Bushwick Bill Dead at 52
Remembering the legendary MC of Houston’s Geto Boys, who lost his battle with Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer on Sunday night
As kids of 13 and 14 in the late 80s, we were privy to a world of salacious material between Eddie Murphy and Howard Stern and Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison and Dice.
But The Geto Boys took the whole concept of working blue to a new level when they saw N.W.A and said, “Hold my beer.” Yet for as X-rated and misogynistic in ways that would set Twitter on fire as their music was, songs like “Gangsta of Love,” “My Mind’s Playing Tricks On Me” and of course the all-time rap track “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta” were so rooted in blues and soul that Willie D, Mr. Scarface and Bushwick Bill were able to bridge this gap connecting pre-WWII “dirty blues” and the hardcore hip-hop emerging from the strife of most American inner cities at the time.
And like Leon Redbone and Roky Erickson and Mac Rebennack, the passing of Bushwick Bill is yet another crushing loss for a lineage of American Individualism that permeated through our lives for all these years. There was nobody in rap like Bill, who refused to let his stature stand in the way of his ability to clobber you with his Jamaican toasted mic skills.
He will be missed.
