With four warped verses around a guitar loop of Isaac Hayes’ “Hung Up On My Baby,” the song itself felt like a giant detour from what the rest of the world was going through. The Geto Boys were brash, unfiltered and unapologetic takes on life in the Third and Fifth Wards of Houston,with Bill, in particular, leaning on dark comedy and horror to satisfy listeners and grab attention.
That video was America’s first inkling to rap beyond the boom bap and structure of New York or the hyper-realism of Los Angeles rap that Hollywood would later commodify into film and television projects. The subsequent “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” video made Halloween feel terrifying, an opening for hip-hop into the varying degrees of mental health and paranoia. It became the album cover for We Can’t Be Stopped, a fitting metaphor for not only the group who fought off label issues to succeed but for its primary star, a man who was born with dwarfism and wound up becoming one of the more famous hip-hop faces in America.įor Bill, who died Sunday at the age of 52 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, that photo was his introduction to mainstream America. The gauze pad that was supposed to hide his missing eye was hanging on his cheek. Of all places, it happened at a hospital with Scarface and Willie D, the two other members of the Geto Boys, wheeling Bushwick Bill out of the hospital on a gurney. The most iconic Houston rap photo did not take place at the ranch of James Prince. That scene would carry into the myth-making that would follow him and his career for the next 28 years. In his words, he was the only living person with both a birth certificate and a death certificate. He was pronounced dead at a Houston area hospital, but three hours later, he returned, alive and alert in the morgue.Īccording to Bill in a TV One interview for the program Unsung, he had a toe tag and was being prepared for an autopsy. A fight ensued and she wound up firing, shooting him in the eye.
The Houston rapper born Richard Shaw dared the woman to kill him in order to collect insurance money for his mom. The year was 1991 and the ingredients for erratic behavior were all there: PCP, Everclear, anger due to an argument with a girlfriend. It is relatively impossible to begin any tale about Bushwick Bill without starting with the most obvious one: the night he cheated death.
0 kommentar(er)
