The cover art featured Bill just after an altercation with a girlfriend where, high on PCP, he was shot in the eye (his exact version of events varied over the years). The group's 1991 album, 'We Can't Be Stopped,' is perhaps its most infamous.

'We were just expressing stuff that happens in the ghetto, just being like reporters.'

'Love, sex, war and politics - that's what the album is about,' Bill told the New York Times at the time. But in an era when N.W.A became Christian-right villains and 2 Live Crew challenged obscenity charges in court, the major-label debut was thwarted after the label got nervous, declining to distribute it over its NC-17 content. Rubin reworked their second album, 'Grip It! On That Other Level,' into what would have been the group's Geffen Records-distributed debut. Geto Boys were an independent commercial hit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their albums across the south, and soon signed with mega-producer Rick Rubin. 'You don't want your kids to hear songs of this nature,' he rapped on 1989's 'Talkin' Loud Ain't Sayin' Nothin'.' 'But you take 'em to the movies to watch Schwarzenegger.' In one of his most famous lyrics, Bill pointed out that hypocrisy. 'If people believe that the Geto Boys really do stuff like on 'Mind of a Lunatic,' they must also believe there's a real Freddie Krueger and a real Michael Myers,' he told Spin. Bill always defended songs like 'Mind of a Lunatic,' with its explicit depictions of rape and violence, as character studies. 'It's okay for the President to start a war in Iraq, but it's not okay for me to talk about what I see around me in the ghetto.'īut the group also had literary and cinematic streaks.

'People want to hear what's going on around them in everyday life - war, blood, violence,' Bill told Spin in 1990.

Geto boys scarface shot himself