The record label Geffen refused to release their 1990 follow-up, Geto Boys, which mostly remixed songs from Grip It!, because of content it called “violent, sexist, racist, and indecent.” While Scarface was the group’s most visible and celebrated rapper - and while he boomed and genuflected where Bill creaked matter-of-factly - it was the latter who put the counterargument succinctly to Spin in 1990: “People want to hear what’s going on around them in everyday life - war, blood, violence.
THE GETO BOYS DANCE CRACKED
It was called Grip It! On That Other Level, and became a critical and - by Rap-A-Lot’s standards at the time - commercial success, having cracked the Billboard 200.īut when Rick Rubin tapped the group as one of his first post–Def Jam rap projects, Bill and the Geto Boys ran into a morass of cultural conservatism that would become one of Bill’s focuses. In 1989, the revamped group (then called the Ghetto Boys) released their first album with the roster of Bill, Willie D, Scarface, and DJ Ready Red. What began as a gig hype-manning and break-dancing became a spot as a rapper in the Geto Boys, which until then had existed more as a name and branding exercise for the label than as a group with a static lineup. (Bill would secure a green card but never American citizenship, which would complicate things later.) Shortly after that, he settled in his adopted Houston - hence the 5th Ward Posse hat - and, by the time he was a teenager, had fallen in with the now-storied record label Rap-A-Lot. When Bill was still young, he moved with his family from Kingston to the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a fact that would later give him his stage name. “Now it’s not ‘Look at the short guy,’” he told Pitchfork in 2015. In interviews, he would talk about how he’d been used to people staring at him in public places by the height of the Geto Boys fame in the early ’90s, the stares were ones of awe.
But it’s also on this song where he raps joyfully about realizing his creative dreams. But more often he used it as a point of everyday othering: On “ Copper to Cash,” from his 1992 debut solo album Little Big Man, he raps frankly about the way his height discouraged businesses from hiring him, which nudged Bill toward illegal means and, eventually, toward rapping. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, with dwarfism (he eventually grew to be three feet and eight inches tall), which he addressed often in his music, sometimes for comic effect. The story of his life is one of resilience. In February of this year, Bill was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. He could also be funny and free, adding levity to Geto Boys records and peppering his solo work with raucously absurd tangents.
He detailed what seemed at times to be crippling dependencies on substances and he rapped about committing grim acts of violence against his loved ones. He wrote frequently about his suicidal impulses and presented his grisliest, pulpiest scenes of violence - he is in every sense a founding father of horrorcore - as an extension of or outlet for the mental anguish he truly faced. In the years between that photo, which was taken in the summer of 1991, and his death on Sunday night in Colorado at the age of 52, Bushwick Bill solidified himself as a pioneer in hip-hop, but also as one of its most conflicted figures. Underneath his slippered feet, in all-caps block letters: WE CAN’T BE STOPPED. He had tried repeatedly to get her to kill him eventually, during the struggle, he shot himself in the right eye.
Just hours before, Bill, whose given name was Richard Stephen Shaw, was having a brutal fight with his girlfriend. He’s on a gurney, being pushed by his remaining group mates in Houston’s seminal rap crew the Geto Boys, Willie D and Scarface.
There’s Bill: bloodied and bandaged, stripped down to a hospital gown, phone to his ear and a 5th Ward Posse hat on his head. You’d be forgiven if the first thing that comes to mind is that album cover. He’ll be remembered as someone who fought against death the way he fought against his own demons and those of his adopted home.
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