Geto Boys - We Can't Be Stopped [35th Anniversary]

The cover is the first thing anyone mentions and it deserves the attention: Bushwick Bill on a hospital gurney, eye destroyed, being wheeled through the corridor by Willie D and Scarface while a photographer keeps shooting. Rap-A-Lot put it on the sleeve. That was July 1991, and We Can't Be Stopped went platinum with almost no radio support and a distributor who had already dropped the group once.

"Mind Playing Tricks On Me" is the song that outlived everything around it. Built on an Isaac Hayes loop, it is four verses of paranoia, insomnia and guilt from three men who had spent the previous album competing to be the most cartoonishly violent, and it lands as genuine psychological horror rather than posturing. It reached the Hot 100 and remains one of the defining rap records of its decade.

The rest of the album is harder to defend and more interesting for it: "Chuckie" is Bushwick Bill at his most unhinged, "Fuck A War" is a Gulf War protest track from an unlikely direction, and "Ain't With Being Broke" is Scarface establishing the voice that would carry his solo career. Southern rap as a commercial force effectively begins here.

This thirty fifth anniversary edition presses the album across two black vinyl discs, remastered, on Rap-A-Lot for the label's 4 Life 40 Years series.