Songoftheday 2/3/18 - At night I can't sleep I toss and turn, candlesticks in the dark visions of bodies being burned...
from the album We Can't Be Stopped (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #23 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11
Today's song of the day comes from the rap group the Geto Boys, who got their start on the streets of Houston, Texas in the mid-1980s. However the three founders of the act all left, with a revolving set of members shuffling in including DJ Ready Red and rapper/dancer Bushwick Bill, who along with Scarface and Willie D put out their first successful record Grip It! On That Other Level, which reached the American albums chart (and go to #19 on the US R&B albums list), and would eventually be remixed by producer Rick Rubin (Run DMC) and re-released as The Geto Boys the following year, also reaching the albums charts. However, the group was getting a major buzz in the hip-hop community more for controversy over their material, which was often violent and misogynistic. Also Bushwick Bill was involved in a shooting where a girlfriend shot his eye out. The actual picture from his hospital stay after that was the covers for their breakthrough single "Mind Playing Tricks On Me", and their third album We Can't Be Stopped (the latter a more graphic take of his injury. With "Mind Playing Tricks On Me", they took the gangsta-style flow that the West Coast rappers like Eazy-E and NWA were selling tons of records with, and told a gruesome story about life in the ghetto, with gang violence, the drug trade, addiction, and suicide in the mix. However, this time, using a sample of Isaac Hayes' record "Hung Up On My Baby", they did what NWA couldn't, have a top-40 hit. And at that time it was the hardest rap record to reach Casey Kasem's Top-40, predicting the flow of "horrorcore" rap by decades...
"Mind Playing Tricks On Me" became the Geto Boys' first and biggest top-40 pop hit in January of 1992. The record also climbed to #10 on Billboard's R&B chart, and spent three weeks at #1 on their Rap Singles chart. A second single from the album, "Ain't With Being Broke", failed to make any of the singles charts, but We Can't Be Stopped sold over a million copies.
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And here's the Geto Boys performing live in 2015, sounding even better than on the record with this jazzy setting...
Up tomorrow: Former Clasher is in a hurry.
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