60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Geto Boys—"Mind Playing Tricks On Me"

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Rob explores the revolutionary Geto Boys single ‘Mind Playing Tricks On Me’ by highlighting how it expresses raw vulnerability through its lyrics and its legacy in hip-hop to the present day. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Kiana Fitzgerald Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm slash music and talk. That's A-N-C-H-O-R dot FM slash M-U-S-I-I-C-A-N-D-T-A-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. I am haunted by a face on the cover of We Can't Be Stop an album by the Houston rap group,

The Ghetto Boys. Not that face. Another face. This is 1991. There are three ghetto boys at this point, three rappers primarily. There is rap battle legend in amateur Golden Gloves boxer William James Dennis, a.k.a. Willie D. There is Brad Jordan, aka Scarface. Even before Scarface, the rapper joined the ghetto boys. The ghetto boys were obsessed with Scarface the movie, whereas Scarface the rapper had not yet seen Scarface the movie when he first named himself Scarface. Finally, there is Richard Stephen Shaw, aka Bushwick Bill, who died of cancer in 2019.

Bushwick Bill stood three feet, eight inches tall. One of his early showcases as a rapper was a ghetto boy's song called Size Ain't Shit. In 1991, Bushwick Bill got shot. in the right eye. Accounts vary as to how this happened. Accounts from Bushwick Bill vary. He has said that he got shot in the eye during a dispute with his girlfriend, the dispute being that he wanted his girlfriend to shoot him. Many years later, Bill would say that it was actually a dispute with his mother, the dispute being that he wanted his mother to shoot him, so that she might collect on his life

insurance policy. A blunt, laced with PCP, factored into that plan, according to Bill. Either way, Bushwick Bill gets shot in the right eye. He goes to the hospital. He will lose the eye. His friends converge at the hospital to visit him, but also, at the urging of their manager and or the brain trust at their record label, Houston's Rapalot Records, they also end up shooting the cover photo for the next ghetto boys album, We Can't Be Stopped. My name is Rob Harvilla.

I'm a music critic at the Ringer, and this podcast is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. Today we're talking about mind playing tricks on me. The biggest song on that album, the biggest song of the ghetto boys' career, all of them, together or solo, one of the biggest songs in the history of Houston rap, of Southern rap. And one of the best songs, hip-hop or otherwise, about mental illness, about paranoia and isolation, and hallucinations, and fear and guilt, and suicidal thoughts. That was Scarface's voice warming up. He flipped the Isaac Hay sample. He produced the song. He brought it to the ghetto boys rather than save it for his solo album. He wrapped two verses and also helped write Bushwick Bill's verse. He's a team player. Further evidence of this can be seen on the cover of We Can't Be Stopped. Bushwick Bill is in the center of the frame. He's propped up on a gurney. It wasn't really his gurney in a hospital gown. He's holding a giant 1991 cell phone to a his left ear. He wasn't really calling anybody. And at his handler's urging, he's got the patch

over his right eye pulled down so you can see the wound, which is extremely real. I guess we have to call this iconic. It's gross. It's shocking. It's famous, infamous, as album covers go, hip-hop or otherwise. Somehow he's not the guy who really haunts me. It's Scarface. Willie D. is standing to Bill's right. He's resplendent in purple, and he's sort of pretending to push the gurney, he doesn't look totally at ease, but relatively he's rolling with this. But standing to Bill's left, Scarface has got one hand on the gurney and one hand on his cane, but he's hanging back, like he's trying to will himself out of the frame entirely. He's shrinking, as Scarface does not, in any sense, shrink.

And there's this look on his face of just such total haunting discomfort, disgust, even, as much emotional as physical. Many years later in his autobiography, Scarface would recall, as he often did in other interviews, this scene. Quote, someone must have told us to dress like we were going to a photo shoot because we had all of our gear on. But once I got to the hospital and saw how fucked up Bill was, I wasn't down with that shit. It was too raw. That's why I have that look on my face in the picture, like, holy fuck. But I was a team player.

turn, candlesticks and the dog vizers the body's being burned. There is such an enormous vulnerability and empathy to this song. You wouldn't call it nuance exactly, but it's alarmingly direct. The ghetto boys made for excellent cartoon supervillains and culture war scapegoats and censorship poster boys. They were the boogeyman. They reveled in it. The song right before Mind Playing Tricks on Me on the album is called Chuckie, the killer doll from the horror movie Child's Play. Bill was obsessed to with that movie as well. It's Bushwick Bill's first extended ode to Child's Play.

Worse than Charles Matts are never having a equal. Incidentally, the third song in that series would appear in 2009 on Bushwick Bill's Gospel album, yeah, and would be called No More Child's Play. But let's just say that mine playing tricks on me is also about sleepwalking in its way. But it's not played as comedy or as a threat or a taunt. It's a reminder that horror core, as garish and gory rap music of this sort is often described, isn't necessarily fueled by cinematic or fantastical horror. Real life is horrible enough. The cover of We Can't Be Stopped is horror. The fact that the cover of We Can't Be Stop is a cynical and exploitive stunt

to sell a song as sensitive and traumatized as mind playing tricks on me. That's horror. In one of those many interviews about the cover, Scarface once said, It's hard to wake up in the morning and deal with that one. Just add it to the pile of reasons he can't sleep. James Prince, the founder and CEO of Rappell Out Records, put the first ghetto boys lineup together in the mid-80s, and that lineup would mutate constantly. The group's first song from 1986 was called Car Freak,

and their first album from 1988 was called Making Trouble. And at this point, Willie D. and Scarface aren't involved at all, and Bushwick Bill is only involved as a hype man in dance, and the album's sound, as provided by DJ Reddy Red, with Sire Jukebox and Prince Johnny C rapping over top is extremely run DMC. Here's an excerpt from a song called No Curfew about their desire to not have a curfew. So this didn't last. Jay Prince's first big revelation was to let Bushwick Bill rap,

and also to replace those earlier rappers with Houston natives, Willie D. and Scarface, who usually wrote Bushwick Bill's rhyme. Willie D. apparently won a billion rap battles in a row at a mythic Houston club called the Rhinestone Wrangler. There's a great book of interviews called Houston rap tapes where he brags about beating vanilla ice there a bunch of times. Quote, I fucked him up like I fucked everybody else up. You could say he flew like a harpoon, daily and nightly. The other big revelation was to stop trying to sound like they were all from New York City or sound like New York City or sound like they wish they were in New York City. They were proud to rep Houston, and of course inspired thousands

of other Houston rappers to be proud of being from Houston. But even better, they helped establish the idea of being proud of wherever you were from, even if it wasn't New York or L.A., Dallas, Memphis, Cleveland, Flint, Atlanta, wherever. Starting with 1989's Grip It on that other level, you know what the ghetto boys represent and where they're coming from and where they want to go, and who Willie D., for starters is willing to steamroll to get there. It's time to step on some motherfucking toes. Nah, dear. Man, fuck them hoes.

These coasts. You explain it to him. Gripit did get a great deal of attention and praise. It got a perfect five-mic review in the source. That record also got Rick Rubin's attention. I don't need to clarify this, but that's Rick Rubin rap rock kingmaker, still basking in the afterglow of the Beastie Boys' license to ill. He signs the ghetto boys to his new defamination.

American label. He suggests they changed the spelling of their name from G-H-E-T-T-O to just G-E-T-O for commercial purposes. He's a genius. And he works on a self-titled 1990 remix album, mostly reworked older songs, a few new ones, including size ain't shit, lyrical content spanning from murder to rape to necrophilia and whatnot. That's another big philosophical change in this era. We've moved beyond the curfew issue. Ghetto Boys is a great album, but Geffen Records, which distributes Deaf Americans' albums, refuses to distribute it due to the

murder and necrophilia and whatnot. The cover of Ghetto Boys, in fact, is remarkable in its own right. It looks like the Beatles let it be, except it's Bill, Willie, Scarface, and Reddy Red taking munk shots, and at one point the CD had a sticker that read, quote, Deaf American

Recordings as 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. Which brings us to We Can't Be Stopped. DJ Redd worked on the album but left before it was finished. Accounts vary, but in that Houston rap tapes book, he cites funky arithmetic.

But you can still hear his voice on the title track, and you can also hear the ghetto boys observe that Geffen Records proudly distributed the likes of Guns and Roses, or for that matter, shock comic Andrew Dice Clay. Manufacturers, wooden press out this, you know it wasn't fair? Bushwick Bill saying, fuck everybody you work there cracks me up every time. I don't know why. The ghetto boys were irate and they were nasty. You did not want to get caught with this tape and your Walkman at school.

But they were also funny and charismatic even at their nastiest. They'd received at this point a quite incendiary mixture of respect and disrespect. A muzzle can be a bullhorn. So We Can't Be Stop Has a song called Gotta Let Your Nuts Hang Scarface is for it It has a sort of answer song to Queen Latifah's Ladies First called I'm Not a Gentleman

in which Willie D. Raps about the idea of male chivalry He's against it. Willie says the song was his girlfriend's idea. It has a Bushwick Bill showcase called The Other Level About a threesome. He had one. The question of whether any of this has aged well Musically or otherwise is very much of the wrong question

though I will note that there's another quite striking Bushwick Bill showcase called Fuck a War, this referring to the first Gulf War. But my playing tricks on me drops on all this like a bomb, and that all three rappers are suddenly shell-shocked, and plagued by fear and doubt and remorse, and confronting terrifying demons who turn out to be imaginary. It's shocking in an entirely different way, to hear Willie D. start bragging,

but immediately pivot to a much frailer and darker place. money. I drive big cars. Everybody know me. It's like I'm a movie star, but late at night, something ain't right. I feel I'm being tell by the same suckers' hair lights. Willie ditches his car and prepares for a gunfight that turns out to involve three blind, crippled, and crazy senior citizens who aren't armed and weren't tailing him. Bushwick Bill gets in a Halloween brawl that turns out to involve zero other people and leaves him bashing his bloody fists into the pavement. It wasn't even Halloween. Scarface ends up just staring at the woman on the corner.

This is Scarface's show. His sample of Isaac Hayes' hung up on my baby is easily the prettiest moment in the whole ghetto boys' catalog to the extent that the group ever aspired to prettiness at all. And he sets the lyrical tone on mind-playing tricks on me, too. He gives himself nowhere to hide and encourages his partners to stop hiding. I often drift when I drive,

having fatal thoughts of suicide Bang and get it over with And then I worry free But that's bullshit I often drift when I drive Gets me every time too For entirely different reasons Scarface's autobiography Diary of a Madman

Starts with a suicide attempt When he's 13 and not his first attempt He winds up in the mental health wing At Houston International Hospital He leaves there of course But part of you never leaves there You can hear it in his voice where he's been, what he's seen, what he's felt,

no matter how cartoonish or outrageous or wildly offensive any one song might get. He writes a lot about this, how people in the industry were so quick to condemn the ghetto boys, but not the environment that made the ghetto boys. Quote, they always wanted to say that we were glorifying violence or the street life or drug dealing or sex or whatever it was. Anything that made them uncomfortable, we were glorifying it. I never understood that. We weren't glorifying shit.

It was just there. How do you glorify reality? Bushwick Bill gets the last verse on mind playing tricks on me. It starts with him and the other ghetto boys robbing trick-or-treaters because, of course, it does. But soon, they're in a fight with a six- or seven-foot lawman he's seen in his sleep. His deepest, darkest fantasies tell you a lot about his reality. It was dark as fuck on the streets. My hands were all bloody from punching on the concrete.

There'd be four more ghetto boys albums after this, though only two would bring all three of these guys back together. There'd be plenty of great solo stuff, particularly from Scarface, who'd revisit this song on his best album, 1994's The Diary. Bushwick Bill was a singular force until he died. But in another sense, the ghetto boys will never leave the world of mind-playing tricks on me, still swinging at ghosts at figments of their own imaginations that maybe aren't imaginary at all. And they're still trapped on the We Can't Be Stop album cover, which Bushwick Bill regretted too. He once said, quote, It still hurts me to look at that cover because that was a personal thing that I went through.

I still feel the pain from the fact that I've got a bullet in my brain. To see that picture only brings it back more so, end quote. He goes on to say that they endangered him. They took out his IV. They had him pull down his eye patch. And he could tell, looking at the cover years later, how wildly uncomfortable Scarface was, too. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

But at least they're staring down their demons together. My guest today is Keanu Fitzgerald, who is based in Texas and writes for NPR, The Cuts, Billboard, Texas Monthly, and many other fine publications. Thank you so much for being here, Keanu. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Of course. When Bushwick Bill died in 2019, you wrote a really beautiful obituary for Rolling Stone and talked about how important his music was to your family. What do the ghetto boys and mind-playing tricks on me in particular mean to you? So I've known about this song since I was very, very young. I was introduced to it through my mother, and she was someone who lived with depression and other mental health issues.

So when she heard the song for the first time, it came out in 1991, she was just blown away, and she would play it every chance she got. So I was born in 89. I was only a couple of years old. And I just remember being in car rides, going out to the country and just hearing this song, I'll repeat, hearing that Isaac Hay's bass line just, do, nah, nah, no, no. You know, it's just like riding deep with my family. So it was a really, really instrumental part of my childhood. Yeah. It's funny, because I've always thought of the ghetto boys as like teenage rebellion music, right? Like, that's who you play when you're trying to terrorize your parents. Like, what changes for you? What changes for you about? this music when it's actually your mother recommending it and enjoying it with you. Yeah. So for me, it just kind of blew open my world in terms of taking in music that I necessarily wouldn't have found on my own or if I did find it, it wouldn't have come until years later. So for her to just kind of plot me in the middle of it from a toddler's age,

you know, it really gave me the ability to listen to artists these days, like the late XXX extantation, like DMX, like Zero, who's from Texas. These artists who are really, really delving into what it means to be emotionally unstable, but also finding their own truth within it, I feel like I owe everything to my mother in that respect. Yeah. I always feel like there are more rap songs than we think that talk about depression and mental health and suicide. Mind playing tricks on me is a famous example, but it's not a total anomaly. Does this song stand apart for you in terms of its subject matter?

Are there other songs or artists that you associate with it? There are definitely other artists. As I mentioned DMX, I mentioned Zero. Zero's entire discography is about mental health and substance abuse and trying to fight back through personal demons. But I feel like this song is so special because it was one of the first. And not only was it one of the first, it was one of the first to really dive head first into everything that it means

to be in a world that does not feel like it's your own, in a brain that doesn't feel like it's your own. They're very, very descriptive. They're very personable in their delivery. And I feel like that's what sets the song apart. Yeah. The ghetto boy's history and discography gets pretty convoluted, like the different lineups, a lot of time passes.

Like, is this song the absolute peak for them, or are there other ghetto boys' songs or eras, like either together or solo that, like, don't get the respect or attention that you wish they would? Sure. Wow. So when you said, together or solo, I just immediately thought about Scarface and his album, The Diary,

That project is one of the most haunting, chilling, but beautiful pieces of work that have ever been produced by hip-hop artists or otherwise. But other than Scarface's solo work, I would say people who are familiar with the office-based soundtrack, Dammit feels good to be a gangster still. Those songs are very incredible. But also, there's a song on The Resurrection called The World is a ghetto. And it's just one of the most poignant tracks that they put together. I think it's really special. and I think that it really speaks to what was going on at the time in the 90s when they made it,

and it really reflects a lot of what we're going through today. Yeah, I was listening to Till Death do us part today, and Scarface said, some people were born dying, I was born killing, and I woke up on my lawn, like, several hours later, and I had no idea what happened, but it was awesome. Like, Scarface is great, and the diary is great. Like, I read his autobiography, and like, you listen to us on, I seen a man die, but, like, he makes very clear. that you know that he actually has seen a man die. It was so real to him. It was just not at all.

As cartoonish as the ghetto boys could appear at times. It was entirely real to them. What do people who aren't from Texas get wrong about Houston rap? What stereotypes were the ghetto boys dealing with? And as a fan, what stereotypes are you maybe still dealing with today? Of course. The major thing that I think people are still having trouble getting over today, artists from the South, is people feel like we're slow and lazy. People feel like we can't spit down here and like we can't really deliver and be hard. And the ghetto boys with this song, they showed that you could have personality and you could also deliver really, really compelling lines that move you and shake you to your core. They are really just great at being precise and incisive and direct. and they really showed everybody that Houston could be a city that produces really great lyricists.

Yeah, I mean, Bushwick Bill had a great solo career. You know, he had a gospel album, you know, which sounds like a joke, but it absolutely wasn't. Like, that's a wonderful album and, like, the last thing you would expect from him, but it works when he does it. Absolutely, yeah. And I'm so grateful that I was able to, you know, write the obituary for Rolling Stone about his life, because as someone who is bipolar myself, I've also been. slap with the schizophrenic diagnosis a time or two. As someone who deals with those issues,

I'm able to look back and listen back to those projects and those songs and feel understood in ways that I never imagined when I was like 10 years old listening to it initially. Yeah. You know, like Kanye or Kid Cuddy or Drake, like I feel whenever a rapper now is open about his feelings or even his mental health, like it's treated as this unheard-of revolutionary thing, where, of course, it's part of this long lineage.

But on the other hand, is this kind of openness like more prevalent in rap now than it was in the early 90s? Like, were the ghetto boys at all revolutionary, like, at the time? Yeah, the ghetto boys were definitely revolutionary at the time. And I would say these days, it's less shocking and jarring to hear someone rap about wanting to commit suicide, trigger warning, and, you know, just people who have just a different way of living life and a different set of lived experiences. It's really a song, Mind Plain Tricks on Me, is just a song that sits.

sits in its own level, in my opinion, but it definitely opened the door for a lot of these new artists, especially these kind of punk rap, emo, quote-unquote rappers, who are out here now. I mentioned XXXX earlier. Ski Mast's Sumpkod, you know, there are many, many artists, Base Goes Perp. Oh, my gosh, he's one that has been very open about his mental health. And the fact that he is proud to be someone who produces music and creates, even though he has this the stigma attached to the things that he's been diagnosed with. Are there any rappers or groups around now that Strike You is carrying on the ghetto boys'

legacy in particular? Do you see that as a direct lineage? In terms of either the controversy they caused or the vulnerability that they were capable of? I mean, as difficult as it is to really wrap my mind around what he's doing, I think Kanye West has a very, very big opening for him to be able to break this entire thing. into a new realm in terms of how we talk about mental health, how we discuss the things that people live with every single day. He's touched on it a little bit in his songs.

He'll be like, oh, they take me on, meds, off meds, but this is my superpower. And it's like, as someone who lives with it myself, I understand what he's saying, and I agree with him to an extent. But he won't go further than that. And so that's why I'm a little hesitant to say that he's kind of carrying the torch. But aside from that, yeah, I can't really think of any, I mean, Kid Cuddy,

Obviously, I think Schoolboy Q is doing some really interesting stuff. You wouldn't necessarily look at him and think that he's like a mentally, like, emotional rapper. But his most recent album, Crash Talk, was like, it sounded like the world had ended. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, I know this is depression. Like, that's what this is. Yeah, and with Kanye, like, it's shocking as that we can't be stopped album cover is, like, Kanye put the word bipolar, like, on an album cover, which I don't think that had ever been done before.

No, yeah. That was a huge deal. That was a huge deal. Well, thank you so much, Keanu. Of course. This was wonderful. Thank you. Thanks very much to our guest, Keanu Fitzgerald, to our producers, Isaac Lee and Justin Sales. And to you, of course, for listening. We'll be back next week.

Until then, here's Mind Playing Tricks on Me by The Ghetto Boys.