This story begins in the rough Fifth Ward section of Houston around 1985.

What does fantasy violence have to do with real-life violence? What does pathology have to do with entertainment? And while we're asking questions, what the heck are the Geto Boys doing in the Top 40? Today he explains it with a chuckle: 'I brought my work home with me.' Drunk and suicidal, Shaw had insisted on it. His girlfriend shot him in the head last May. Just look at Richard Shaw, a k a 'Bushwick Bill,' who is unique enough as the only dwarf in rap music, but now he's got a glass eye too. There's a line over here for fiction' - his arm splits the air - 'and there's a line over here for nonfiction.'Įxcept that when you talk to the Geto Boys, the line seems to blur. 'You know? That's stupid if you believe that.

'Nobody can go out and kill 30 or 40 different people and not go to jail,' Jordan says.

He's not nothing to be.'Ī few minutes earlier, Jordan was smiling and moving through the backstage hangers-on with a beer in hand, half swaggering and half staggering, a bandanna pulled over his face bandit-style. I want people to follow Brad Jordan, man.' That's what he says backstage at Capital Centre, with the Geto Boys about to step in front of 10,000 rap fans as the headlined act. To 21-year-old Brad 'Scarface' Jordan, this is a moral puzzle easily disregarded. The price you pay, the listener, for a few minutes of vicarious thrills is the nagging worry that, damn, maybe songs like these are turning this into a world where a teenager can shoot into a stranger's car because he feels like 'bustin' somebody,' then grin when he's arrested for murder.

And a very, very disturbing view of life in which killing equals fun, coldbloodedness equals manliness. That's three or four niggers left for dead. Scarface, in a gunfight, pulls out an automatic shotgun known as a Streetsweeper: Scarface stands proudly in his 'run-down neighborhood cemetery,' counting bodies: It's off the group's gold album, 'We Can't Be Stopped.' This song is titled 'Another Nigger in the Morgue,' and it's delivered with exuberance - glee even - by Scarface, one of three Houston rappers getting famous right now as the Geto Boys. You're about to enter a nightmare world of brute criminality, unrelenting bloodshed and African American self-loathing.Īnd it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.Īnother street-sweepin' neighborhood drug war.

Geto boys scarface death