scarface, hip hop lyricists found a protagonist cut from their own •

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cloth, the low-end player who amplifies his hustle to kingpin status,” observed critic William Jelani Cobb. “The tragic arc of the film’s hero met the expectations of a generation who had learned that success has mortal costs from generations of urban folklore, fiction, and lived experience. So this was not fatalism; this was a blank-faced recognition that in business as in war, death is the price for glory. Look closer at hip hop’s fascination with the gangster, and what you recognize is a stained and battered allegiance to the American dream.”8 The title and plot points of De Palma’s Scarface were taken from a prohibition-era Howard Hawks movie, which—when it debuted in the spring of 1932— was among the first gangster-themed films to find mainstream Hollywood release. Over the course of the next half-century, “gangster” became a movie genre in its own right, its antihero protagonists speaking to the complexity of urban American capitalism in the same way western antiheroes plumbed the pathologies of the American frontier. “The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring,” wrote Partisan Review critic Robert Warshow. “Not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world. And the gangster—though there are real gangsters—is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination.”9 Though Warshow wrote this in 1948, the sentiment could just as easily apply to the late 1980s, when the Ghetto Boys took inspiration from the immigrant-hustler mythos of the movie Scarface to create the ghetto-hustler mythos of songs like “Scarface.” In a •

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move emblematic of rap culture itself, Akshen and DJ Ready Red had appropriated the narrative arcs (and, at times, the actual dialogue) of the cinematic “gangster” and remixed them to engineer a vivid vision of the newly emerging hip-hop “gangsta.” For all the murder and mayhem of the Ghetto Boys’ gangsta tracks, Ready Red got the idea to sample Tony Montana while drinking Olde English malt liquor and smoking Backwoods cigars with Bushwick Bill in a makeshift apartment above James Smith’s car lot in 1987. In the middle of watching Scarface on VHS for the umpteenth time, Bushwick accidentally bumped the stop/start button of Red’s beat machine at the moment Tony Montana says “All I have in this world is my balls and my word.”10 Red rewound the scene and began to experiment with beats, eventually leading to “Balls and My Word,” a Making Trouble track consisting entirely of Tony Montana quotes and the sounds of gunfire over a pulsing old-school beat. It wasn’t until James Smith paired Red’s samples with Akshen’s streetwise lyricism on Grip It!, however, that Scarface solidified its place the gangsta rap canon. The notion of young men finding artistic inspiration from videocassettes (most famously associated in that era with white filmmaker Quentin Tarantino) would seem to go against the ethos of gangsta rap, but the rise of VHS was in some ways as important to the genre as the rise of the crack trade. For the first time in the history of mass culture, everyday viewers could watch movies (and parts of movies) obsessively—memorizing the catchphrases, studying the characters, and fantasizing narrative possibilities. Suburban teens could rewatch Scarface and •

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daydream about an edgier, more glamorous existence; ghetto boys like Akshen and Ready Red could draw on its story to create lyrical reveries of triumph over the dull specter of violence, police harassment, and diminished opportunity that encompassed their day-to-day lives. The declarative, editorial sensibility that typified old-school lyrics was thus in the process of giving way to a narrative, action-oriented sensibility that would come to distinguish gangsta lyrics. This made gangsta rap both more entertaining and more troubling than hip-hop’s previous musical incarnations. Unlike the movies from which they drew their storytelling style, the gangsta lyrics in songs like “Trigga Happy Nigga” didn’t always depict the moral consequences of violence. Instead, they tended to focus on the ruthless will to power (rather than the rise-and-fall) of the gangster narrative. This recurrent theme, coupled with the genre’s reflexive misogyny, made the music instantly controversial—not just with cultural conservatives, but with longtime hip-hop advocates like Nelson George, who took issue with the genre’s “gory descriptions of self-genocide.”11 Critics like William Jelani Cobb took a more sympathetic view, noting that, in the context of two centuries of racial oppression, a given gangsta lyricist “habitually, ritually—desperately—rephrases reality, flips the script, and declares the black men indestructible despite all evidence to the contrary. A coping mechanism raised to the level of aesthetic statement … is best taken at its opposite face value: the shouted claims of omnipotence [serving] to highlight one’s own fragility.”12 The New York Times writer Jon Pareles added that part of what made gangsta rap so unsettling to mainstream •

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listeners was that (despite their familiarity with, say, Johnny Cash or Bruce Springsteen singing from the perspective of a killer) they weren’t used to young, innercity black men narrating life-based fictions with such murderous, nihilistic abandon: What is praised in a Hubert Selby Jr. novel or a Martin Scorsese film—the representation of crazy, evil characters and terrifying events in streetwise style—is widely denounced in rap, perhaps because rap is made not by certified artists but by self-appointed representatives of a menacing underclass. On the pop-culture spectrum, gangster rap falls somewhere between the brute titillation of action movies and the sober titillation of tabloid television. But it is written from a perspective that is rarely heard elsewhere. Like other African-American musical and literary forms, gangster rap almost always carries multiple meanings simultaneously; its writers mix storytelling, mock-documentaries, political lessons, irony and self-promotion in unpredictable proportions, often defying simple summaries.13

For all the furor that resulted when Grip It! On That Other Level was remixed and marketed to major-label consumers as The Geto Boys, its gangsta-themed tracks were never the focus of controversy the way similar songs had been for N.W.A. At first blush this might seem peculiar, since “Life in the Fast Lane” was as glib about killing cops as “Fuck Tha Police” had been, and “Scarface” boasted a bigger drug-game body-count than “Gangsta Gangsta.” But James Smith’s reinvented Ghetto Boys weren’t just taking cues from West Coast •

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gangsta rap; they were pushing its raw, edgy tropes into a direction that was far more vulgar, far more unhinged, and far more difficult to categorize. No song illustrates this better than “Mind of a Lunatic,” the final track on the Grip It! album. For listeners such as myself, who first heard (and were scared shitless by) “Mind of a Lunatic” in its rewritten and remastered form on The Geto Boys, the version that appears on Grip It! lacks a certain edge. Both versions are shockingly, disgustingly violent—but while The Geto Boys cut never loses its deranged and murderous focus, the Grip It! track occasionally slips into standard-issue, don’t-fuck-with-me ghetto bravado (particularly in the Akshen and Willie D verses later in the song). Still, the original version of “Mind of a Lunatic” is chilling to hear, particularly in Bushwick Bill’s verses (which were written by Juke Box before he left the group).14 Bushwick was new to MCing when Grip It! was recorded, and he is less prominent on its tracks than Akshen or Willie D. But his languid lyrical delivery (and faint hint of Caribbean patois) imbues the song’s lyrical horror with an unnerving matter-of-factness. Peeping through a window, Bushwick’s narrator sees a beautiful woman naked in her house and decides he will rape her; as the nameless woman attempts to leave her home, he grabs her, drags her back inside, forces sex on her at knifepoint, and—as she begs for her life—slits her throat and watches her body convulse as she bleeds to death. This is a scene so sickening—so effective in its intent—that, for the group’s critics, it became a metaphor for everything that was wrong about the Geto Boys and, by proxy, gangsta rap in general. Bushwick’s lyrical snuff •

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fantasy was mentioned again and again during The Geto Boys release controversy in 1990; Bob Dole condemned it during his 1996 presidential campaign, and the song was censured in congressional hearings as late as 2000. Even seasoned music journalists like Roni Sarig, who wrote approvingly of the Geto Boys’ contribution to southern hip-hop in his book Third Coast, found the song unconscionable. “‘Mind of a Lunatic’ goes much further than gangland murder, with graphic depictions of rape and mutilation,” he wrote. “The sole intent is to shock and disgust in a way that popular music has never done before, and in this it surely succeeds. But the track’s antisocial expression is not just a sign of depravity. The Geto Boys’ disinclination to self-censor or take responsibility for their creation, and their contempt for listeners (who, quite often, are not consenting adults), points to something more disturbing: the rappers’ complete alienation from and lack of interest and participation in society.”15 Disturbing as “Mind of a Lunatic” is at the literal narrative level, however, a close examination of its cultural allusions and sonic textures reveals a song that is more aware of its artifice than it lets on. Where “Trigga Happy Nigga” is punctuated by furious Scarface outtakes, the samples in “Lunatic” come from the adolescent melodrama of a Spiderman cartoon (specifically, a dorky white-bread voice gasping “He’s a paranoiac who’s a menace to our society!”). When Bushwick Bill’s character dreams of slaughter, he sees “flashes of Jason”—i.e. the hockey mask-wearing serial killer from the Friday the 13th horror franchise—and Willie D’s narrator compares himself to Freddy Krueger, Wes Craven’s mass murderer •

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from A Nightmare on Elm Street. In this way, the song’s themes peg themselves not to the documentary reality of the streets, but to the imaginative world of young men who’ve watched way too many VHS slasher flicks. Horror movies are, of course, created for visceral effect— not cerebral dissection—and they are enjoyed relative to their ability to instill raw emotions like fear and revulsion. In a visual medium like film, this fear is intensified as we voyeuristically cut back and forth between stalker and prey; we glimpse the killer’s knife and we see the victim’s reaction, but worst of the gore is most effectively left to the imagination. In a song like “Mind of a Lunatic,” the listener’s point of view is trapped with that of the killer; there is no cut-away as his knife enters flesh, and the only thing left to imagination is the terror of the victim. In this way, the fact that the song is repulsive is—on a pulphorror entertainment level, at least—a sign that the song is achieving what it set out to do. Bushwick Bill, whose delivery on “Mind of a Lunatic” was so unnerving he was still being asked about it two decades later, became fond of comparing the song to Orson Welles’ legendary 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast. The “Lunatic” lyrics, he argued, weren’t advocating rape and mutilation any more than Welles’ broadcast was depicting an actual Martian attack. “When [Welles] read War of the Worlds on his radio show and people thought they were actually being invaded by aliens, it proved that words can be powerful and insignificant at the same time,” Bushwick said. “If you could use your voice and demeanor and projection to describe a situation in a way that the average person would perceive it as reality, to me that’s what I want to achieve. Would •

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you really [respond to the song] if we were to say, “I saw this,” and “I heard that”? It’s stronger to say “I did this.”16 Hence, where gangsta rap had taken street reality and spun it into a more cinematic direction, “horrorcore” (a rap subgenre pioneered in part by “Mind of a Lunatic”) was about spinning a cinematic fantasy and inviting the audience to confuse it with reality. One interesting footnote to “Mind of a Lunatic” is that, for all the controversy it engendered in the decade after its release, none of its critics (the New York Times’ Pareles being the lone exception)17 caught on to its most obvious literary conceit: the fact that—as is spelled out in the fourth verse—the whole story is being told from the deranged perspective of a suicidal kid in an insane asylum. The events described in the song are not, as it turns out, happening in the actual world of the narrative; they are happening, of all places, in the mind of a lunatic.

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Let A Ho Be A Ho

Rap is really funny, man. But if you don’t see that it’s funny, it will scare the shit out of you. —Ice-T in a Rolling Stone interview (1992)

Though the Geto Boys are popularly remembered as a horrorcore gangsta act, neither Grip It! On That Other Level nor its reincarnation as The Geto Boys hews to these themes in the manner of a concept album. Three of the songs that appear on both releases (including “Read These Nikes” and “Talkin’ Loud Ain’t Saying Nothin’”) are straightforward diss tracks—funky, danceable, darkly humorous tirades against lying girlfriends, hypocritical parents, and bogus tough-guys. The album’s most memorable diss cut is “Size Ain’t Shit,” Bushwick Bill’s caveat auditor to anyone who dare underestimate him due to his dwarf stature. Written with the help of Willie D the night Bushwick joined the Ghetto Boys, “Size Ain’t Shit” is the most overtly humorous track on the album, its verses accented by cartoonish squeaks and scratches lifted from Fred Wesley and The J.B.’s dance-funk standard “Blow Your Head.” Like all the songs on Grip It!, the lyrics are over •

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the top (and thematically indiscriminate), as Bushwick guarantees beat-downs, bullets to the skull, and jailhouse rape for anyone who makes light of his size. More than just a put-down track, “Size Ain’t Shit” serves as a clever branding gesture for Bushwick Bill—it’s a hyperbolic MC mission statement that announces his transition from being the group’s smallest backup dancer to its most outsized and flamboyantly recognizable personality. Diss tracks aside, a central feature of the songs that would go on to comprise The Geto Boys—and the controversy surrounding it—is the blatant misogyny that underpins the lyrics. “Their attitude toward women is youthfully ignorant at best, swinishly hateful at worst,” one early critic of the group asserted. “There is scarcely a track on the album in which women are not routinely derided and threatened with physical violence.”1 Indeed, sexism saturates the album’s gangsta and horrorcore songs (where women appear largely as expendable fuck objects), but the group’s lyrical disdain toward women becomes most explicit on “Let a Ho Be a Ho” and “Gangster of Love.” Of the two songs, “Let a Ho Be a Ho” takes a pragmatic approach toward gender dynamics, dispensing pimp-game wisdom in a tone similar to that of 1970s-era street-novelists like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. Under a bass line-and-cash register loop lifted from Pink Floyd’s “Money,” Willie D waxes vulgar on the foolishness of falling for (and fighting over) trashy women, imploring listeners to never “treat a ho like a queen who behaves like a dog.” For all the verbal abrasiveness of “Let a Ho Be a Ho” (in which women are referred to as hoes, whores, •

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or bitches just short of fifty times), the song sounds like a feminist treatise next to “Gangster of Love,” which suggests, over the course of five different verses, that women exist primarily to enable demeaning sex acts. Accompanied by a feel-good bass-groove and a slideguitar sample from Steve Miller’s rock-radio mainstay “The Joker,” the Ghetto Boys MCs use the song to brazenly catalogue everything they have done or plan to do to women, including (but not limited to) fucking them, fucking their best friends, fucking their sisters, fucking their mothers, fucking them six at a time, demanding that they fuck fellow posse members, demanding that they get on their knees and perform fellatio, beating them up for talking shit, beating them up for lying about pregnancy, and beating up their meddling fathers. (In a random flourish true to the scattershot nature of the lyrics on Grip It!, the song also promotes condom use and namechecks a certain “Cathleen Johnson” for her anilingus skills.) Unnerving and repugnant by design, the song’s vulgarity devolves into such clownish overstatement that the listener’s reflexive unease is offset by a sense of farce. Much the way the Ghetto Boys’ gangsta scenarios were the creation of Akshen, the group’s pimp-themed songs came from the lyrical wheelhouse of Willie D, whose Rap-A-Lot solo album Controversy (released just a few months after Grip It!) featured tracks with names like “Kinky” and “Bald Headed Hoes.” Not long after the newly rechristened “Geto Boys” rose to notoriety in the early 1990s, Houston Chronicle reporter Catherine Chriss used dry ironic juxtaposition to highlight a certain contradiction at the heart of Willie D’s songwriting: •

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Two events seem to have shaped [Willie D’s] life more than anything else: the four months he spent in jail, and the death of his grandmother, whom he thanked on his solo album. “I dedicate this album to the memory of my beloved grandmother Ernestine Smith. God only knows how I miss you baby.” Songs on the album include “Fuck Me Now,” “I Need Some Pussy,” and “Welfare Bitches.”2

Indeed, just as Akshen used cinematic embellishment to flesh out his tales of the dope trade, Willie D’s mack-game manifestos hinged on a sense of exaggeration and bombast that can make it misleading to interpret his songs at a direct editorial level. Cultural critics like Tricia Rose have articulated a case against regressive gangsta lyrics that “ultimately reinforce the social domination of black women and have no place in politically progressive struggles,”3 but using a political lens to analyze the Ghetto Boys’ lyrics can be limiting, since their very point is to offend all sense of propriety, progressive or otherwise. In terms of literal content, any earnest-minded discussion of the gender narratives on Grip It! inevitably yields a conclusion (i.e. the lyrics are offensive and wrong) that is less revealing than the more complex social and artistic factors that underpin those narratives. William Jelani Cobb, for example, has pegged rap’s sexism to the performative hypermasculinity that comes with being young and male in impoverished urban areas, where economic opportunities are few, and traditional romantic love can be conflated with weakness.4 Researcher Eithne Quinn expands on this idea in her book Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, noting that “sexual •

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and romantic liaisons generate intense, often painful emotions that highlight issues to do with power, status, and trust. … If gangsta’s pimping tales return repeatedly to the exploitation of women, they also explore the power of female sexuality, and expose the hidden materialist underpinnings of sexual transactions in contemporary society.”5 (Quinn supports her observations in part with data from ethnologist Janis Faye Hutchinson, whose early-1990s field research in Houston’s hip-hop nightclubs found that “black women tend to privilege men who work in the illegal economy … over those who work at ‘square’ jobs.”6) Understood in this context, the lyrical bravado of songs like “Gangster of Love” might be seen as a preemptive gesture against romantic vulnerability in a harsh environment—collateral damage, if you will, of a socially constrained masculinity that can’t afford to leave itself open to a more nuanced appreciation of the feminine. But to try and explain the Ghetto Boys’ pimp narratives purely in the context of socio-cultural anxiety is to overlook how goofy (and, for listeners like me, uncomfortably hilarious) these kinds of songs can be. Almost every sexual boast in “Gangster of Love” is overstated to the point of absurdity, and the rhyme pairings aim more for comic effect than poetic artistry. On a sonic level, sampling the chilled-out bass-line and drawling white-boy tenor of Steve Miller’s “The Joker” (a stonerrock assertion of nonthreatening male sexuality) provides a farcical counterpoint to the macho, ghetto-centric bluster of the lyrics. When, prior to recording Grip It!, James Smith resolved to make the Ghetto Boys sound more “country,” this is exactly what he was talking •

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about—not country in some Texas-flavored geographical sense, but country in the vernacular African American sense: exuberantly uncouth, given to contradiction and misdirection, laced with insider slang, and defiantly designed to be misheard. Africana historian Robin D.G. Kelley has pointed out how critics who examine rap lyrics should take into account how America’s black vernacular tradition often embraces imaginative language and verbal gamesmanship for no end beyond the aesthetic goal of “getting a laugh”: Despite their good intentions, ignoring aesthetics enables [critics of rap] not only to dismiss “egotistical sexual boasting” as a weakness in political ideology, but also to mistakenly interpret narratives of everyday life as descriptions of personal experience rather than a revision of older traditions of black vernacular poetry … What counts more than the story is the “storytelling”—an emcee’s verbal facility on the mic, the creative and often hilarious use of puns, metaphors, similes, not to mention the ability to kick some serious slang (or what we might call linguistic inventiveness).7

Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. used a similar argument in the face of federal obscenity charges against 2 Live Crew in 1990, asserting that sexually explicit rap lyrics were the legacy of “signifying,” an African-American street tradition wherein “the best signifier or ‘rapper’ is the one who invents the most extravagant images, the biggest lies.” Raunchy-minded MCs, he argued, were engaged in a “sexual carnivalesque” that parodied •

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racist stereotypes about black sexuality through ribald shock and exaggeration. “2 Live Crew must be interpreted within the context of black culture generally and of signifying specifically,” Gates wrote. “Their novelty, and that of other adventuresome rap groups, is that their defiant rejection of euphemism now voices for the mainstream what before existed largely in the ‘race record’ market—where the [off-color comedy] records of Redd Foxx and Rudy Ray Moore once were forced to reside.”8 The most intriguing concept Gates presents here is that of the carnivalesque—an idea first defined by Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who suggested that the strict hierarchies of official society are counterbalanced by an urge for irreverence and chaos, “free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities.”9 Taken at face value, pimp-game cuts like “Gangster of Love” are irredeemably offensive. But irredeemable offensiveness—the eager compulsion to shock and disgust—is the central raison d’être of such songs, which, in the spirit of the carnivalesque, are created more for provocation and amusement than to present some cohesive statement about gender relations. The year Grip It! was released, rock critic Greil Marcus noted in his book Lipstick Traces that punk music (then more than a decade old) had made “home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself seem like bad jokes, [so that] the music itself came forward as a better joke.”10 It could well be said that the Ghetto Boys, with their anything-goes, fuck-it-all approach to themes of •

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sex and violence, were refining that punk ethos for the hip-hop generation. James Smith had not, however, set out to create a rap version of punk rock. He had, in pushing the Ghetto Boys to sound as raw as possible, set out to sell albums.

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Life In The Fast Lane

I just like great art and music, even if it’s great and ordinary. But if it’s great and it happens to be offensive, too, then that makes it even more exciting. —Rick Rubin in the Washington Post (2006)

Rap-A-Lot Records released Grip It! On That Other Level in March of 1989 without the benefit of major distribution, mainstream media coverage, or commercial radio airplay. At the time, pop vocalist Debbie Gibson’s album Electric Youth sat atop the Billboard 200, and R&B singer Karyn White’s self-titled debut held the #1 spot on the Top Black Albums chart. Billboard was still a couple years away from adopting SoundScan (a computerized data-tracking system that would revolutionize which music qualified as “popular”), and chart positions were determined by shipping numbers and subjective retailer reports rather than actual sales. This system favored corporate acts over independent ones, white artists over black, inoffensive albums over edgy ones. A few rap acts (most notably Tone Lōc and De La Soul) found their way into the upper echelons of the Billboard charts that year, but popular music remained the stomping ground of •

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performers like Phil Collins and Billy Joel, Janet Jackson and Madonna, Bon Jovi and Poison, Milli Vanilli and New Kids on the Block. This made it all the more remarkable that the Ghetto Boys managed to crack the Billboard 200 within the year, reaching #166 (and #19 on the Top Black Albums chart) based entirely on word-of-mouth buzz and intensive touring in the South and Midwest. Grip It! went on to sell over 500,000 copies—and, while the group saw its core audience as young black hip-hop heads who lived in the middle of the country, its most important new fan was Rick Rubin, a white record producer who hailed from New York, lived in Los Angeles, and had publicly disavowed his interest in hip-hop music just one year before. Once dubbed “the king of rap” by the Village Voice, Rubin had produced his first two hip-hop records half a decade earlier, at age 21, while living in a dorm room at New York University. Eventually partnering with Russell Simmons to create the Def Jam record label, Rubin had been instrumental in transforming recorded hip-hop tracks from ten-minute party jams into shorter, radio-friendly cuts that followed the verse/bridge/chorus structure of rock ’n’ roll.1 Working alongside Simmons, he’d produced a series of classic albums—including LL Cool J’s Radio, Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell, and the Beasties Boys’ Licensed to Ill—that had established rap as a viable commercial genre and helped usher in hip-hop’s Golden Age. In decades to come he would go on to work as a producer on more than 100 albums, revive the late-life career of country legend Johnny Cash, and amass a catalogue that sold in excess of 100 million units.2 But in 1989, having recently parted ways with Simmons and •

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Def Jam, he was straining to hone an artistic vision for his newly founded, Los Angeles-based Def American Recordings. Enamored of hard-edged metal acts like Slayer and Danzig, he’d grown increasingly ambivalent toward rap music. “I was a huge hip-hop fan, but more and more records started to sound the same,” he told Spin. “People often ask me why I abandoned hip hop. To be honest, I think hip hop abandoned itself.”3 Had Rubin still been living in New York in 1989, Grip It! On That Other Level might have slipped his attention, but in the car-commute culture of Los Angeles he fell into the habit of playing the album when he drove around the city. The more he listened, the more he realized that rap still had the potential to excite him. “I thought [the Ghetto Boys] were great artists making great music, and no one else was making music like that at the time,” he said. “What I liked about their music was that it wasn’t toned down. Part of what was strong about it was how radical it was, lyrically. As a fan, the Ghetto Boys were thrilling in the same way that a horror movie might be thrilling.” Though Rubin would later be accused of cynical opportunism in championing a group with such provocative lyrics, he insisted that his interest in Grip It! went beyond the album’s power to shock. “It wasn’t the fact that it was offensive that made me like it,” he said. “There were other offensive records that came out that I didn’t like and wouldn’t support, like 2 Live Crew. I just knew it was something I listened to in my car every day. It was entertaining. It was very funny. If a white group did it, it would be punk rock.”4 Rick Rubin approached James Smith about collaborating with Def American, and, in late 1989, the Ghetto •

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Boys became the first rap group signed by Rubin since he’d recruited Public Enemy to Def Jam in the mid-1980s. For Smith, the appeal of a Def American partnership lay less in Rubin’s legend as a musical guru than in the promise of major-label distribution for Rap-A-Lot. “At the time Rick Rubin was [affiliated] with Geffen Records,” Smith said. “I had done some homework on Geffen, and they had a real powerful machine. So I did a deal.”5 Rubin traveled to Houston and met with the Ghetto Boys at Ready Red’s north-side apartment and outlined his ideas for rerecording, remixing, and remastering the songs on Grip It! for major-label release. Of all Rubin’s innovations in fine-tuning the group’s sound and image, the most emblematic was a simple spelling change, meant to finalize the group’s post-Making Trouble transition from regional wannabes to groundbreaking gangsta provocateurs. From that day forward, the Ghetto Boys would be known was the “Geto Boys.”6 Rubin’s sensibility in transforming Grip It! On That Other Level into The Geto Boys was as much that of a fan as a record executive. Setting up camp in a professional recording studio in Houston’s northwest suburbs, the Def American CEO worked with his remixengineer protégé Brendan O’Brien to bring out the group’s existing strengths. Vocals were rerecorded in confrontational spirit of the Geto Boys’ battle-rap roots; the MCs’ lyrical delivery became louder and hoarser, more muscular, more forceful, more given to visceral rage. The songs’ basic structure and sampling patterns stayed the same, but the mix became tighter and more propulsive. Bushwick Bill’s psycho-dwarf persona, which had been absent from many of the tracks on Grip It! •

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(most notably “Gangster of Love”), showed up on more songs. “Scarface” and “Do it Like a G.O.” were dialed up for aggression, Akshen’s point of view on “Life in the Fast Lane” was switched to the second person, and three songs (“Talkin’ Loud Ain’t Saying Nothin’,” “Let a Ho Be a Ho,” and “Trigga Happy Nigga”) were trimmed by one verse to add impact and focus. Two Grip It! songs were dropped (“Seek and Destroy” and “No Sell Out”), and a Making Trouble-era track, “Assassins,” was added to the mix. Originally written by Ready Red’s New Jersey homeboy Johnny C, “Assassins” depicts a murder spree in the streets of Fifth Ward, and features Scarface’s Tony Montana screaming “don’t fuck with me!” as the narrator kills and dismembers his victims. Inspired by mid-1980s news headlines about a vengeful HIV-positive prostitute and a student who’d murdered his teacher,7 the song follows a maniacal protagonist as he steals jewelry from a blind man, shoots his teacher at a grocery store, guns down his father for freebasing, disembowels a hooker with a machete, and slaughters a hitchhiker with a chainsaw. Rubin’s Geto Boys remix retains the song’s old-school couplets and drum machine beats, but whereas Johnny C broke character in the Making Trouble version (“we just was buggin’,” he laughs at the end), the narrator depicted by Willie D, Akshen, and Bushwick never flinches from the crazed task of carnage. Rubin added “Assassins” to The Geto Boys as a horrorcore counterpoint to the album’s pièce de résistance—a remastered “Mind of a Lunatic” that was edited and rewritten for maximum psychological impact. Playing to the racist fears of a major-label audience, the song’s Grip It!-era •

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references to Fifth Ward have been erased, placing its murderous, window-peeping black protagonist into a generic setting that could just as easily be a white suburb. Moreover, all semblance of rational cause-and-effect have been taken out of the narrative. Whereas before Akshen trashed the apartment of a friend who’d become a coke fiend, now he stabs the coke fiend’s mother and grandmother to death and buries them in the back yard; whereas before Willie D had declared he wasn’t opposed to punching a woman, he now announces his willingness to butcher anyone, aged 9 to 99, beyond the point of dental recognition. Bushwick Bill’s narrator had previously fretted about the cops after slitting his victim’s throat; now we see him having sex with the corpse, smearing his name on to the wall in the victim’s blood, and calling the cops on himself. (Rubin, who was asked upon release of The Geto Boys how far horrorcore lyrics can go, quipped, “I think this pretty much covers it.”8) The remixed tracks on The Geto Boys are bookended by two new songs—“Fuck ’Em” and “City Under Siege,” both of which underscore the group’s penchant for Scarface samples and haphazard lyrical motifs. Of the two tracks, “City Under Siege” (which takes its name from a true-crime news show produced by Houston’s Fox TV station in the 1980s) is the most overtly political. Accented by a plaintive piano loop from Vicki Anderson’s 1970 “The Message From the Soul Sisters,” the song calls out the hypocrisies of the Reagan–Bush drug war, slams sanctimonious parents, and condemns police brutality against African Americans (namechecking Ida Delaney, a 50-year-old black grandmother who was shot and killed

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by an off-duty Houston cop in a drunken fit of road rage in October of 1989). “Fuck ’Em,” the opening track on The Geto Boys, serves as the album’s rage-inflected thesis statement, a lyrical middle finger raised at anyone and everyone who might question the Geto Boys’ right to say whatever the fuck they want. Fueled by a funky rhythm-guitar riff from Isaac Hayes’ “Breakthrough” and a percussion loop from disco drummer Marc Cerrone’s “Rocket in the Pocket,” this is, in essence, an offensive song about mainstream America’s priggish compulsion to preempt and censor offensive songs. In retrospect, one senses a winking irony in “Fuck ’Em,” since—when the song was being written and recorded—mainstream America did not yet have all that much to say about the Houston gangsta rappers. This would change drastically as The Geto Boys album neared its summer 1990 Def American release date.

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Mind Of A Lunatic

Def American Recordings is opposed to censorship. Our manufacturer and distributor, however, do not condone or endorse the content of this recording, which they find violent, sexist, racist, and indecent. —Disclaimer affixed to The Geto Boys album upon release (1990)

In theory, Geffen Records was the perfect outlet to distribute The Geto Boys. Back in 1986, when Rick Rubin was still at Def Jam, he’d run into trouble when he tried to debut his first non-hip-hop album, Slayer’s thrashmetal Reign in Blood. At the time, Def Jam was being distributed by Columbia/CBS, which balked at releasing Reign due to the Holocaust motifs in the song “Angel of Death.” Rubin turned to Geffen, which was affiliated with Warner Brothers, and the rival label happily took on the controversial album. “I’ll put out this record right now,” a friend of Rubin’s recalls a Geffen A&R executive gushing. “I don’t give a fuck. The band’s brilliant.”1 Reign in Blood was released in October of 1986, and went on to become one of the most celebrated and influential albums in thrash-metal history. •

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In practice, however, Geffen was less interested in Slayer than it was in bringing the 23-year-old Rubin— then considered an industry wunderkind for his success at Def Jam—into its corporate fold. Reign in Blood was promoted by Warner without ever appearing in Geffen’s catalogs, and the company waited patiently for Rubin to bring them a Beastie Boys or Run-D.M.C.-type hit. As it turned out, however, Rubin wasn’t interested in championing radio-friendly acts. When he founded Def American and released edgy recordings by doom-rockers Danzig and foul-mouthed comedian Andrew Dice Clay, Geffen declined to put its name on the albums. The increasingly strained partnership unraveled further in the summer of 1990, when, aiming for a mid-August Geto Boys release, Rubin submitted his remix master tapes to Geffen. The company’s executives found the Geto Boys’ songs so unnerving that—in addition to leaving the company’s name off the project—they insisted Rubin affix the album with a special disclaimer.2 So it was that The Geto Boys became the first recording in the history of American popular music to be earmarked for release with two separate content warnings—the standard “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” label, and a second sticker, which announced its distributor’s disavowal of the album’s “violent, sexist, racist, and indecent” material. The conflict over the album’s release might have ended there, were it not for an unnamed quality-control officer at Indiana’s Digital Audio Disc Corporation, who—after listening to “Mind of a Lunatic” and interpreting its lyrics at face-value—refused to press CDs of The Geto Boys. As Geffen shopped around for another manufacturer, the •

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label’s executives grew more and more conflicted about their affiliation with the album. “Nobody disliked the music at all,” company V.P. Bryn Bridenthal told the New York Times on the eve of the album’s scheduled debut. “But the more everybody lived with it and thought about it and discussed it, the consensus was to make the hard decision and not to release it. We have a right as private company to decide what kind of materials we want to be associated with, and this one, we decided, went too far.” A Geffen press release mailed to media outlets later that week stated: “The extent to which The Geto Boys album glamorizes and possibly endorses violence and misogyny compels us to encourage Def American to select a distributor with a greater affinity for this musical expression.”3 Though Rubin was incensed at Geffen’s decision, it gave him the contractual leeway to end his relationship with the label and find a new Geto Boys distributor while the album was still making headlines. Rubin started by approaching freedom-of-expression activist Jeff Ayeroff—who ran Virgin Records at the time—but the Geto Boys’ lyrics proved too harsh even for the man who’d initiated the “Censorship is Un-American” campaign.4 Ultimately, Rubin made the strategic move of shopping the album to Geffen’s parent company, where Warner/Elektra/Atlantic distribution chief Henry Droz offered him a stopgap deal in exchange for a future WEA/Def American partnership. In late September—six weeks after its scheduled release date— The Geto Boys was finally pressed, packaged, and shipped to record stores.5 While this was all playing out, the Geto Boys, •

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previously unknown outside of indie-label rap circles, became the summer’s pop-culture cause célèbre. The group’s over-the-top distillation of perceived hip-hop pathologies—N.W.A-style violence and 2 Live Crew-style raunch—fed into the media’s existing narrative about the moral dangers of music marketed at young people. Civic associations like the National Organization for Women rushed to condemn The Geto Boys, as did politicians like former New York mayor Ed Koch (who suggested that the Houston rappers were advocating “rape and mayhem”).6 The group’s most flamboyant critic amid the controversy proved to be conservative lawyer Jack Thompson, who—flush from the success of having secured an obscenity conviction against a vendor of 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be album in Florida—set his censorial sights on the Geto Boys.7 “Unless the record industry addresses the problem of obscenity, the arrests will escalate and the people bonding out will be the heads of major labels,” Thompson wrote in Billboard, singling out WEA for having championed The Geto Boys album. “All your clever lawyers cannot erase the consequences of distributing obscenity to children whose parents are appropriately armed for revenge. An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered.”8 Following Thompson’s example, stores like Disc Jockey, Sound Shop, and Music 4 Less refused to stock the album, and Midwestern promoters canceled Geto Boys concerts in Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Saginaw, citing “the offensive nature of their language and material.”9 •

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Both James Smith and Rick Rubin came forward to defend the Geto Boys (“I don’t think the group actually hates women any more than I think they’re going to go out and kill somebody,” Rubin told the Los Angeles Times)10—but the group’s most eloquent advocate was its 3’8” MC, Bushwick Bill, who seemed to delight in trolling the media. To some reporters Bushwick would suggest that the violence on The Geto Boys was a sober documentary depiction of life in Houston’s Fifth Ward; to others he would insist that the violence was no more real than the plots of movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween. When asked about the Geto Boys’ influence on the minds of young Americans, Bushwick would cite President Bush’s plans to send thousands of young Americans to war in Iraq; when asked about the limits of constitutional free speech, Bushwick would point out that the Constitution once considered black people to be three-fifths human; when asked about the dark themes of the Geto Boys’ lyrics, Bushwick would reply that Americans wouldn’t find the lyrics so objectionable if they’d been written by white artists. (A 1996 study by social psychologist Carrie Fried backed up Bushwick’s point: “When a violent lyrical passage is represented as a rap song, or associated with a black singer, subjects find the lyrics objectionable,” she observed. “If the same lyrical passage is presented as country music, or is associated with a white artist, reactions to the lyrics are significantly less critical.”11) Bushwick reserved his harshest words for Geffen Records. “I hope they all die with dicks up their asses,” he told Spin.12 Of all the criticism aimed at the Geto Boys during the release of the album, the group’s MCs were most

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rattled by the hostility of the Afrocentric hip-hop heads who dominated the audience at the 1990 New Music Seminar in New York. As the Houston rappers went onstage to perform at the event, their introduction was drowned out by boos from the political-minded East Coast rap fans. Two decades later, Akshen (who was then performing under the name Scarface) was still bitter about the incident, citing it as a reason for not attending VH1’s 2010 “Dirty South” Hip Hop Honors gala in New York. “That’s what I base my whole fuckin’ life on: the New Music Seminar 1990,” he said. “We sold records all over the fuckin’ country and New York made a mockery of it. Those backpack-totin’, true hip-hop motherfuckers didn’t want to hear us. They wanted a cipher and to hear about the true mathematics, not a bunch of Texas niggas calling bitches bitches and rapping about slanging dope and beating niggas up. It was hard getting respect from the East Coast. We didn’t get no fuckin’ love from nobody.”13 Rubin, who was also in attendance at the event, attributed the reaction in part to the fact that New York’s progressive rap activists, who had always seen free-speech as a central pillar of musical expression, had gotten caught up in the orthodoxies of the newly emergent political-correctness movement. “Censorship was the big issue at the New Music Seminar [that] year, and everybody had their own little narrow concern about the issue,” he said. “Specifically, I remember a gay activist getting up and asking ‘How do we oppose censorship and not allow records about gay-bashing?’ And a woman got up after him and asked, ‘How do we stop censorship and

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not allow records that disrespect women?’ The answer is you don’t. You can’t. It’s one or the other.”14 While the group collected enemies from both ends of America’s political spectrum, reviewers seemed mostly bewildered by The Geto Boys, proclaiming affection for its beats and astonishment at its lyrics (“whether the Boys are expressing their inner natures or one-upping N.W.A and 2 Live Crew, they’re sick motherfuckers,” wrote veteran rock critic Robert Christgau).15 Jim Washburn of the Los Angeles Times and Steve Sutherland of Britain’s Melody Maker offered up unambiguously glowing reviews (Sutherland calling it “brilliantly vivid, utterly appalling, and very, very entertaining”), while some of the worst reviews for The Geto Boys came out of the group’s hometown (the Houston Chronicle calling it a “stupid, unpleasant album,” and the Houston Post accusing the group of “capitalizing on society’s regretful lust for all things sordid”).16 The most comprehensive response to the album came from the pioneering hip-hop magazine The Source, which dedicated a December 1990 cover story to the emerging gangsta rap genre after its printer asked it to remove an offending Geto Boys advertisement (the tagline of which read: “Play Pussy, Get Fucked”) from the October issue. “Let’s get it straight: the Geto Boys are out to entertain, not disrupt the social order,” wrote David Mays, the magazine’s founder. “If we are going to talk about problems of violence, drugs, and sexism in our society, let’s try to get the real root of the problems and not fall into the trap of pointing the finger at rap music in general or at the Geto Boys specifically.”17 For all the publicity it generated, The Geto Boys didn’t •

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sell particularly well (in part because many consumers purchased Grip It! On That Other Level amid the controversy instead of waiting for the delayed Def American release). The album reached #67 on the Top Black Albums chart, and peaked at #171 on the Billboard 200, selling fewer than 300,000 copies in its first year. Still, the events surrounding the album’s release had pushed the Geto Boys into the national consciousness, establishing their notoriety as gangsta rap agitators, and creating a sense of anticipation for what they might do next.

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Gangster Of Love

Come here, you sweet bitch, gimme that pussy, let me get in your drawers I’m going to make you think you fucking with Santa Claus —Jelly Roll Morton, “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,” as sung for Alan Lomax (1938)

The version of The Geto Boys that was shipped to stores in 1990 is now considered a collector’s item. On subsequent pressings of the album, “Gangster of Love” doesn’t feature the laid-back slide-guitar-andvocal sample from Steve Miller’s “The Joker”; instead, the song mixes an outtake from the Chicago Gangsters’ 1975 heavy-funk “Gangster Boogie” with a guitar riff from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s southern-rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama.” This change—which yielded a completely differentsounding song (even as the lyrics remained the same)—is a largely forgotten footnote to the controversy that surrounded the album’s release. It’s also illustrative of an era-specific shift in the way hip-hop artists like the Geto Boys were allowed to sample copyrighted material, •

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and a curious window into the historical (and, at times, racially charged) complexities that underpin black and white artists’ relationship to influence, appropriation, and remix. Appropriating snippets of other musicians’ recordings had, of course, been central to hip-hop ever since its pioneering DJs used turntables to loop rhythm breaks from soul, disco, and rock records at Bronx street parties in the mid-1970s. This folk approach to musical ownership expanded when rap music was first pressed on to vinyl, as the basic building blocks of early hip-hop records consisted of borrowed music (from the Sugar Hill Gang’s use of Chic’s “Good Times,” to Afrika Bambaataa’s use of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express,” to UTFO’s use of Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat”). In a way that presaged the online mash-up culture that would emerge with the twenty-first century, hip-hop was an art form that blurred the line between consumer and producer, influence and originality. “Through sampling, hip-hop producers literally borrow the song that influenced them, replay it, reuse it, rethink it, repeat it, recontextualize it,” wrote music critic Christopher R. Weingarten. “All the associations that a listener may have with an existing piece of music are handed down to the new creation—whether it’s as complicated as a nostalgic memory over a beloved hook or as elemental as a head-nod to a funky groove you don’t specifically recognize.”1 The advent of new digital sampling technologies in the mid–late 1980s expanded hip-hop artists’ creative possibilities, and the songs on many of rap’s iconic Golden Age albums—Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation •

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of Millions to Hold Us Back, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique—are built on a rich sonic texture of dozens upon dozens of samples. As the art of sampling reached new levels of complexity and subtlety, however, the popular success of rap music drew the attention of the music industry’s lawyers. Where previous copyright-infringement lawsuits against rap artists had been piecemeal and situational, heightened success for hip-hop albums meant heightened scrutiny. “Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable,” Chuck D noted. “It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records.”2 In 1991 a US District Court case challenging rapper Biz Markie’s unlicensed use of a Gilbert O’Sullivan pop song eventually created a precedent that record companies used to regulate sample use. But in 1990, when the sample-heavy Geto Boys album dropped, the issue was still handled on a case-by-case basis. 2 Live Crew had recently been sued for sampling countryrocker Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” and Rick James was in the process of suing MC Hammer over the use of his funk hit “Super Freak,” but no mechanism was yet in place to alert songwriters or record companies when rap artists appropriated their material. Steve Miller, for instance, had not been aware that the Geto Boys had sampled “The Joker” until his 14-year-old nephew called to tell him about it a few weeks after the release of the Def American album. “It was the foulest thing,” Miller told the Washington Post. “I was sick when I heard it.”3 Miller sued the Geto Boys, and ultimately received •

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$50,000, along with a guarantee that future pressings of The Geto Boys would no longer sample his song. Given the raunchy, misogynistic imagery that saturates “Gangster of Love,” it’s easy to understand why Miller would be uncomfortable when he heard his 1973 recording of “The Joker” (its four-bar slide-guitar solo looped fifty-four times in DJ Ready Red’s mix) providing a rhythm and chorus for the Geto Boys’ relentless lewdness. To listen to “Gangster of Love” for the first time was pretty much inseparable from the shock one felt at its vulgarity, and even the favorable media reviews for The Geto Boys took specific exception to the song’s lyrics. (“This track spends a solid five minutes viciously denigrating women,” wrote a Rolling Stone critic. “There’s no excuse—literary, comedic or otherwise—for this kind of malice.”4) Furthermore, Miller’s decision to sue the Geto Boys could not be chalked up to some racist loathing for hip-hop, since he hadn’t protested when black rap artists like Too $hort, N.W.A, and the Jungle Brothers had sampled his songs around the same time. Nevertheless, Miller’s move to disallow the use of his song in “Gangster of Love” did carry racial undertones. When the white, Milwaukee-born rocker croons “call me the gangster of love” on “The Joker,” he is actually echoing a line from his 1968 cover of a different “Gangster of Love” arrangement—a blues tune originally recorded in 1957 by a black, Houston-born musician named Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Under American copyright law, a Third Ward bluesman like Watson couldn’t prevent Miller from recording a cover of his song, yet Miller was perfectly within his rights to

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restrict a quartet of Fifth Ward gangsta rappers from sampling his lyrical allusion to the Watson original.5 Moreover, while Steve Miller took issue with the explicit sexual content of the Geto Boys song, Guitar Watson’s original “Gangster of Love” is a euphemistic celebration of similar carnal bravado. The titular character in Watson’s song is a brash outlaw who crows that he is to sex what Jesse James and Billy the Kid were to the Wild West. Watson doesn’t use the word “sex,” of course, but when his narrator kidnaps a beauty queen and gives her “a big steak dinner” that makes her lose interest in her pageant prize, it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what’s really going on. Later in the song, when Watson speaks of the million-dollar bounty placed on his head after rounding up twenty-five or thirty girls and putting them on a freight train (a line Miller sang wordfor-word in his 1968 cover), he makes Akshen’s boastful 1989 promise “to run a train” on “six different hoes a night” seem tame by comparison. Much of the rock music popular when Steve Miller was in his songwriting prime was influenced by black blues music, and was thus inventive in its use of sexual metaphor. The term “rock ’n’ roll” had itself come from an African American double entendre for fucking (much like “jazz” was a variant on a word that referred to both spirit and semen)—and one reason why rock was initially controversial was that its popular white artists were known to utilize the same winking lyrical euphemisms as their black forbears. When, in 1958, the teenaged white rocker Janis Martin sang of wanting a cowboy who could cock his pistol and bang-bang-bang, her lyrics were in the spirit of black blues diva Dinah Washington, who in •

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1948 sang of a dentist whose drill could thrill when it filled her hole. When, in Led Zeppelin’s 1969 “Lemon Song,” Robert Plant moaned “squeeze me baby, till the juice runs down my leg,” he was pretty much plagiarizing a Robert Johnson blues lyric written thirty-two years earlier. (Steve Miller himself had used fruit—“really love your peaches, want to shake your tree”—as a sex metaphor in “The Joker.”) Boundary-pushing sexual imagery had, in fact, been a feature of American popular music since well before the advent of the blues. In 1909 (the same year US copyright law made it legal for musicians to cover other artists’ songs), an adultery-themed, ragtime-inflected piano ditty called “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!” was the year’s most-talked-about Tin Pan Alley song. Much like sex-themed Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew songs that would create controversy later in the century, “Oh! You Kid” attracted the wrath of the country’s moral guardians, even as it played its sexual brazenness for laughs. “The song was a culture-war flashpoint, the subject of legal imbroglios, and, sometimes, an inciter of violence,” wrote music critic Jody Rosen. A Missouri farmer who sent a young woman a postcard bearing the legend “I Love My Wife, But Oh You Kid!” was hauled into United States District Court in Jefferson City, threatened with five years’ imprisonment, and given a stiff fine for the crime of “sending improper matter through the mails.” In Los Angeles, a “petite and pretty” woman, Marie Durfee, assaulted a man after he greeted her on the street with the song’s catchphrase. A police court judge sided with Durfee, ruling: “The salutation, •

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‘Oh, you kid!’ is a disturbance of the peace and is punishable by ninety days’ imprisonment in the city jail.”6

Though “Oh! You Kid” conveyed its message through playful suggestion and euphemism, one could, in 1909, go to American honky-tonks and whorehouses that played music as explicitly pornographic as any song that would later appear on The Geto Boys. In his 1938 interview with folklorist Alan Lomax, jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton recalled visiting a Chicago bordello in 1908, where the house musicians played a song called “The Dirty Dozen,” which featured lines like: “Look up bitch, you make me mad / I tell you ’bout the puppies that your sister had / She fucked a hog / She fucked a dog / I know the dirty bitch would fuck a frog.” Morton also mentioned an African American proto-blues song called “Make Me a Pallet On the Floor,” which he says was being performed in New Orleans before he was born (which would date its origins to the mid-late nineteenth century). Morton then sang Lomax a version of the tune, which went on for more than fifteen minutes, and included such lyrics as: Bitch, you got the best cunt I ever had Maybe it was that all I got was always bad I put that bitch right on the stump I screwed her ’til her pussy stunk Throw your legs up like a church steeple, So I can think I’m fuckin’ all the people Baby, it’s been a pleasure in me fucking you You the fuckin’est bitch I ever met.7

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Though Morton asserted that these songs were never performed outside of select honky-tonks and bordellos, the fact that they existed more than a century ago hints at something significant. “Any honest reading of the musical history of black America would yield that the sentiments expressed in hip-hop were not new,” William Jelani Cobb noted in his 2007 book To the Break of Dawn. “They were simply the first generation that could speak them [to a wide audience] without the euphemism of metaphors.”8 Indeed, what separates songs like the Geto Boys’ “Gangster of Love” from “Make Me a Pallet On the Floor” is not the audacity of its lyrics, but the fact that those lyrics had been written and recorded with a mass market in mind. For most of the twentieth century, the clever use of metaphor had allowed mainstream audiences to enjoy sexually charged pop songs without having to ponder the raw specifics of the sex act itself. In a certain sense, the word “explicit” (as stated on 1990-era album warning labels) means a refusal to hide behind euphemism; in so doing, the Geto Boys were taking what had long existed in black folk-culture and, with a bit of assistance from Rick Rubin, offering it up to white massculture consumers. The final irony of Steve Miller’s lawsuit against the Geto Boys is just how rigid the line between American folk- and mass-culture could be, even at the end of the twentieth century. “The Joker” had, after all, first been sampled by the Geto Boys back when they were still known as the Ghetto Boys. The Grip It! version of “Gangster” (which was musically indistinguishable from the Geto Boys cut) had been in circulation for eighteen months, selling half a million copies along the way, •

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yet Steve Miller hadn’t known it existed until the Def American version began to make headlines. In many ways, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to a search on ProQuest Central, a library database featuring results from over 16,000 magazines and newspapers, the phrases “Geto Boys” and “Ghetto Boys” appeared in American news-media outlets 192 times in 1990. Search those same two phrases in 1989, and a ProQuest database search yields no results at all. Which is to say: the same songs that scandalized the American public when marketed to a largely white massaudience in 1990 hadn’t yielded a single media headline when they’d been marketed to a largely black indie-rap audience the year before.

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Trigga Happy Nigga

People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor streets are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiance gives rise to feelings as complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. —Guy-Ernest Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” (1955)

Like Steve Miller, I was late in finding out about The Geto Boys. I remember hearing about the Geffen controversy in the summer of 1990, and I kept track of the news stories about Dodge City’s so-called “Mind of a Lunatic” murderers in the summer of 1991, but I didn’t listen to any of the album’s songs until nearly a year after its release. I recall picking up the CD case and studying the black-and-white mugshots on the cover as my dorm roommate blasted “Fuck ’Em” that first evening of the fall semester. Arranged in a gangsta imitation of the Beatles’ Let It Be album, the Geto Boys glowered out at me, each of them clutching a letter-board with a jailhouse booking number and the phrase “5TH WARD •

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PCT.” At that moment I had no idea what or where the Fifth Ward was; in time, I would become so transfixed by the album that I’d journey to Texas and explore the neighborhood in person. My fascination with The Geto Boys might not have played out as it did if it weren’t for the relative dearth of information that defined pre-Internet life. By September of 1991, when I was listening to “Trigga Happy Nigga” and “Let a Ho Be a Ho” for the first time, the Geto Boys had already dropped a new album, We Can’t Be Stopped. DJ Ready Red had quit the group; Bushwick Bill had lost an eyeball after having been shot in the face by his girlfriend. Akshen had changed his performance persona to Scarface and penned a song that would revolutionize the Geto Boys’ reputation and take the group to the top of Billboard’s Hot Rap Singles chart. With no access to hip-hop magazines (and no subscription to cable television), however, I had no idea any of this was going on. For me, at the tail end of summer in 1991, The Geto Boys was the only album that mattered, and all I knew of the group. A little over two years later, when my cross-country travels took me into Texas, my decision to visit Houston was inseparable from my ongoing fascination with the Geto Boys. Half a century earlier, the French Situationists had argued that a given city’s physical geography has less experiential promise than its “psychogeography.” That is, for every map that depicts a city in terms of street grids and tourist zones, there are a thousand more imaginative psychic maps—subjective, emotional, associative ones—that offer a more relevant window into the life of the city.1 Though I wasn’t fully aware of it at the •

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time, The Geto Boys had become my psychogeographical guidebook to Houston, a pretext for seeking out and paying attention to the very aspects of a place I might have otherwise avoided or ignored. As with any travel experience, my impression of inner-city Houston was an ongoing succession of tweaked expectations and subjective discoveries. I hadn’t really expected to witness a spectacle from some Geto Boys narrative—Bushwick dismembering hitchhikers with a chainsaw, or Akshen blasting drug rivals with a shotgun—but I also hadn’t expected to find a neighborhood so seemingly languid and residential. Unlike the iconic East Coast ghettos that populate the cinematic imagination, the Fifth Ward had no high-rise housing projects or densely populated tenements. My journal entry for that cool, humid February day spoke of wide, willow-fringed boulevards and ragtag packs of feral dogs, of pawnshops and storefront churches, of trashclotted bayous and sagging shotgun houses. Some Fifth Ward blocks featured one or two well-kept brick houses with security fences and trimmed lawns; other blocks hosted shoddy-looking apartment complexes that had been walled in with razor-topped chain-link. Many of the smaller streets, I noted, didn’t have curbs, sidewalks or functioning streetlights; most residential stretches of the neighborhood were checkered with garbage-strewn plats and abandoned homes. At one point I spotted a tethered horse dolefully chewing at weeds in a vacant lot. The officers at the northeast Houston police substation didn’t ask me why I had requested a citizen ride-along, and I let them assume I was interested in police work. By the standards of Geto Boys songs like “Scarface” •

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and “Life in the Fast Lane,” which portray policemen as random cannon-fodder and reflexive harassers of black men, I was now embedded with the enemy. After filling out a bit of paperwork and sitting in on a second-shift personnel meeting, I was introduced to my assigned officer, a coolly composed, athletic-looking 27-year-old black patrolman named John Waldon. Having grown up near the neighborhoods he served, John went about his job with an alert sense of courtesy and competence. When I asked him why he’d wanted to become a police officer, he said he hadn’t. “I’ve always wanted to be a gospel musician,” he told me. “If you saw me in church you’d never believe I was a cop. Most of my friends outside of work are women. When the workday is over I don’t want to think about being a police officer; I just want something soft to hold on to.” In some ways, gangsta rap narratives have a lot in common with vérité crime shows like Cops. Both tend to focus on confrontational, action-packed scenes from the street-level drug trade (albeit from opposite points of view)—and, for the most part, both cherry-pick moments of high drama from a daily routine that mixes general wariness with hours and hours of workaday procedure. Much of my ride-along shift with John revolved around responding to generic neighborhood squabbles: a woman with young children who thought her neighbor wasn’t controlling his pit bulls; a teen mother who’d been getting threatening phone calls from a girl who’d had a child by the same father; a theatrically livid (and visibly drunk) middle-aged man who wanted us to track down his car, which he’d lent to his girlfriend’s son the week before and hadn’t seen since. Early in the shift Officer •

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Waldon and I visited a Domino’s Pizza and ate for free in the kitchen; later that evening, we visited his mom’s house and snacked on leftover ham and collard greens. Twice during the shift we visited the police dispatch center, where John talked up a cute young phone operator named Maria. Everywhere I went—be it police calls or social calls—I found Fifth Ward residents to be unhurried and chatty in a way I would notice again when my journey took me into Louisiana and Mississippi. At one point John responded to a dead-on-arrival call for an elderly man who’d passed away at home. We got there before the ambulance. The dead man lay just inside the front door, reclined in his easy chair. Someone had placed a napkin-like paper sheet over his face, and his right foot rested on the floor, as if he might change his mind and get up for one last glass of water. One of his daughters calmly removed a watch and some rings from his ashy brown hand; another daughter stood in the kitchen helping an officer fill out paperwork. The man had been watching TV when he’d died, and for reasons I couldn’t quite explain in my journal it bothered me that nobody had thought to turn it off. Later that evening Officer Waldon assisted undercover officers from the Major Offenders Division as they conducted a raid on a Fifth Ward counterfeiting operation. Having heard reports of Rottweilers on the premises, the officers wore body armor and stormed the suspect’s house with guns drawn, but I never did see any dogs. The suspect, as it turned out, was a baby-faced, middle-aged black woman who looked a little like I Dream of Jeannie in her topknot ponytail and billowy gold pants. She sat in her garage-office (“Snoopy’s World: Cards, Bookkeeping •

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and Contacts”), smiling sadly as she read a warrant that charged her with making and selling bogus autoinsurance cards. When her teenaged daughter showed up in tears, she tried to comfort her. “Don’t cry baby,” she said. “I’m an innocent person; I was just doing something I shouldn’t have.” The most affecting experience during my Fifth Ward sojourn came just fifteen minutes into the ride-along. As I was still regaling my host officer with getting-to-knowyou chit-chat, a call came over the radio for assistance in apprehending a man who’d fled from patrol officers assisting a Narcotics Enforcement investigation. In a matter of moments we were racing through northeast Houston at upwards of seventy miles-an-hour as John tried to triangulate the suspect’s location from radio dispatches. We ended up outside a maze of single-story red-brick public housing units, where the fugitive’s car had crashed into an aboveground gas pipe. A dozen or so officers had fanned out to search for him, and I tagged along as John walked down a shallow bayou adjacent to the housing complex. We scanned the underbrush for signs of activity for a few minutes before a call came in that the fugitive had been cornered in one of the small brick houses. By the time we got to the scene the initial responding officers were leading a lanky, shirtless young black man out in handcuffs. The suspect was placed into the back of a squad car, and a gregarious red-haired HPD veteran who went by the nickname “Shaky Pete” invited me over to have a look. As Pete, John, and the other officers went off to compare notes and talk to witnesses, I stood by the squad car and made conversation with

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the suspect, a guy about my age who said his name was Marcus. Trying to discern my feelings from the journal entry I wrote that day is difficult, since its mood is strictly observational. Whereas I documented other days from my trans-American journey with a mix of existential navel-gazing and pseudo-Kerouacian reverie, I made no attempt to make sense of what I witnessed in Fifth Ward. My handwritten 3,214-word account of the experience was resolutely focused on what people did, what people said, what people wore, and what their surroundings looked like. I appear to have been aiming at dispassionate fairness (insofar as evaluating a neighborhood from a police cruiser can be fair), and I described the suspects in the same empirical tone I used to describe the cops. I seem to have been aware that whatever degree of inquiry I brought to the Fifth Ward was bound get mixed up with my own ignorant rubbernecking. Beyond confirming that the setting of The Geto Boys had a real-life parallel, I didn’t record much beyond the basic documentary details of my experience. One exception was the self-conscious awkwardness with which I attempted to recount my encounter with Marcus. He had looked uncomfortable sitting in the back of the police cruiser, so I asked him if he was OK. He told me he wasn’t. He said the cops had tackled him when he was inside the house, and someone had kicked him in the asshole while he was being handcuffed. That made it painful to sit. Resisting the urge to inquire about why exactly he’d been arrested, I asked him if there was anything I could do to help him. He said he needed someone to call his grandmother’s house and tell his •

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girlfriend to take his daughter to Las Vegas. I told him I’d see what I could do—adding that, as an out-of-town visitor doing a citizen ride-along, I didn’t have much authority. Marcus gave me an exhausted well then, why the fuck am I talking to you look and eased back into his seat, his eyes glazing over in a look of dull misery. I never did find out why the Houston cops had tried to pull Marcus over, or why he’d tried to outrun them. I had no idea if he’d committed a drug-related crime or been the victim of racial profiling, no sense for whether he’d be convicted or acquitted of whatever the Narcotics Enforcement Squad thought he was involved with. Sitting in handcuffs in the back that police cruiser, he was just a guy, who—according to my journal, at least— was most certainly going through one of the worst days of his life.

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If Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood were a country it would qualify for aid from UNICEF. The infant mortality rate there is worse than in Cuba, Jamaica, or Chile. —“City’s Fifth Ward like Third World,” Houston Post (April 30, 1990) While people use drugs in all parts of the city, drug use is more brazen in the Fifth Ward area. Crack is smoked on the streets, with little effort made to hide it. —“Sense of Hopelessness Permeates High-Crime Area,” Houston Post (May 20, 1990)

The urban conditions that had shaped the lives of Fifth Ward residents like Marcus grew out of the same sociohistorical factors that had informed the hard-edged sensibility of The Geto Boys. “Gangster rap is a direct by-product of the crack explosion,” Nelson George wrote in Hip Hop America. “Unless you grasp that connection nothing else that happened in hip-hop’s journey to national scapegoat will make sense. This is not a chickenor-the-egg riddle—first came crack rocks, then gangster •

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rap.” Indeed, if the Geto Boys sounded harsher than their hip-hop contemporaries, this could have something to do with the fact that the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s took an outsized toll on Houston. To truly understand how this happened, one must trace the history of the Geto Boys’ namesake ghetto back more than a century. Originally a bayou-laced rural area northeast of Houston’s four original wards, the “Fifth Ward” was incorporated into the city in 1866 to accommodate an influx of migrants after the Civil War. Though the bulk of ex-slaves arriving in the city moved to a Freedmen’s Town inside the city’s old borders, African Americans settled the Fifth Ward in large enough numbers that it was majority black by 1870. Houston was a regional transportation hub at the time, and railroad warehousing and maintenance shops soon became central to the new ward’s economy. The gritty industrial–residential area grew notorious for mud-clogged roads and a high crime rate, and before long Houston residents were calling it “The Bloody Nickel” (a phrase that would remain in common use, including in multiple Geto Boys songs, more than a century later).1 The blacks who’d settled in the Fifth Ward never lived as equals to their white neighbors. Ever since Texas had gained independence from Mexico in the 1830s, its leaders had actively restricted the civil rights of free blacks as it imported tens of thousands of African American slaves to work on cotton plantations. After the Civil War, white supremacist paramilitaries waged brutal terrorism campaigns to restrict voting in black-majority areas throughout the South, including greater Houston •

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(where the so-called Jaybird–Woodpecker War of 1889 resulted in a whites-only Democratic primary system that would last for more than six decades). Jim Crow laws and private industry policies adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made it almost impossible for black Houstonians to vote, hold office, serve on juries, own land, buy goods from mainstream merchants, or compete with whites for desirable jobs.2 Such institutionalized racism would guarantee that African Americans lived as subordinate citizens in the Fifth Ward until the years after World War II, when most of the neighborhood’s white families departed for Houston’s newly booming suburbs. Black families enjoyed no such postwar mobility, since discriminatory property laws kept them out of the city’s suburban areas, and federal-level housing initiatives (including Title III of the G.I. Bill) were structured so that low-interest mortgage loans were virtually unattainable for African Americans.3 While whites abandoned the Fifth Ward, black migrants from rural Texas and Louisiana arrived to take their place. “As in Harlem, the newly arrived blacks were isolated culturally, economically, and socially by racial discrimination and prejudice,” noted Texas Monthly writer Richard West. “Only manual and menial jobs were open to them. Their incomes remained low, and their neighborhood fell into what sociologists call ‘the cycle of poverty.’”4 Harlem was an apt comparison, since, for all its socioeconomic disadvantages, the Fifth Ward became Houston’s hub for African American culture and commerce in the postwar years. A self-contained black business district grew up around the intersection of Jensen Drive and •

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Lyons Avenue, where local families who’d saved up their money could dine at the Blue Shoe Café, get their pictures taken at Jiffy Studios, or catch a movie at the De Luxe Cinema. Black shoppers who weren’t welcomed at the Woolworth’s downtown could browse to their heart’s content at the Twentieth Century Gift Shop, and African American celebrities like Sarah Vaughan and Count Basie could sleep at the Crystal Hotel after performing for packed crowds at Club Matinee (which came to be known as “the Cotton Club of the South”). Around the same time, Fifth Ward’s Phillis Wheatley High School grew into one of the largest black high schools in America, and would go on to find pride in former students like Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, singer Archie Bell, and heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman.5 The most famous Fifth Ward enterprise during this era was black-owned Peacock Records, which topped the R&B charts in 1953 with Big Mama Thornton’s single “Hound Dog.” In many ways a spiritual predecessor to Rap-A-Lot Records, Peacock was founded by Don Robey, who in his day was as feared and respected as James Smith grew to be in the wake of the Geto Boys’ success decades later. A high school dropout, Robey had hustled for a living from a young age, making money from gambling, liquor, and nightclubs before founding Peacock Records in 1949. Over the course of the next decade, Peacock debuted recordings by artists like Little Richard, Johnny Ace, Floyd Dixon, Memphis Slim, and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Robey garnered a reputation as a ruthless CEO, having honed his business skills in Fifth Ward’s underworld. He is said •

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to have conducted contract negotiations with a loaded .45 revolver sitting out on his desk, and once—having taken umbrage at his client’s swagger in the studio—he beat Little Richard so viciously that the flamboyant rock ’n’ roll pioneer suffered a hernia. Robey’s shrewdest business move was poaching the publishing rights to “Hound Dog,” which paid off handsomely when Elvis Presley’s 1956 version of the song sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide.6 Despite the bootstrap successes of its postwar entrepreneurs, however, the Fifth Ward remained one of the poorest neighborhoods in Houston, its aging street and sewer infrastructure falling into disrepair as the city funneled development capital into the white suburbs. Conditions worsened in the 1960s, when new freeway projects vivisected the Fifth Ward’s Jensen–Lyons business district, routing suburban commuters away from the inner city. Around the same time, civil rights-era desegregation policies meant that more prosperous black families could leave the area for nicer parts of the city. This was a positive development in a certain sense, but it also meant that the Fifth Ward began to lose the very professionals and merchants who’d kept its bootstrap economy alive. “Without the guidance and aid of a more privileged class, poor black inner-city communities grew increasingly disorganized and isolated from the values and patterns of mainstream society,” hip-hop sociologist Michael P. Jeffries wrote of the era.7 Homes that couldn’t be sold by departing residents were abandoned, and homeowners who remained in the neighborhood often couldn’t afford basic repairs and maintenance. Cut off from what shred of influence the Fifth Ward once •

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had on city politics, its civic services declined steadily during the 1970s, transforming vacant lots into garbage dumps, street drains into cesspools, abandoned houses into vice dens. For the rest of Houston the 1970s was a golden age, as high oil prices and a regional drilling boom brought unprecedented wealth to the area’s petroleum-dependent economy. This began to change around 1982, when oil prices dropped, and the Houston metro area slid into one of the most severe regional recessions in US history, hemorrhaging 220,000 jobs over the course of the next half decade.8 This economic downturn happened at a time when the Reagan administration was increasing the national defense budget and slashing spending on urban housing, job training, and mass transit programs. Federal funding for Houston’s civic development initiatives fell by nearly two-thirds, and the city was forced to plunder its transportation funds to pay for its police department.9 As jobs became harder to find in the city (and more difficult to reach for folks too poor to own a car), living conditions became more desperate for residents of the Fifth Ward, making the neighborhood particularly vulnerable when the crack cocaine trade exploded in the mid-1980s. According to Drug Enforcement Agency data, more than three-fourths of crack users in the early 1980s were white professionals or suburban young people in cities like New York and Miami. By the time crack had gone national a few years later, most users of the cheap, highly addictive form of cocaine were inner-city dwellers. In response, the federal government—which just a few years earlier had broadly defunded urban •

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social programs—earmarked tens of millions of dollars for urban law enforcement and incarceration initiatives. This dope-trade clampdown increased the street value of crack, and inner-city violence spiked as street gangs battled over profits. The national murder rate for black male teenagers doubled between 1985 and 1989, and punitive new laws for drug infractions led to a 300 percent increase in the African American male prison population by the middle of the following decade. No US state had a higher incarceration rate during this period than Texas, and no Texas community paid a higher social toll than Houston’s Fifth Ward.10 While the songs on The Geto Boys depict crack-era Houston in tones of violence, vulgarity, and rage, the local news media had a tendency to treat the Fifth Ward as if it were a foreign country. A 1989 Houston Chronicle article, quoting a local social worker, noted that some young Fifth Ward residents looked “like Ethiopian-starvation children” due to drug-related social breakdown. “Crack cocaine is snatching food from the mouths of hungry children in the Fifth Ward, where the fierce grip of the drug has emerged as the greatest obstacle to eliminating hunger,” the article observed. “In their frenzy to get high, mothers and fathers sell their children’s food to buy crack, trade food stamps for a hit, and abandon their children for days while they wander the streets in search of the drug.” One in five Fifth Ward residents reported having gone at least one day each month without eating; rates for poverty, delinquency, unemployment, homicide, and suicide were higher among young black males than they had been in the pre-civil rights years of the 1960s.11 •

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Amid this grim atmosphere, standard rules of social mobility no longer applied. “Crack changed the mentality of the whole era,” recalled MC Wickett Crickett, a Houston rap pioneer and Fifth Ward resident. “Once the fast money came in, the respect left. [Before] the crack game, everybody respected one another; you went to work, spoke to your neighbors, busted your butt to get a car. Once the crack came in, you could get a car for quick as hell. You ain’t got to bust your butt no more. Wasn’t no ‘wait until the end of the week’ to get paid. You made $1000 a day almost.”12 For individuals involved in the inner-city dope trade, the fast money of the 1980s was inseparable from violence, as Akshen (writing as Brad “Scarface” Jordan) recalled in his 2015 memoir, Diary of a Madman. “[In] the late seventies the neighborhood was still pretty intact. Most of the homes had both parents in them. People were working. But once that crack came in, it got to a certain point where you’d hear those shots go off and you didn’t even want to go look anymore. You already knew someone was dead. It had become an everyday thing.”13

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What does fantasy violence have to do with real-life violence? What does pathology have to do with entertainment? And while we’re asking questions, what the heck are the Geto Boys doing in the Top 40? —David Mills in the Washington Post (1991)

On July 1, 1991, less than one year after the shit storm over Geffen’s refusal to release The Geto Boys, the group dropped We Can’t Be Stopped. The new album covered familiar thematic territory—gangsta bombast, pimp game boasting, slasher movie gore—but its songs didn’t exude the same degree of unhinged raunch and rage that had defined the previous album. Now that the Geto Boys had America’s attention, their new lyrics proved more nuanced and introspective, their soulinfused beats more blissed out, less dense. “Chuckie,” the album’s Child’s Play-sampling horrorcore cut, was so cartoonish and hyperbolic that it aimed more for laughs than revulsion. The gangsta lyricism on “Another Nigger in the Morgue” and “Gota Let Your Nuts Hang” was as muscular and coldblooded as ever, but the songs’ beats rocked a funkier, bouncier groove. Mack tracks like •

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“Quickie” and “The Other Level” were sexist without being so blatantly misogynistic, and the album’s political anthem, “Fuck a War,” was, for all its profanity, one of the more cogent songs of underclass protest to emerge from the Gulf War. Far and away the most important track on the new album, however, was “Mind Playing Tricks On Me,” a haunting gangsta confessional about the psychological toll that came with living in a place like the Fifth Ward. The song offered an intimate window into the anxieties of inner-city life in the crack era, and served as an eloquent counterpoint to the hard-edged provocation that had defined The Geto Boys. In time it would come to be celebrated as a defining hip-hop track of the 1990s. We Can’t Be Stopped generated its own share of controversy in 1991, but this was less for its lyrics than its album cover art, which featured Bushwick Bill propped on a hospital gurney, his right eye hideously pulped by a bullet wound. Though the Geto Boys at times went to fictional extremes in their lyrics, this grainy, awkwardly staged hospital photo was no fiction. Four days prior, Bushwick had, in a fit of despair, brandished a .22-caliber Derringer at his girlfriend’s house after having binged all day on Everclear, E&J, Bacardi, malt liquor, and weed. In an incident he later recounted in his 1992 solo single “Ever So Clear,” Bushwick cocked the pistol, handed it to his girlfriend, and begged her to kill him. When she refused, he threatened her infant; a struggle ensued, the dwarf rapper took a bullet to the eye. As Bushwick would recount later, he was taken to Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital, where he was legally declared dead before coming to consciousness in the morgue.1 •

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Seeing promotional shock value in the incident on the eve of a new album release, James Smith summoned Scarface and Willie D to the hospital for a photoshoot (DJ Ready Red, who had helped produce many of the new album’s tracks, had quit the group over contract frustrations two days earlier). A sedated Bushwick was wheeled into the hallway and handed a blocky gray mobile phone; Rap-A-Lot staffers peeled the bandages from his distended eye-socket, propped a “Fifth Ward Posse” ballcap on his head, and snapped a photo as his fellow Geto Boys pretended to wheel him down the hall. Less than one month later, this absurd, grotesque depiction of gangsta authenticity graced the cover of We Can’t Be Stopped when it shipped to record stores across the nation. “We didn’t know what we were shooting for, but [Smith] sure did,” Scarface recalled of the photo. “He knew it was one of those images that would make you stop what you were doing as soon as you saw it and take a closer look like, What the fuck?”2 If any one person had benefited from the Geffen fallout, it had been James Smith. In addition to making his Geto Boys a household name in the summer of 1990, the turmoil surrounding the Def American release had given Smith the leverage to negotiate out of his arrangement with Rick Rubin and release We Can’t Be Stopped as a Rap-A-Lot record.3 The new album’s title track opens with Smith’s drawling assessment of the Geto Boys’ journey since he’d reinvented the group a few years earlier. In 1989, he says, they’d knocked on the door of the music establishment and in 1990 they beat on the door; “now it’s 1991,” he concludes, “and we fit’na kick this motherfucker in.” The next three minutes of •

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the track amount to a profane celebration of the Geffen imbroglio, gleefully shouted over snippets of drums and bass from James Brown’s “Funky President.” Willie D disses Geffen and weak-willed concert promoters; Scarface calls out the hypocrisy of the mainstream news media and the corporate record industry; Bushwick Bill asserts that anti-obscenity activist Jack Thompson is a “country ass hick” and tells him to “go suck a dead man’s dick.” The most iconic track on We Can’t Be Stopped very nearly didn’t make it on to the album. Originally written by Scarface for possible inclusion on his solo debut (released by Rap-A-Lot that fall), “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” initially met with resistance from Willie D, who didn’t think it felt like a Geto Boys song. The group’s new distributor, Priority Records, was enamored of the track, however, and Smith pushed for its inclusion as a Geto Boys song, suggesting that all three MCs rap on it. The track’s title comes from a phrase Scarface had heard his grandmother use in moments of confusion, and its lyrics explore the depression, paranoia, and self-doubt he’d struggled with since he was young.4 The song’s first line (“I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles”) is lifted directly from “Mind of a Lunatic”— but while the old Geto Boys track had been written to evoke a slasher movie sense of menace, “Mind Playing Tricks” turned inward, examining what happens when the person you fear the most is yourself. Sonically structured around a lilting, melancholy guitar groove that Scarface and Ready Red lifted from an old Isaac Hayes soul tune, “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” inverts the self-aggrandizement and swagger that •

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had characterized hardcore rap. Scarface delivers the first verse with a grim sense of exhaustion, describing the sleeplessness and paranoia that comes with the gangsta life. In the second verse, Willie D examines the fearful regret that accompanies a life of violence, and the emotional ambivalence that underpins material success. The song’s vulnerability and loneliness comes to an emotional crescendo in the third verse, as Scarface confesses to his struggle at self-understanding, his thoughts of suicide, his longing for forgiveness, his inability to deal with (or express) his feelings toward the woman he loves. “Mind Playing Tricks” ends with another echo from “Mind of a Lunatic,” as Bushwick Bill lashes out against an attacker who, it turns out, exists only in his imagination. By the end of summer in 1991, “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” was in steady rotation at the very R&B stations the Geto Boys had once condemned in “Do it Like a G.O.” The video for “Mind Playing Tricks” proved so popular that Fab Five Freddy of Yo! MTV Raps made a pilgrimage to Houston’s Fifth Ward, where Bushwick Bill namechecked local landmarks (including Wheatley High) and recounted how James Smith had brought the group members together. “Mind Playing Tricks” eventually hit #1 on the Hot Rap charts and broke into the pop Top 40, peaking at #23 on the Billboard Hot 100. We Can’t Be Stopped climbed to #24 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold two months after its release. Critics were initially slow to embrace the album, but the staying power of “Mind Playing Tricks” landed the single on a plethora on retrospective “Best Of” lists, including Spin’s “Top 20 Singles of the 1990s,” VH1’s •

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“100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs,” and Pitchfork’s “Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present.” Two decades after the song’s release, a panel of rap artists and critics assembled by Rolling Stone ranked “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” as #5—above N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”—on its list of the 50 Best Hip-Hop Songs Ever. Questlove of The Roots, speaking for the Rolling Stone selection, called the Geto Boys’ song “a classic of cracked ghetto armor that put Houston hip-hop on the map,” noting its “awesome complex display of paranoia … which of course humanizes them in the end.”5 The most superlative response to “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” came not long after its release, when the eminent rock critic Greil Marcus used the song as a centerpiece of an Esquire essay entitled “Notes of the Life & Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock ’n’ Roll.” Positing that rock had, by late 1991, become “something that ought to be killed,” he argued that profit-driven record companies had been reducing art into target-market segments for so long that music “no longer seems to speak in unknown tongues that turn into new and common languages.” Marveling at how Carl Perkins’ song “Blue Suede Shoes” was so fresh and uncategorizable in 1956 that it managed to top the country, R&B, and pop charts, Marcus pondered if a contemporary song could achieve the same kind of preternatural, unifying intensity. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” appealed to him in its off-kilter rejection of rote entertainment, but he found it ultimately too caught up in its own irony and self-awareness. “Mind Playing Tricks On Me,” on the other hand, felt larger than the •

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musical categories that might have sought to contain it. “In my fantasy the song could be heard as a new ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’” Marcus wrote. “The borders of the song are that unclear, that open”: The echoes here are very deep: “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” shares the fatalism of Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Me and the Devil Blues,” the otherworldliness of the Orioles’ 1948 “It’s Too Soon to Know,” the dead-end introspection of Sly & the Family Stone’s 1971 “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa”—dead-end, because Africa isn’t talking, and the only one who’ll listen to you is yourself. … If you can hear Bushwick Bill not as a Houston rapper, or even as an African-American, but directly as an exemplary American with a story to tell and the means to tell it, then metaphors suggest themselves as quickly as, in its most intense moments, the music in “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” seems to slow down … That drifting, swirling sound, those tinkling notes—almost a merrygo-round sound, after a bit—make room for anyone’s displacement, confusion, terror, despair.6

In January of 1992 the Geto Boys traveled to New York City, where eighteen months earlier they’d been booed off the stage at the New Music Seminar. This time, when they performed their songs to a sold-out music festival audience at Madison Square Garden, the crowd sang along. “I remember walking off that stage with such a rush,” Scarface recalled. “Ground had been broken. We’d showed out in New York—the birthplace of hip-hop— and we’d been embraced.”7 The following month, on February 26, 1992, We Can’t Be Stopped was certified •

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as platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. With Ice Cube’s Death Certificate and N.W.A’s Niggaz4Life going platinum around the same time (and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic a few months from transforming G-funk into a blockbuster pop phenomenon), gangsta rap hadn’t just earned the respect of the East Coast rap establishment—it had formally revoked New York’s selfascribed role as hip-hop’s tastemaker. Once considered a part of rap’s lunatic fringe, the Geto Boys were now a part of—and, in fact, had influenced—a new hip-hop dialogue, one that was less about mimicking the tastes of the metropole than bringing one’s own “’hood” into the conversation.

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If the ’hood is the essence of where blackness can be found, which ’hood are we talking about? —Paul Gilroy, “It’s a Family Affair,” Black Popular Culture (1992)

As gangsta acts grew into a certified pop phenomenon in the early 1990s, the anti-rap activism that had once been spearheaded by white conservatives like Jack Thompson increasingly became a cause for black progressives. One catalyzing incident for this trend came in August of 1993, when Bushwick Bill was invited to speak at a conference of African American media professionals in Houston. History has forgotten who, exactly, thought this would be a good idea, but a Knight Ridder dispatch from the event suggests that Bushwick’s appearance did not go as planned: At a recent forum on hip-hop culture at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention, Bushwick Bill, one of the Geto Boys, managed to clear the house of a large number of indignant female and male journalists by insisting that every woman he had ever met, with the  101 •

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exception of his mother, was “a bitch or a hoe.” One woman challenged him, wondering what he would call his own mother. His mother’s a “woman,” he explained. But he wasn’t sleeping with his mother. Women he’s having sex with are “bitches,” he said. Bushwick Bill, who seemed baffled by the crowd’s response, later attempted a halfhearted apology without really acknowledging the offensiveness of his stance.1

Two months later, citing what had then come to be known as “the Bushwick Bill incident,” a group of African American female entertainment industry professionals allied themselves with the National Political Congress of Black Women in an effort to “organize boycotts and lobby for legislation to combat negative images of black women in all popular culture.”2 The chairperson of the Congress of Black Women, a sexagenarian Philadelphian who referred to herself as “the Honorable Dr. C. Delores Tucker,” would soon become synonymous with a far-reaching gangsta rap censorship campaign that attracted both liberal and conservative sympathizers in the mid-1990s. As had been the case with Jack Thompson (who was later disbarred in Florida for making false statements to tribunals), C. Dolores Tucker’s activist efforts frequently fell victim to her own outsized personality. Though her anti-rap campaign rapidly garnered the support of the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus, Tucker tended to babble on about hypotheticals at press conferences, once suggesting that disused American military bases be used as re-education camps for inner-city youth.3 Her dogged boycott tactics eventually compelled Time Warner to sell its interest in Interscope Records,  102 •

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which had championed gangsta artists like Tupac Shakur and Snoop Doggy Dogg, but the rappers in question wound up benefiting from the ensuing publicity, and Interscope netted a $100 million profit when it realigned itself with MCA. In the aftermath of the Interscope deal, Death Row Records head Marion “Suge” Knight accused Tucker of trying to extort him into partnering with her on a PG-rated rap venture, and soon the media was looking into allegations that she had misrepresented her educational credentials, profited from slum properties in Philadelphia, and used state resources for personal gain during her 1970s-era tenure as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state. By the end of the 1990s, Tucker was making more headlines over her increasingly bitter defamation lawsuits (against the Shakur estate, as well as Time and Newsweek) than for her activism.4 Although Tucker’s censorship campaign ultimately fizzled out, it reflected genuine concerns in the African American community over the violence, sexism, and profanity that pervaded gangsta rap. Some of this concern focused on how the music was being perceived by its white fans, who, commentators feared, might not be savvy enough to make sense of its racial implications. Jazz critic Stanley Crouch, for example, insisted that the “cursing, misogyny and thug materialism” of gangsta rap amounted to “contemporary minstrelsy”—a caricatured vision of black America that white consumers enjoyed for implicitly racist reasons. “All you have to do is go to Tower Records or turn on MTV, and there you are, in the darkest black America, where savages run free and wild,” he quipped to the Los Angeles Times in 1995.5 Hip-hop scholars like Tricia Rose and Bakari Kitwana  103 •

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were more nuanced in their assessment of gangsta rap’s cross-cultural implications, but similarly dubious about the under-examined motivations of white hip-hop consumers. Few white Americans who listened to the sensationalist narratives of gangsta rap, they pointed out, had had meaningful interactions with black Americans, and rarely did they have a clear grasp of their own racial privilege or an informed understanding of African American social history.6 In this way, the pleasure many whites derived from listening to hardcore rap ran the risk of veering into voyeuristic titillation, as mainstream American pathologies (chauvinism, gross materialism, an instinct for gun violence) were unfairly assumed to be traits of the inner city. But the ways in which gangsta rap narrative informed the white imagination were just one aspect of a much more complex African American debate about what the music represented. As often as not, this dialogue was split along class lines, with black middle-class commentators working from a different set of assumptions than inner-city-affiliated gangsta rappers. When Bushwick Bill was invited to speak at the 1993 National Association of Black Journalists conference, he was not, after all, interacting with an audience of peers. The one-eyed, 3’8” rapper was a high school dropout who’d come up in the Fifth Ward (by way of Brooklyn), while the well-educated media professionals were of the very demographic that had moved away from places like Fifth Ward a quarter-century earlier. Bushwick, who’d proved savvy at trolling the white media during The Geto Boys controversy three years earlier, wasn’t outlining a cohesive philosophy of gender when he outraged the  104 •

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assembled black journalists; he was, in a sense, playing a carnivalesque trump card to an audience that felt it was entitled to a display of contrition. As it happened, the rift between black underclass musicians and the African American bourgeoisie had been playing out for nearly a century by the time gangsta rap began to tweak mainstream social anxieties. In late nineteenth century New Orleans, for example, musical forms like ragtime (and later jazz) were at first shunned by the city’s black and creole middle classes because of the music’s unfamiliar rhythms, lewd themes, and red-light-district origins. A few decades later, when rhythm and blues evolved out of the fast-shuffle jumpblues played at lower-class juke joints and “rent parties,” the black mainstream was equally slow to embrace it. “As was the case in New Orleans, some blacks—in this case, middle-class, assimilation-minded, or ostensibly sophisticated ones—resisted the ‘ethnicity’ evident in the new rhythm and blues, characterizing it as ‘gut-bucket’ and ‘unrefined,’” music scholar Perry A. Hall noted. “It was as if black musicians were deliberately making cultural space between themselves and perceived mainstream sensibilities, as if their wish was to make sure they were not mistaken for someone trying to appeal to ‘white’ or otherwise highfalutin’ tastes.”7 Thus an ongoing cultural cycle played out over the course of the twentieth century as established African American sensibilities struggled with the raw artistic innovations coming out of the poorer, less-assimilated corners of black society. The Geto Boys, who by their very name evoked a less-advantaged aspect of the black experience, had from the outset embraced lyrical offensiveness as a way  105 •

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of being heard. Though they occasionally touched on political topics, they were never nation-conscious in the same sense that middle-class rap acts like Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest had been. Whereas Afrocentric artists of the same era had focused on informed racial awareness, gangsta rappers favored a “ghettocentric” approach that rejected uplift, wore poverty as a badge of authenticity, and depicted visions of sex and violence that were often incomprehensible to the outside world.8 “Products of the postindustrial ghetto, the characters in gangsta rap constantly remind listeners that they are still second-class citizens whose collective lived experiences suggest that nothing has changed for them as opposed to the black middle class,” wrote Robin D.G. Kelley. “In fact, [the word] ‘nigga’ is frequently employed to distinguish urban black working-class males from the black bourgeoisie and African-Americans in positions of institutional authority. To be a ‘real nigga’ is to have been a product of the ghetto.”9 Equating poverty with racial authenticity was an understandably unsettling notion for middle-class blacks, who were themselves marginalized from white society, in spite of their relative economic stability. This meant that their nuanced cultural tastes and contributions had a way of being dismissed as somehow less-than-black by the larger American society. At the outset of the 1990s, gangsta rap was still a fringe movement, a pushback against the New York-centric pop and political acts that dominated hip-hop at the time. But as the decade progressed and gangsta went multi-platinum, its street-oriented, “keeping it real” ethos began to dominate the genre. The edgy inner-city  106 •

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narratives that had agitated the hip-hop mainstream when pioneered by groups like the Geto Boys soon degenerated into predictable gangsta tropes, as rap’s new corporate stars spun interchangeable tales of drug deals, gun violence, and offhanded misogyny. Artists like Tupac Shakur, a former drama student who’d been raised in a politically conscious black-nationalist family, embraced exaggerated thug personas; puerile beefs over street authenticity, like the East Coast–West Coast, Bad Boy–Death Row rivalry of 1995–7, led to actual outbreaks of violence (including, some believe, the murders of Shakur and his Brooklyn-based rap rival Biggie Smalls). By the turn of the millennium, hip-hop had, as one critic put it, “devolved into a circular firing squad, riddled with gangster clichés and potboiler tales of the alleged hood”10—and a white guy from Detroit was being hailed as one of the best new voices in rap. Though the gangsta genre had, at the end of the 1990s, come to take the blame for hip-hop’s political tone-deafness and materialistic decadence, the success of Eminem was an ironic symbol of the way groups like the Geto Boys had helped keep rap black. Three generations earlier, when jazz had emerged from African American communities in New Orleans and New York and Chicago, it was quickly embraced and recorded by white musicians. Paul Whiteman, a former Denver Symphony violist-turned-bandleader, was dubbed “The King of Jazz,” and white audiences only dimly aware of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington celebrated Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman as musical geniuses. Later in the century, white rock fans would regard the release of Elvis Presley’s Sun Records single “That’s  107 •

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All Right” as the birth of a revolutionary new style of music, not grasping that Presley had been covering a bluesy Arthur Crudup tune in the raw, up-tempo style of Ike Turner. The story of American popular music in the twentieth century was, in fact, an ongoing tale of decontextualization—of art created in lower-class black communities being stripped of its cultural and emotional meaning and sold to mainstream America with a white face. Hip-hop, with its mythic connection to the Bronx, initially resisted appropriation and assimilation, but as rap grew into a mass-culture phenomenon, groups like the Beastie Boys proved that white artists could master its beats, and pop acts like Vanilla Ice showed that white performers could imitate its dance moves. Gangsta rap—by asserting that the true home of hip-hop wasn’t just New York, but in black inner cities everywhere— suggested that the music’s authenticity was as much about an artist’s origins as his performance skills. When Eminem broke out as a rap artist in 1999, the conversation surrounding his success referenced his upbringing on the black side of Detroit’s 8 Mile so frequently that the previously little-known Michigan thoroughfare became both a talisman of his hip-hop credibility and the title of his debut movie. In the end, even Eminem would acknowledge that, as a white rap star, he was an outlier. Unlike what had happened with jazz and rock, hip-hop had preserved its racial integrity—in part because of gangsta rap’s insistence that its purest expression flowed out from the dangers and joys of living in places like Compton and Queensbridge and the Fifth Ward.  108 •

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Hip-hop has radically reshaped the way we listen to and consume music, first by opposing the pop mainstream and then by becoming it. —Hua Hsu in The Atlantic Monthly (2009)

The last echo of The Geto Boys 1990 release controversy reverberated a full decade later, in December of 2000, when James Smith (who had legally changed his name to J. Prince) was accused of being a drug kingpin—and Rap-A-Lot Records his money-laundering front-business—during a Committee on Government Reform hearing in the US House of Representatives. According to the official transcript of the proceedings,1 the assembled congressmen and law enforcement officers detailed Smith’s alleged narcotics empire with language as over-the-top as any Geto Boys gangsta narrative. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Jack Schumacher and his colleagues outlined the agency’s operations against the “Rap-A-Lot gang,” including a drug bust that caught Smith’s alleged “No. 3 man” with 6 kilos of cocaine and $90,000 in cash. Another law enforcement expert explained how the investigation into Rap-A-Lot Records  109 •

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traced back to 1988, when border patrol agents found 76 kilos of cocaine (representing a street value of nearly a million dollars) in a car licensed to Smith’s auto lot. “This wasn’t just some small case of one drug dealer,” Indiana Republican Dan Burton declared. “This was a major drug operation.” Ohio Republican Steve LaTourette added that Smith was “Mr. Big” when it came to Texas drug-trafficking, and concluded that the Rap-A-Lot CEO had “a pretty big sway down in the Houston area of poisoning their children with cocaine.” As is often the case on the floor of Congress, the drug allegations against Rap-A-Lot Records were more about political theater than rational inquiry. House Republicans were, at the time, using the hearing in an attempt to embarrass then-Vice President Al Gore and California Democrat Maxine Waters, who had used the Rap-A-Lot case to raise racial profiling concerns with the Justice Department. The 1988 allegations against Rap-A-Lot had not, as it happened, involved 76 kilos of cocaine— they involved 76 packets of cocaine that weighed 5 kilos total (representing a street value of roughly $65,000), and the drugs were never juridically linked to Smith.2 Moreover, the $90,000 and 6 kilos of cocaine that led to the arrest of Smith’s employee belonged to the D.E.A., and had been planted in a Houston hotel room as part of an ethically dubious “reverse-sting operation” designed to entrap and “flip” potential witnesses. (The conviction against Smith’s employee was later vacated.3) Not only did the congressional inquisitors neglect to clarify these seemingly paramount details, however, but they doggedly diminished any suggestion that racial profiling might have been involved in the case. When  110 •

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D.E.A. officials admitted that one of their agents had been reprimanded for stealing a gold chain from an African American detainee, Connecticut Republican Chris Shays hypothesized that the chain in question was in fact “a medallion that identified gang members.” In response to claims that D.E.A. agents had extrajudicially lured Smith to a darkened Houston gas station on the pretext of intimidation, California Republican Doug Ose asserted—absurdly—that “we can’t find any dark stretches of Texas highway in the Fifth Ward.” The most astonishing moment of the congressional hearing came when Rep. LaTourette instructed a staffer to play a Scarface track called “Look Me in My Eyes” to illustrate how Rap-A-Lot had directed threats at Agent Schumacher and one of his confidential informants. The collective response to the song—reiterated again and again during the course of the hearing—was outrage. “I think it shows what a vicious bunch of thugs that we were dealing with here,” declared D.E.A. Administrator Donnie Marshall. “I wish that those kind of lyrics were a crime that we could deal with.” To anyone familiar with the Scarface song in question, this is a baffling reaction. “Look Me in My Eyes” does not call for Schumacher’s death, though it does accuse him of unjust harassment (the D.E.A. agent had, in real life, arrested the rapper on a marijuana possession charge in an attempt to get him to flip on Smith). The song vents rage at the D.E.A. and the F.B.I., but at heart it’s a plaintive evocation of the anxiety and self-doubt young black men feel in the face of constant police scrutiny. Over the course of two extended verses, Scarface admits to suffering nightmares, details the false accusations  111 •

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against him, declares solidarity with Rap-A-Lot, begs his therapist for wisdom, and is comforted with a paraphrase of Matthew 7:7: “He who seeks, he shall find.” Searing and profane, “Look Me in My Eyes” isn’t a prescription for murder; it’s an eloquent exploration of the psychological toll that comes with presumed guilt. Lyrical tone-deafness and fudged evidence aside, the Congressional hearing against Rap-A-Lot proved fatuous by its constant insinuation that gangsta rap inspired real-life lawlessness. In the ten years since The Geto Boys had first agitated America’s moral guardians, the national violent-crime rate had in fact fallen to historically low levels.4 Hip-hop had, during that same period, become a billion-dollar youth-culture industry, influencing not just music, but fashion, advertising, and cinema. The Source, unknown outside of hip-hop circles in 1990, had grown twelve-fold, and was outselling Rolling Stone on the newsstand.5 And, D.E.A. accusations notwithstanding, Scarface had charted five Rap-A-Lot solo albums in the Billboard Top Ten since 1993—a success rate on a par with such vicious thugs as Mariah Carey and George Strait. Just as significantly, rap had, inside of one decade, transformed into a truly national music that went well beyond the tastes of New York or Los Angeles. Whereas the Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew had been the only nationally known southern rap artists at the outset of the 1990s, by the turn of the millennium some of hip-hop’s most influential artists, producers, and label owners hailed from places like Atlanta and New Orleans and Memphis. By 2002, southern acts would come to represent more than half of all singles on the hip-hop  112 •

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charts, and by 2004 the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts were dominated by southerners.6 Houston grew to be a key player on the national hip-hop scene, as mix tapes by DJ Screw influenced tastes on both coasts, and albums by Lil’ Flip, Chamillionaire, Paul Wall, Mike Jones, and Lil’ Troy (i.e. the former drug dealer who’d released the first Akshen single back in 1988) went platinum. What was most remarkable about southern hip-hop was the way it rose to prominence in large part through independent, black-owned record companies. Innovating from a blueprint pioneered by Rap-A-Lot Records, southern labels like No Limit, Cash Money, and Swishahouse found success by developing local talent, selling directly to fans, and leveraging national distribution only after acts had established a strong regional audience. “Rap-A-Lot was very instrumental in awakening the sleeping giant,” James Smith said when he was recognized for his achievements at VH1’s 2010 “Dirty South” Hip-Hop Honors. “I always described the East Coast as a piece of bread, and the West Coast as a piece of bread, and the South the meat.”7 Though Smith was never formally charged with the drug offenses alleged by the D.E.A., he did develop a reputation for running his label with a ruthlessness that would have done Peacock Records’ Don Robey proud (TMZ has called him “a guy you just don’t mess with”; Vice dubbed him “the boogeyman of southern rap”).8 A number of Rap-A-Lot artists, including members of the Geto Boys, have over the years accused Smith of threats, intimidation, and violence; in 1998 Bushwick Bill filed a $20 million lawsuit against Rap-A-Lot, alleging that Smith’s henchmen had hit and kicked him in the “head,  113 •

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chest, stomach, arms, legs and genitals” as he was leaving a Houston comedy club.9 Smith also gained a reputation for binding his artists to exploitative financial arrangements of the sort that led DJ Ready Red to leave the group in 1991. (Red eventually returned to New Jersey, where, after a decade-long struggle with drug addiction, he found work as a security officer, mobile DJ, and freelance music producer.) As a trio, the Geto Boys released four studio albums after the platinum success of We Can’t Be Stopped, though contractual disagreements and solo side-projects meant that 1993’s Till Death Do Us Part didn’t feature Willie D, and 1998’s Da Good Da Bad & Da Ugly didn’t feature Bushwick Bill. The most successful of the group’s later albums was The Resurrection, released in 1996, which reached #6 on the Billboard 200 and topped the hip-hop albums chart on the strength of its single “The World is a Ghetto.” The Geto Boys’ most recent album, The Foundation, debuted in 2005; the group is no longer active, but occasionally reconvenes for festival appearances and reunion tours. Willie D has released six solo albums since 1989 and is considered an elder statesman of rap in Houston, often appearing as a panelist at university hip-hop events. In the late 1990s he had a local talk-radio show called “Reality Check,” and in more recent years he has penned an advice column, “Ask Willie D,” for the Houston Press. In 2004 he moved with his family to Baku, Azerbaijan in what proved to be short-lived real-estate venture; a few years later he did jail time in the U.S. for a wire-fraud scam involving cellphones. Active in political issues as well as music, he partnered with Scarface in 2012 to  114 •

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record the single “Hoodiez,” which protested the murder of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.10 For Bushwick Bill, getting shot in the eye didn’t impede his career so much as catalyze it. His 1992 solo album, Little Big Man, reached #15 on the Billboard 200, and he contributed to a track on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic later that same year. In the mid-1990s he released a concept album called Phantom of the Rapra, made a guest appearance on the TV sitcom Martin, and befriended both Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (“With ’Pac, I could talk everything from aphrodisiacs to Egyptology,” he told XXL. “With Big it was strictly blunts and the block”).11 Bushwick continued to be an outspoken and sharp-witted advocate of rap’s freedom to offend (“If I give one of you a Bushwick Bill tape and give the other a semi-automatic weapon, which one do you think kills?” he quipped in 1995),12 and he released three more solo albums between 1998 and 2005. A born-again Christian since the mid-2000s, he brandished a bible for the cover his 2010 album, My Testimony of Redemption, which explored introspective spiritual themes. Scarface grew to be Rap-A-Lot’s most successful recording artist, as three of his solo albums went platinum (and two more went gold) between 1991 and 1998. His 1994 concept album The Diary frequently appears on lists of rap’s all-time greatest recordings, as does his 2002 Def Jam release, The Fix, which won a rare five-mic rating from The Source. In 2000 music executive Lyor Cohen tapped the Houston rapper to head up Def Jam South, and his four-year tenure as the label’s president was most notable for the signing of Atlanta rapper Ludacris.13 Scarface’s complex rhyme patterns and psychologically  115 •

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nuanced lyrics left an influence on a generation of MCs—from Tupac to Nas to Jay-Z—compelling MTV to dub him “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper.”14 In his 2010 book Decoded, Jay-Z pointed out how Scarface “always feels like he’s rapping right in your ear … The power of his stories comes in part from his willingness to pull the covers off of taboos, to get into the shit that people pretend isn’t really happening.”15 In 2015 Scarface dropped his twelfth solo album, Deeply Rooted, and released a memoir entitled Diary of a Madman. For Americans who didn’t pay much attention to hip-hop in the 1990s, the Geto Boys are best remembered not for the controversy surrounding the Def American album, or for the success of “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” but for the group’s soundtrack appearance in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult movie Office Space. The film, which stars Jennifer Aniston and Ron Livingston, satirizes the soullessness of Middle-American corporate life, and some of its funniest moments come when its characters carry out acts of white-collar rebellion to the accompaniment of mid-1990s album tracks like “Still” and “Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta.” The hilarity, of course, lies in the way the Geto Boys’ music imbues the film’s petty suburban triumphs with a sense of inner-city gravitas. In April of 2014, almost three decades after James Smith first founded the Ghetto Boys, Houstonia magazine ran a story entitled “The Fifth Ward Had Zero Murders Last Year (No, Really).” Conceding that petty crime was still a problem in the area, the article noted that a “Lyons Avenue Renaissance” project had attracted new investment in the neighborhood, including retail  116 •

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spaces, housing for mixed-income residents, and a Texas Southern University-sponsored project to restore the historic De Luxe Theater. With easy freeway access, inexpensive housing prices, and close proximity to downtown Houston, significant parts of the Fifth Ward were, to all appearances, on the verge of gentrification.16 As with the streets of the Fifth Ward, the tracks on The Geto Boys don’t evoke the same sense of danger that they did a generation ago. Though the songs still sound raw to the uninitiated ear, online commenters at sites like YouTube and Genius.com have come to regard them with a kind of sentimentality—sometimes exuded by young fans whose favorite rappers were influenced by the Geto Boys, and other times by once-young fans who can recall a time when hip-hop was a still-new genre that could shock its listeners into paying closer attention.

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Karla Modesto, Collins Leysath, Willie Dennis, Keith Rogers, John Biguenet, Sara DeCaro, Maco Faniel, Jeff Nienaber, Kristin Van Tassel, Beatriz Herrera, Tod Goldberg, Dayton Moore, the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, the African American Library at the Gregory School, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Sutton 109 for assistance, advice, insight, input, and feedback.

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Introduction   1. Richard West, “Only the Strong Survive,” Texas Monthly, February 1979.   2. R. A. Dyer and Rick Mitchell, “Geto Boys’ Music Blamed in a Slaying in Dodge City,” Houston Chronicle, July 23, 1991.   3. Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars (Basic Civitas Books, 2008).   4. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (Routledge, 2001).

Fuck ’Em   1. Jon Pareles, “Store Owner Convicted of Obscenity in Album Sale,” New York Times, October 4, 1990.   2. Jon Pareles, “Outlaw Rock: More Skirmishes on the Censorship Front,” New York Times, December 10, 1989.   3. Dave Marsh and Phyllis Pollack, “Wanted for Attitude,” Village Voice, October 10, 1989.   4. Tipper Gore, “Hate, Rape, and Rap,” Washington  119 •

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  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9. 10.

11.

Post, January 8, 1990, and Jerry Adler, “The Rap Attitude,” Newsweek, March 19, 1990. Ben H. Bagdikian, “The Public Must Reject 2 Live Crew’s Message,” New York Times, July 3, 1990, and Rick Mitchell, “Yo! It’s raw, it rhymes, it sells,” Houston Chronicle, January, 1991. As pioneering hip-hop critic Nelson George would later admit in Hip Hop America (Penguin, 1998), “My old-school New York, [Public Enemy]-is-God ears couldn’t really hear NWA yet. It was too obscene. Too radical.” Matthew Mooney, “An ‘Invasion of Vulgarity,’” Americana, Spring 2004, and Keith Howard, “Ragtime Kalamazoo (1895–1917),” Kalamazoo Public Library, 2010. Sources include Los Angeles Mirror News, October 28, 1957; “Rock and Roll is Banned in Santa Cruz, California,” History.com; and Rose Eveleth, “The FBI Investigated the Song ‘Louie Louie’ for Two Years,” Smithsonian.com, May 23, 2013. David Hadju, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). Paul Verna, “N.W.A. Disk is a No-Go at WaxWorks Web,” Billboard, September 15, 1990, and Dave Marsh, “Don’t Knock the Rock,” Village Voice, May 29, 1990. Jon Pareles, “Gangster Rap: Life and Music in the Combat Zone,” New York Times, October 7, 1990, and Larry McShane, “Geto Boys Decision Raises Questions,” Associated Press, August 30, 1990.

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Size Ain’t Shit   1. He was also known as “Lil’ J” around the time of the events in this book. For the sake of simplicity, I’m referring to him by his birth name.   2. Chuck Philips, “Probe of Rap Label Looks at Entrepreneur Behind Bars,” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1997. To Harris’s claim that he gave Smith seed money, Smith replied: “Harris is a pathological lying snitch … I started Rap-A-Lot with my own money.”   3. Lee Hancock, “Lawmaker Intervened on Inquiry into Rapper and Label, Records Show,” Dallas Morning News, October 2, 2000.   4. Andrew Noz, “‘It Was Like Flies to Honey’: 25 Years of Rap-A-Lot Records,” NPR.org, February 10, 2012, and J. Prince (James Smith), “Celebrating 25 Years of Hip Hop in Houston,” Rice University, March 23, 2010.   5. Noz, “25 Years of Rap-A-Lot Records.”   6. Rob Kenner, “J. Prince Talks About the Rise of Rap-A-Lot Records,” Complex, December 4, 2011, and Katy Vine, “Man About Town,” Texas Monthly, May 2014.   7. Maco Faniel, Hip-Hop in Houston: The Origin and the Legacy (History Press, 2013), and Lance Scott Walker, Houston Rap Tapes (Sinecure Books, 2013).   8. Noz, “25 Years of Rap-A-Lot Records.”   9. Matt Sonzala, “DJ Ready Red, Original Ghetto Boy,” houstonsoreal.blogspot.com, January 4, 2005, and “The Story of DJ Ready Red ... an Original Geto

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Boy,” Gearslutz Pro Audio Forum, November 10, 2010. 10. Faniel’s Hip-Hop in Houston, and TV One’s Unsung: The Geto Boys (2013). 11. Walker, Houston Rap Tapes. 12. Noz, “25 Years Of Rap-A-Lot Records,” and Kenner, “J. Prince Talks About the Rise of Rap-A-Lot Records.” 13. Pareles, “Gangster Rap.”

Do It Like A G.O.   1. J Prince, “Celebrating 25 Years of Hip Hop in Houston”; J Prince (James Smith) on the Rap-A-Lot Records 25th Anniversary DVD; and Kenner, “J. Prince Talks About the Rise of Rap-A-Lot Records.”   2. Catherine Chriss, “For Houston’s Geto Boys, Anything Goes in the World of Gangsta Rap,” Houston Chronicle, April 5, 1992, and Trill Nadia, “Scarface’s Mental Health Discussed in Book about Southern Rap,” KeepitTrill.com, March 28, 2011.   3. Katharine Shilcutt, “Still Standing,” Houston Press, January 12, 2011.   4. Though Brad Jordan’s iconic rap persona is Scarface, I will refer to him in these pages as Akshen, since he was still using that name upon the 1990 release of The Geto Boys.   5. Also known as “capping,” “roasting,” and “signifying,” the dozens was common in African American communities throughout the twentieth century. Elijah

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Wald, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama (Oxford University Press, 2012).   6. Faniel, Hip-Hop in Houston, and Walker, Houston Rap Tapes.   7. Roni Sarig, Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (Da Capo Press, 2007), and Walker, Houston Rap Tapes.   8. Shaila Dewan, “Big Talker,” Houston Press, November 13, 1997.   9. Chriss, “For Houston’s Geto Boys, Anything Goes in the World of Gangsta Rap.” 10. Despite their departure from the group, the influence of Juke Box and Johnny C can be heard on Grip It! tracks like “Mind of a Lunatic” (which was co-written by Juke Box) and “Gangster of Love” (which was co-produced by Johnny C). 11. Bushwick Bill asserts that many people, including James Smith, had suggested he try his hand at being an MC; note Bill’s comments in Episode 145 of Blog Talk Radio’s Murder Master Music Show, September 14, 2014. 12. Chriss, “For Houston’s Geto Boys, Anything Goes in the World of Gangsta Rap.” 13. Peter Relic, “The Return,” XXL, January/February 2005; Bushwick Bill, in “Nardwuar vs. Bushwick Bill” (SXSW interview), YouTube, March 2014; Blog Talk Radio’s Murder Master Music Show, Episode 145; and TV One’s Unsung: The Geto Boys. 14. Brad “Scarface” Jordan, with Benjamin Meadows Ingram, Diary of a Madman: The Geto Boys, Life, Death, and the Roots of Southern Rap (Dey Street Books, 2015).  123 •

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15. Insanul Ahmed, “Scarface Breaks Down His 25 Most Essential Songs,” Complex, January 31, 2013; the rest of Akshen’s quote is from Jordan, Diary of a Madman. 16. According to explanatory comments on a video of the song posted to YouTube by Collins Leysath (Ready Red), “G.O.” isn’t an acronym so much as a play on (and emphasis of) the word “go.”

Scarface   1. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Random House, 2010).   2. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (Picador, 2005).   3. John Herbers, “Black Poverty Spreads in 50 Biggest U.S. Cities,” New York Times, January 26, 1987, and Alexia Cooper and Erica L. Smith, “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008,” U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, November 2011.   4. Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012).   5. Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (Columbia University Press, 2004).   6. Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.   7. Garson O’Toole, “Rap is Black America’s TV Station,” QuoteInvestigator.com, February 11, 2014, and Chuck D, interviewed by John Leland, “Armageddon in Effect,” SPIN, September 1988.  124 •

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  8. William Jelani Cobb, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (New York University Press, 2007).   9. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Partisan Review, 1948. 10. Murder Master Music Show, Episode 145. 11. George, Hip Hop America. 12. Cobb, To the Break of Dawn; brackets indicate where I’ve made slight edits for readability. 13. Pareles, “Gangster Rap.” 14. Ahmed, “Scarface Breaks Down His 25 Most Essential Songs.” 15. Sarig, Third Coast. 16. Murder Master Music Show, Episode 145, comment edited here for clarity, and J. D. Considine, “Geto Boys are Getting a Bad Rap for Lyrics They Say Mirror a Wicked World,” Baltimore Sun, October 30, 1991. 17. Pareles notes, “The song is being treated as if literature had never seen a deranged narrator.” See his “Gangster Rap.”

Let A Ho Be A Ho   1. Rick Mitchell, “Bad Attitude: Talented Rappers Debut Ugly Record,” Houston Chronicle, September 21, 1990.   2. Chriss, “For Houston’s Geto Boys, Anything Goes in the World of Gangsta Rap.”   3. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan, 1994).  125 •

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  4. Cobb, To the Break of Dawn.   5. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang.   6. Janis Faye Hutchinson, “The Hip Hop Generation: African American Male-Female Relationships in a Nightclub Setting,” Journal of Black Studies, September 1999; speaking of her female respondents’ preferences, Hutchinson notes: “Drug dealers are at the top and are ranked by the amount of money they spend at the club. Rappers who have recorded an album are next in the ranking, and men who work for the drug dealers are beneath the rappers in rank, followed finally by the regulars—men who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.”   7. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Lookin’ for the ‘Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto,” in Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal’s That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012).   8. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “2 Live Crew, Decoded,” New York Times, June 19, 1990.   9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 10. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989).

Life In The Fast Lane   1. Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New American Library, 2010).   2. J. Freedom du Lac, “Rick Rubin, Song Doctor,” Washington Post, January 15, 2006.

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  3. Frank Owen, “Censorship Isn’t Def American,” Spin, November 1990.   4. Dan Buyanovsky, “Rick Rubin Reflects on his Contributions to 10 Iconic Hip-Hop Albums,” XXL, July 2, 2010; Lynn Hirschberg, “The Music Man,” New York Times, September 2, 2007; Freedom du Lac, “Rick Rubin, Song Doctor”; and Rick Rubin interview, Melody Maker, May 4, 1991.   5. Noz, “25 Years Of Rap-A-Lot Records.”   6. Walker, Houston Rap Tapes.   7. Blog Talk Radio’s Murder Master Music Show, Episode 88, July 20, 2013.   8. Steven Hochman, “Maybe They Should Issue Stickers for Everyone’s Ears,” Los Angeles Times, 22 July 1990.

Mind Of A Lunatic   1. D. X. Ferris, Slayer’s Reign in Blood (Bloomsbury Academic, 2008).   2. Jon Pareles, “Distributor Withdraws Rap Album Over Lyrics,” New York Times, August 28, 1990, and Hochman, “Maybe They Should Issue Stickers for Everyone’s Ears.”   3. Pareles, “Distributor Withdraws Rap Album Over Lyrics.”   4. Frank Owen, “Censorship Isn’t Def American.”   5. Patrick Goldstein, “Geto Boys’ Raunchy Rap Gets the Green Light,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1990.

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  6. Larry McShane, “Nastier Than 2 Live Crew, Beyond NWA,” Associated Press, November 8, 1990.   7. Chuck Philips, “New Rap Attack,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1990.   8. Jack Thompson, “Clean Up Record Lyrics—Or Else,” Billboard, October 6, 1990.   9. “Rap Group Cut From UIC Show,” Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1990. 10. Goldstein, “Geto Boys’ Raunchy Rap Gets the Green Light.” 11. Carrie B. Fried, “Bad Rap for Rap: Bias in Reactions to Music Lyrics,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, December 1996, edited here for brevity. 12. Pareles, “Distributor Withdraws Rap Album Over Lyrics”; Hochman, “Maybe They Should Issue Stickers For Everyone’s Ears”; and Owen, “Censorship Isn’t Def American” 13. Maurice Garland, “Scarface Feels ‘Slighted’ by VH1’s ‘Disrespectful’ Dirty South Hip Hop Honors, Will Not Attend,” Ozone Magazine, May 13, 2010, and Jordan, Diary of a Madman, edited here for clarity. 14. Owen, “Censorship Isn’t Def American.” 15. Robert Christgau, “The Geto Boys (Def American, 1990),” Consumer Guide, November 1990. 16. Jim Washburn, “Top 10 Albums,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1990; Steve Sutherland, “Review: The Geto Boys,” Melody Maker, November 3, 1990; Mitchell, “Bad Attitude: Talented Rappers Debut Ugly Record”; and Tim Carman, “Exploitative as They Wanna Be, Geto Boys’ New LP Shows Why They’re Getting Bad Rap,” Houston Post, September 27, 1990.

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17. David Mays, “U Can’t Print This,” The Source, December 1990.

Gangster Of Love   1. Christopher R. Weingarten, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010).   2. Kembrew McLeod, “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop,” Stay Free! Magazine, May 31, 2004.   3. Richard Harrington, “Steve Miller, Gratefully Live,” Washington Post, July 31, 1992.   4. Rolling Stone, “Album Reviews: The Geto Boys,” November 15, 1990.   5. Noah Shachtman, “Copyright Enters a Gray Area,” Wired, February 14, 2004, and “Digital Music Sampling: Creativity or Criminality?” on PRI’s Science Friday, January 28, 2011.   6. Jody Rosen, “How a Sexed-Up Viral Hit From the Summer of ’09—1909—Changed American Pop Forever,” Slate, June 3, 2014.   7. Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” (audio recording, 1938), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.   8. Cobb, To the Break of Dawn.

Trigga Happy Nigga   1. Guy-Ernest Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Les Lèvres Nues #6, September 1955.  129 •

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City Under Siege   1. Howard Beeth and Cary D. Wintz, Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston (Texas A&M University Press, 2000); “Little Pearl Harbor,” www.houstonarchitecture.com, May 10, 2007; Diana J. Kleiner, “Fifth Ward, Houston,” Handbook of Texas Online, June 12, 2010; and Patricia Pando, “In the Nickel,” Houston History, Summer 2011.   2. Joseph A. Pratt, ed., “Confronting Jim Crow,” Houston History, Fall 2010.   3. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, May 2, 2014.   4. West, “Only the Strong Survive.”   5. Pando, “In the Nickel,” and West, “Only the Strong Survive.”   6. Faniel, Hip-Hop in Houston; Josh Alan Friedman, Tell the Truth Until They Bleed (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2008); “Don Robey and Peacock Records,” Soulful Kinda Music online, retrieved June 2, 2015 from http://www.soulfulkindamusic.net/articlepeacock. htm; and David Kirby, “The Meistersinger of Macon,” Triquarterly issue 130, Winter 2008.   7. Michael P. Jeffries, Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop (University of Chicago Press, 2011).   8. Lisa Belkin, “Now, it’s Time to Remember the Oil Bust!” New York Times, August 22, 1989, and Derek Thompson, “Houston is Unstoppable,” The Atlantic, May 28, 2013.   9. Tim Weiner, “From Boom to Bust in 1980s,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 17, 1992.  130 •

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10. US Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA History, 1985–1990, http://www.dea.gov/about/history/19851990.pdf; Roland G. Fryer, Paul S. Heaton, Steven D. Levitt, and Kevin M. Murphy, “Measuring the Impact of Crack Cocaine,” NBER Working Papers Series no. 11318, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005; and Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang. 11. Susan Warren, “Parents’ Craving for Crack Keeps Youngsters Hungry,” Houston Chronicle, December 17, 1989; see also: Mary Louise Adams, “Improving the Potential for Success of Inner-City Black Male Youths: A Case Study of the Fifth Ward Enrichment Program.” PhD dissertation, University of Texas, 1992. 12. Walker, Houston Rap Tapes, edited slightly for clarity. 13. Jordan, Diary of a Madman.

Assassins   1. TV One’s Unsung: The Geto Boys; Bushwick Bill, in “Nardwuar vs. Bushwick Bill”; and Murder Master Music Show, Episode 145.   2. Jordan, Diary of a Madman.   3. Kenner, “J. Prince Talks About the Rise of Rap-A-Lot Records,” and Noz, “25 Years of Rap-A-Lot Records.”   4. Keith Murphy, “Full Clip: Scarface Breaks Down Geto Boys & Solo Catalogue,” Vibe, August 6, 2010; Ahmed, “Scarface Breaks Down His 25 Most Essential Songs”; and Jordan, Diary of a Madman.   5. Ahmir Khalib Thompson, “Questlove’s Top 50  131 •

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Hip-Hop Songs of All Time,” Rolling Stone, December 17, 2012.   6. Greil Marcus, “Notes on the Life & Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Esquire, August 1992.   7. Jordan. Diary of a Madman.

Talkin’ Loud Ain’t Saying Nothin’   1. Kevin L. Carter, “Increasingly, the Language and Attitudes of Hard-Core Rap are Under Fire,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, October 6, 1993.   2. Kevin L. Carter, “Speaking Out About Rap Music’s Crude Side,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 1993.   3. “C. Delores Tucker Crusader Against Gangsta Rap 1993—A Moment in Black History,” YouTube video, posted by Darryl Edric Pugh, Sr., December 21, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6gb1w72xA.   4. Charnas, The Big Payback.   5. Jesse Katz, “Rap Furor: New Evil or Old Story?” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1995.   6. Rose, Black Noise, and Bakari Kitwana, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America (Basic Civitas Books, 2005).   7. Perry A. Hall, “African-American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and Innovation,” in Bruce H. Ziff and Pratima V. Rao’s Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (Rutgers University Press, 1997).

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  8. Davarian L. Baldwin, “Black Empires, White Desires,” in Forman and Neal’s That’s the Joint!   9. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los. Angeles,” in William Eric Perkins, Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (Temple University Press, 1996). 10. Cobb, To The Break of Dawn.

Read These Nikes   1. “The Drug Enforcement Administration: Were Criminal Investigations Swayed By Political Considerations?” Hearings Before the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives, December 6 and 7, 2000, Serial No. 106–257.   2. United States v. Anthony Price, Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 869 F.2d 801, filed March 24, 1989.   3. United States v. Todd McCarter, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, No. 01–21203, decided December 26, 2002.   4. Steven D. Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004, and Franklin Zimring, The Great American Crime Decline (Oxford University Press, 2007).   5. Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.   6. Sarig, Third Coast, and Ben Westhoff, Dirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop (Chicago Review Press, 2011).   7. Quoted in Westhoff, Dirty South.  133 •

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  8. Brandon Caldwell, “A Brief History of Houston Rap Executive J. Prince Defending Everyone from the Geto Boys to Drake,” Vice, February 17, 2015, and “Steve Francis Chain Recovery Engineered By Rap God,” TMZ, March 6, 2015.   9. Murder Master Music Show, Episode 88; Ichiban Records v. Rap-A-Lot Records, Court of Appeals of Texas, Houston (1st District), 933 S.W.2d 546, rehearing overruled July 9, 1996; and Dallas Winston, “Bushwick Bill Files Lawsuit,” AllHipHop.com, September 14, 1998. 10. Dewan, “Big Talker”; Matt Sonzala, “Interview with Willie D—Geto Boys,” houstonsoreal.blogspot.com, January 4, 2005; “Rap’s Willie D Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud,” UPI, December 18, 2009; and Jake Paine, “Willie D Talks Reuniting With Scarface For Trayvon Martin,” HipHopDX, April 26, 2012. 11. Relic, “The Return.” 12. Bushwick Bill, The 411 Online interview, July 10, 1995. 13. Westhoff, Dirty South, and Jordan, Diary of a Madman. 14. Shaheem Reid, “Scarface, Heralded For His Past, Keeps Eye On Future,” MTV News, August 15, 2002. 15. Jay-Z, Decoded (Spiegel & Grau, 2011). 16. John Nova Lomax, “The Fifth Ward Had Zero Murders Last Year (No, Really),” Houstonia, April 7, 2014.

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Also available in the series: 1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard 12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. Exile on Main Sreet by Bill Janovitz 19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder 25. Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy 31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

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35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard 42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris 58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. XO by Matthew LeMay 64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards 67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson

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A lso available in the series :

75. Kid A by Marvin Lin 76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Entertainment! by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica by David Masciotra 109. A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork

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