The Geto Boys

33⅓ Main Series #114

by Rolf Potts

At the outset of summer in 1990, a Houston gangsta rap group called the Geto Boys was poised to debut its self-titled third album under the guidance of hip-hop guru Rick Rubin. What might have been a low-profile remix release from a little-known corner of the rap universe began to make headlines when the album's distributor refused to work with the group, citing its violent and depraved lyrics. When The Geto Boys was finally released, chain stores refused to stock it, concert promoters canceled the group's performances, and veteran rock critic Robert Christgau declared the group "sick motherfuckers."
One quarter of a century later the album is considered a hardcore classic, having left an immutable influence on gangsta rap, horrorcore, and the rise of Southern hip-hop.
Charting the rise of the Geto Boys from the earliest days of Houston's rap scene, Rolf Potts documents a moment in music history when hip-hop was beginning to replace rock as the transgressive sound of American youth. In creating an album that was both sonically innovative and unprecedentedly vulgar, the Geto Boys were accomplishing something that went beyond music. To paraphrase a sentiment from Don DeLillo, this group of young men from Houston's Fifth Ward ghetto had figured out the "language of being noticed" - which is, in the end, the only language America understands.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2016

About the author

Rolf Potts has reported from more than sixty countries for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, Conde Nast Traveler, Outside, The Believer, The Guardian (U.K.), National Public Radio, and the Travel Channel. A veteran travel columnist for the likes of Salon.com and World Hum, his adventures have taken him across six continents, and include piloting a fishing boat 900 miles down the Laotian Mekong, hitchhiking across Eastern Europe, traversing Israel on foot, bicycling across Burma, and driving a Land Rover from Sunnyvale, California to Ushuaia, Argentina.

-from rolfpotts.com

Reviews

[Ronny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great! The dry, almost academic analysis of such songs as "Let a ho be a ho" and "Mind of a lunatic" made me laugh out loud a lot.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably like a good number of people I heard about Geto Boys through their 'hit' Mind Playin' Tricks on me. Other than that I've never heard a Geto Boys album so, as always, I went to good ol' YouTube and listened to The Geto Boys, which is, a remix album of the group's second record.
I liked it!

Ok I know the lyrics are politically incorrect but the beats and samples are so infectious that you can't help dancing. Author, Rolf Potts does not really go into the album though rather he gives a lot of background behind the genesis of the album and Geto Boys themselves.

The is about the rise of the more controversial side of hip hop. beginning with 2 Live Crew puerile raps and then going to NWA's more political sided gangsta rap, with Geto Boys being the next development of the genre. The rest of the book is about the group's rise in the rap world and what is happening to them at the moment. In between we get Potts' own memories of Geto Boys.

33 1/3 barely set a wrong foot and this is no exception: A entertaining and somewhat educational read. Definitely a must have for those who are curious about gangsta rap and 90's hip hop culture.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good potted history of he development of hip-hop beyond NYC and the whole censorship outcry over this album and NWA & 2 Live Crew, plus the issues it gave the Afro-American community itself.

[christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does tell about the making of the Geto Boys horrifying 1990 self titled album that I listened to a lot on cassette circa 9th/10th grade and can't really listen to now since it is probably the most misogynistic record ever made, even if musically very good and innovative, but it is about more than that. It's about the rise of gansta rap in the early 90s and all the controversy that surrounded that and all the conflicts it caused between various social groups. In the top ten 33 and 1/3 books I've read. Man, the "bushwick bill" incident.

[Aaron Burch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm especially a sucker for the more blending of the personal with the research/analytic, and only a couple chapters here do that, but those chapters are great, and help give a good handle on why you're specifically reading Potts on this album, as opposed to possibly someone else, and then once he's grabbed you with what the album meant to *him*, it does a great job of the larger context of the album, what it meant, the time it came out, its importance. I really enjoyed it.

[Nitish Pahwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Geto Boys is a lively, pithy account of a transformative group and album, an overdue document of an essential, yet undercovered and underappreciated, monument of rap music and its role in America’s reception of the genre. Rolf Potts examines the album with the sense of a historian, identifying both the immediate context within which this album was crafted and the historical, geographic, racial, and, of course, musical factors, all of which span decades past, that led to The Geto Boys’ distinctive character.

It is a relatively thorough history for its short length, giving readers much to digest in their brief reading times. However, the details brushed by here, fascinatingly related as they are, ultimately require more than the space given to them—the notorious stories of Rap-a-Lot founder J. Prince, how the Geto Boys came to replace the Ghetto Boys and overhaul their sound and tone, the group’s reception in parallel to that particular era of consciousness-offending rap (note: although N.W.A. and 2 Live Crew are also discussed here, Ice-T’s own contribution is strangely overlooked), the Geto Boys’ artistic process, their impact following “Mind Playin’ Tricks,” and so on. Obviously, this book is meant to focus on the self-titled opus, and Scarface has his autobiography for a personal supplement, but the sheer excitement that projects from each story of the group begs for more, and for more meaty retellings, worthy of the length of the multiple tomes that have been previously devoted to East and West Coast rap.

Although this book is relatively more straightforward in its analysis of the album than other books in the 33 ⅓ series, Rolf Potts adds unique personal touches throughout. If you were wondering why a white man mostly known for his travel writing would be apt to cover an album like this, Potts makes his case relatively well—he describes his feeling upon hearing this album for the first time in the early ’90s and examines the appeal it held for him, his friends, and the other pockets of white America held in thrall by the violence, misogyny, specified cultural resonance, and spite for the political order resplendent in the work, the kind of suburban reception that in part led to the censorship efforts raised against the Geto Boys. (The neigh-unimaginable wonders of pre-internet music discovery are also conveyed here—as Potts tells it, he listened to The Geto Boys for the first time in 1991, by the time the Geto Boys had already released We Can’t Be Stopped. Yet Potts not only had no conception of the group’s infamy at that point, he also had no idea that the follow-up album to the one he was listening to had been released, and did not realize this for a while afterward.) Plus, drawing on his travel-scribe sense, he describes a journey he took to the Fifth Ward of Houston, the world the Geto Boys stemmed from, wondering what he’ll find of the cultural touchstone, with struggles fomented by historic racial mistreatment, that so enraptured him. (To his credit, he is aware of his position as a white tourist and of the oddity of his particular curiosity.) He does not witness a real-life “Mind of a Lunatic,” but finds something else there, a less extreme but just as sad manifestation of the policies that have shunted the Fifth Ward all these years, and recounts it poignantly.

It’s a good thing for everyone that The Geto Boys was considered worthy of discussion along the other prestigious albums of the 33 ⅓—one wonders if the Geto Boys would have their due among the masses today if they had been studied and documented as ardently as several of their ’90s contemporaries. It adds a much-needed extreme outlier to the canon and may hopefully lead to more scholarship of the Geto Boys, whose story and music are just as important as any of the rap artists who have been so prolifically documented and depicted through text and film in the past decade.

[John Spiller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read about 30 of the books in the 33 1/3 Series, and Rolf Potts' "The Geto Boys" is probably one of the best of the bunch. Potts avoids all the potential missteps that could come with a white middle class Midwesterner assessing gangsta rap made by blacks from the Fifth Ward in Houston.

This book is well-written and nuanced, which is saying something given the exaggerated offensiveness of the album's raps. Potts puts "The Geto Boys" in perspective both in the context of the group (the band formerly known as The Ghetto Boys) and rap music as a whole. He also makes observations that speak volumes about black-white relations.

For example, Steve Miller sued the Geto Boys for the use of the riff from his song "Gangster of Love" on the Geto Boys song with the same name. Potts points out that not only did Miller cop his song title from Johnny "Guitar" Watson, a Houston musician, Miller had also covered Watson's "Gangster of Love" on an earlier album. Add to this, Watson's "Gangster of Love" contained the same type of sexual braggadocio that Miller found so offensive when his riff was incorporated. Interestingly, the Ghetto Boys had released "Gangster of Love" (with Miller's riff) a year earlier, and the record sold several hundred thousand copies, but because it was purchased primarily by African-Americans, it didn't enter national consciousness. Miller only learned about the second version when his 14 year-old nephew bought a copy of "The Geto Boys".

[Byron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the fact that the author used the series-standard track-by-track format as a jumping off point to do whatever he wanted to do. Some chapters hardly discuss the songs they're ostensibly about, and there's probably as much discussion of (the superior) Grip It! On That Other Level and We Can't Be Stopped as the self-titled, Rick Rubin-produced remix album. There's not as much discussion of the actual music as you'd expect from a 33 1/3 book. The main focus is the controversy surrounding the album and the larger '90s-era debate about gangsta rap, much of which you might already be familiar with, if you're old enough to have lived through that era or you've read any number of other books on the topic.

[Norb Aikin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing. I've read a few books in this series and they usually focus on song craft, meanings, and the basis of how the tracks come together. What happens here is drastically different...the chapters are mostly socioeconomic essays that have little to nothing to do with the songs they're titled after. I loved this album when I was a kid in the early 90's, I acknowledge its flaws and its place in a respectable society, but this book offers very little insight (save for a handful of pages). The writing is fine, and the book is well-researched, but damn...this what not what I was expecting or looking for.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I'm not entirely sure this was an essay about The Geto Boys album, it definitely added some detail to my adolescent memory of The Geto Boys. It definitely helps cement the group as one of the premier players in horrocore/gangsta rap...a genre with which I've always had an odd fascination.

[R · Rating 1 out of 5]

this author decided the best way to get a tour of the 5th ward was in a cop car which is an apt metaphor for his engagement with the content here

[Gary Ellenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was one of the bests in this series. Great historical perspective in terms of rap, the band and the country. Yes, also the cost of crack. Great read. Flew by.

[Matt Lohr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rolf Potts's in-depth take on one of the most notorious albums in rap history is arguably the strongest volume yet in the most recent crop of titles from the long-running 33 1/3 series. Potts delves into the album's intriguing history as a remix of an earlier Geto Boys release, "Grip It! On That Other Level," and how the input of remix producer Rick Rubin led to an album more confrontational and even more lyrically brutal than the original release. He details the different concerns each member of the group brought to the lyrical content, Akshen / Scarface's tales of hard-slangin' street life counterbalanced by Willie D.'s boast-laden mackin' exploits, and all of it suffused with a healthy respect for the traditions of musical raunch and "doing the dozens" found in black and general American culture. Potts holds forth on the record's struggles with a distributor and manufacturer that initially refused to have anything to do with the recording (and led to "The Geto Boys" being one of the few albums ever released with TWO warning labels), and the legal troubles that the record encountered from pearl-clutching politicians. (Fascinatingly, he draws a line from this album all the way back to 1909, when a tune called "I Love My Wife, But Oh! You Kid" caused one of the first scandals over obscenity in popular music.) And he links the depravity and violence chronicled in the Boys' music with the harsh realities of life in Houston's Fifth Ward, where the band hails from, culminating in Potts' recounting of his own police ride-along in "the Bloody Nickel" during his college days.

The book gets a little eggheadish in its conversations of gender relations, and given their lyrical content, it was admittedly strange to be reading about songs like "Mind of a Lunatic" and "Gangster of Love" so soon after the Brock Allen Turner case made national news. But it doesn't diminish the impact of the Geto Boys' album or of Potts' work. I have taken the 33 1/3 series somewhat to task in the past for virtually ignoring many genres of "black" music in favor of an emphasis on hip-hop. But if all of their rap-themed books were as strong as Potts', I'd have far less to complain about.

P.S. It's not featured on this album, but if you haven't heard it, you should listen immediately to the Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks On Me", from their 1991 follow-up, "We Can't Be Stopped." It is, quite simply, one of the great rap recordings of all time.

[Adam]

A bit too much general history of the band compared to insight about the record and its impact. I enjoyed the author's overall tone and voice. Check out my review here: http://www.houstonpress.com/music/the...

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

backdrop of the battle of free of fundamentalists in the 90’s. dirty south supremacy

[Elliot T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rolf Potts' book is an attempt of an adult to make sense of the relationship between black artists and the privileged, teenage white listener that he once was. To really make any sense of it, you have to understand where both the artist and listener are coming from, and it is in this way that Potts' book exceeds most other attempts to examine this fraught relationship.

It's easy for fans and cultural critics to be judgmental of others or defensive about their own stances on controversial art. The power of compelling art and, in the case of The Geto Boys, the profound connection the listener feels with the anger and the sense of aggrievement of the artist can cause the listener to align themselves with the social and political values of the artist, no matter how different the life experiences of the artist are from those of the listener. This sounds like a case of art invoking empathy (the white suburban listener feels the frustration of the black urban artist), but too often it comes at the expense of critical reasoning. As a teenage fan, I thought artists like Ice-T, 2LiveCrew, and The Geto Boys had excellent points about free speech and censorship. As an adult looking back, I realize my attitude on free speech came not from some careful consideration of the issue. I loved the beats, the samples, and I felt as pissed off and powerless as they did. If you were opposed to The Geto Boys, I was opposed to you. Art has the power to forge empathy, sure, but it also can warp your reasoning, and I think Potts gets this.

The book also provides valuable context for understanding the long cultural tradition in which The Geto Boys were operating, the day-to-day reality of late-80's black urban America, and the necessity of carving out a musical and lyrical identity that separated the group from the dominant New York and L.A. hip-hop scenes. It draws heavily on interviews with producers and the work of hip-hop scholars, eschewing the need to engage in original dissection and interpretation of the lyrics. Potts provides just enough information on where the samples came from and how the sound of the album changed when Rick Rubin was brought in to re-make the album's predecessor. But the real emphasis of the book is on understanding context.

You're not supposed to like The Geto Boys, especially if you're a white kid from the suburbs, and yet millions of us did. The reasons why you're not supposed to like The Geto Boys and artists like them have changed. In the 80's, cultural critics were more worried about descriptions of graphic violence than they are now, while today's critics focus on the power dynamics of race and racist stereotypes. Then as now, over-the-top sexism has the rare ability to unify critics from both ends of the political spectrum. For the most part, rap (and music in general) no longer has the place as "bad object" that it did in the early 90's. However, much of what there is to be learned from how an album like The Geto Boys was created and consumed can help us understand the dynamics of our culture - not only the dynamic between black artist and white listener, but the one between cultural critics (anyone passing judgment on the impact of individual expressions on culture and society, i.e., pretty much everyone who writes anything on the internet) and pissed-off young people.