The Geto Boys blew into the mainstream consciousness in 1990 with shock tactics borrowed straight from low-budget horror films. At a time when rap lyrics and B-movies could still stir up intense controversy, the Geto Boys combined bloody slasher tropes and bleak personal narrative, accidentally created a new subgenre, and nearly destroyed themselves in the process.

As the flagship act for Rap-a-Lot Records, along with Ganksta Nip, they found an innovation that later led to something called “horrorcore”—a label concretized by Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA to describe the grisly, grimy Grimm stories of his supergroup, Gravediggaz.

Appreciating the Geto Boys is certainly easier if you’re already a fan of horror. When I went from obsessively browsing the horror section at my local video rental store to actually watching the films, I learned quickly how to distinguish trashy jump-scares from the genuinely psychologically unsettling films that stick with you. 

If the VHS cover was plain and unassuming, the movie was usually better in the conventional critical sense. If the box trafficked in cheap thrills—say, ants crawling across a woman’s cleavage—the movie wasn’t going to be worth much without a certain sense of humor on both sides of the screen. 

Because of that strange comedic alchemy, Low-budget horror, aside from being one of the only areas in which independent film can be said to be thriving, has its unique language, internal logic, and storytelling devices. The world would be poorer without it. 

The Geto Boys’ Grip It! On That Other Level (credited to the Ghetto Boys, before it reverse-autocorrected) has the startling, subversive appeal of a classic cult horror flick. It’s the album that solidified the group’s core lineup of Scarface, Willie D, Bushwick Bill, and DJ Reddy Red, and it attracted the attention of Rick Rubin, fresh off his success fusing raw rap fundamentals with arena-rock swagger and theatrics with LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys.

Rubin oversaw The Geto Boys, a 1990 remix album that transformed the ragged, eclectic sound of Grip It! Into the sound of a bomb going off, with a cover that mocked both the labels’ squeamish distributors and the Beatles’ Let It Be, and gave the Geto Boys their Hollywood blockbuster moment. The lyrics went beyond the violent street tales of Ice-T and N.W.A. to indulge in grindhouse fantasies of rape, murder, necrophilia, familicide, psychosis, and damnation. 

The album remains a Rorschach that can tell you a lot about your hangups, traumas, and perversions based on what you find stomach-churning, hilarious, or both. It posits that if reality itself is a controlled hallucination, perhaps the tropes of cartoonish horror can sometimes get us closer to the essence or “truth” of the feeling of an experience. Well, no, I’m the one positing that, and I should speak for myself.

In any case, the Soundscan numbers for N.W.A.’s monumental 1991 album Efil4zaggin exposed the open secret that, despite the lyrical verisimilitude, much of the audience for gangsta rap consisted of suburban thrill-seekers from whom Ice Cube’s South Central was as real as Stephen King’s New England. While N.W.A. crafted gritty urban tales that toyed with reality, the Geto Boys tore through any notion of authenticity, dispensing with distinctions between truth and fiction. They gave the weekend warriors exactly what they wanted in dangerously high, pure doses.

Rap’s connection with real-world violence has long been debated, with most evidence suggesting that violence flows into the music more than it flows out of it. In the case of the Geto Boys, it appeared that, per Jung’s shadow theory, “If you think dark thoughts, dark things will come to surround you.” 

We Can’t Be Stopped, the group’s follow-up album, seemed to celebrate this, with its infamous cover of Bushwick Bill on a gurney after a failed suicide attempt. Though lacking its predecessor’s full punch and relentless, brutal consistency, the album retained that grim, defiant sense of humor, balancing the prerogatives of entertainment, art, and provocation.

We Can’t Be Stopped became the soundtrack to an unlikely connection with Amos, a classmate I’d always resented because he seemed like me but better. Amos was charming, well-liked, and magnetic—a kid who had everything I wanted, including a series of hot, smart, kind girlfriends and a precocious brooding intensity I failed to recognize as the same burgeoning depression I hadn’t yet acknowledged I was dealing with.

One day, we were talking rap. I liked 2 Live Crew, Mama Said Knock You Out, and some lyrically lyrical East Coast stuff I picked up from my brilliant, perpetually dead-serious summer camp roommate, who spent those two weeks listening to EPMD’s Business as Usual and almost nothing else. Amos liked the Geto Boys.

He’d picked up We Can’t Be Stopped, which had just come out, and wanted me to hear “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” one of rap’s classic before-and-after experiences. Over a jumpy Isaac Hayes sample, it brings the full spectrum of depression, paranoia, and general mental illness into unforgettable, devastating, irresistible relief.

If you love the song, this Ringer podcast is quite good – even as a huge fan, I learned a lot. If you’ve never heard the song, my god:

In later years, the Geto Boys continued their association with the world of film, particularly in collaborations with fellow Texan Mike Judge. Tracks like “Still” and “Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” were essential pieces of Office Space, and Scarface performed in Idiocracy. After horrorcore became the Gathering of the Juggalos and cold, paranoid aesthetics of trap pushed some genuinely weird shit to the heights of commercial success, the Geto Boys’ best music still sounds more fresh, funny, raw, garishly confrontational, and clinically cold and cutting than most of what’s out there.

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