This was groundbreaking stuff, honest-to-goodness live war, featuring play-by-play from on-site reporters and color commentary from retired senior military in the studios. For its third album, The Geto Boys, they changed it to the “Geto” spelling, which the group has used since.In the early evenings of late January 1991, a fter local news and Wheel of Fortune, the majority of American families tuned in to CNN’s coverage of Operation Desert Storm, the first ever real-time, front line broadcasts in the history of combat. For its first album 5th Ward Chronicles: Making Trouble (1988) and its second, Grip It! On That Other Level (1989), the spelling was the English standard “Ghetto Boys”. The group’s name, Geto Boys, comes from a deliberate misspelling of the word Ghetto. The Geto Boys are credited as the group who put the south on the hip hop music map and inspired a legion of acts including 2Pac, The Notorious B.I.G., UGK, TI, Goodie Mobb, Outkast, 50 Cent, Chamillionaire, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Young Jeezy, Juvenile, Mystikal and others. The band did a rare performance as a reunion at the Smoke Out festival in San Bernardino, CA on October 23rd, 2009. A video clip for the song with footage from the film was released. The song “Street Life” from the album Till Death Do Us Part was featured on the motion picture South Central. The single “Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” has also been covered by the band Aqueduct and country singer Carter Falco. The song “Mind of a Lunatic” has been covered by many recording acts including Marilyn Manson in 2003, as a b-side off the album The Golden Age of Grotesque. The Geto Boys’ popularity was boosted somewhat in 1999 by the prominent use of two songs-”Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” (released as a promotional single for the 1992 compilation album Uncut Dope) and “Still” (from The Resurrection)-in Mike Judge’s film Office Space, now considered a cult classic. The Geto Boys were featured on Scarface’s My Homies Part 2 album. After years on hiatus, the group reunited to released its seventh album, The Foundation, in 2005. Subsequently, Big Mike was dropped and Willie D returned for 1996’s critically acclaimed The Resurrection and 1998’s Da Good Da Bad & Da Ugly which Bushwick was not a part of. It did spawn one top 40 hit in “Six Feet Deep”, which peaked at #40 on the Billboard Hot 100. Although Till Death Do Us Part was certified gold it was not as well received by fans, as the lyrically gifted shoes of Willie D who also wrote for Bushwick, proved too big to fill for Big Mike. Scarface and Bushwick Bill continued with the Geto Boys, adding Big Mike for Till Death Do Us Part in 1993. was the only one who actually left the group. The album featurned the single “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”, which became a big hit in the hip-hop community and even charted well on the pop charts reaching #23 on the Billboard Hot 100.Īll three members began solo careers, but Willie D.
On the album’s title track, the group responded to Geffen Records ending its distribution deal with Def American. The album cover had a picture of the injured Bushwick being carted through a hospital by Scarface and Willie D. A high-profile incident in which Bushwick Bill lost an eye in a shooting with his girlfriend helped boost sales of its third album, We Can’t Be Stopped. In the early part of the decade, several American politicians attacked gangsta emcees, including the Geto Boys (most famously Ice-T and the N.W.A). The album, however, was actually a compilation, consisting mainly of ten tracks taken from its 1989 album Grip It! On That Other Level (most of them remixed), as well as two new songs and one song from its debut LP, Making Trouble. Records (with marketing for the album done by WB sister label Giant Records) because of controversy over the graphic portrayal of rape, necrophilia, murder, explicit sex, cartoonish violence, and hostility toward women. The group’s 1990 album The Geto Boys caused Def American Recordings, the label to which the group was signed at the time, to switch distributors from Geffen Records to Warner Bros. Despite the explicit content of their songs, critic Alex Henderson argues that the group “comes across as much more heartfelt than the numerous gangsta rap…wannabes who jumped on the gangsta bandwagon in the early ’90s.” The Geto Boys broke new ground with their soulful southern sound (a precursor to the Dirty South style). The Geto Boys earned notoriety for its transgressive lyrics which included gore, psychotic experiences, necrophilia and misogyny.