He was the only original member who stuck with the group until the very end, through breakups and upheavals. Bill was in the group before Scarface and Willie D. As early as 1984, he joined the first iteration of the Geto Boys - then the Ghetto Boys, an unformed extension of a regional rap record-label brand - as a hypeman and a dancer. He moved with his family to Brooklyn, and then to Houston. He had dwarfism, the sort of thing that can define your life if you let it. Everything in his life was lined up against him. There was no roadmap for Bushwick Bill to succeed. He took desperate, sad, squalid circumstances, and he made lurid, fucked-up, unforgettable art out of them. It’s one of the all-time great rap images.īushwick Bill did things like that for his entire public life. That image became the cover art for the Geto Boys’ next album 1991’s We Can’t Be Stopped. The bandage on his eye is pulled down, revealing the red hole in the middle of his face where his eye used to be. But there it is: Fellow Geto Boys Scareface and Willie D flanking Bill, who’s sitting upright in a gurney, a 5th Ward Posse hat perched on his head, a giant Zack Morris cellphone up to his ear. Later, he said that he couldn’t remember it. Bill was barely conscious when he posed for the photo. The whole time, he sounds eerily peaceful: “I’m glad that I’m here, G / But it’s fucked up I had to lose an eye to see shit clearly.” At the end of the “Ever So Clear” video, Bill plucks out his fake eye and plunks it into a wine glass.įamously, while Bill was still in the hospital, the Geto Boys’ label Rap-A-Lot took that moment and made the best of it. Bill raps about threatening his girlfriend’s kid, saying he’ll kill the baby if she doesn’t kill him. (This seems like the type of morbid and ridiculous story that Bushwick Bill would’ve made up, but then Bill’s whole life was a morbid and ridiculous story, so who’s to say.) “I brought my work home with me,” he joked to The Washington Post shortly thereafter.Ī year later, he rapped about the whole story on the solo single “Ever So Clear.” It’s a gripping, harrowing song. Later, Bill claimed that he actually died in the hospital - that he woke up in the morgue, on a slab, with a tag on his toe. Eventually, the gun went off, shooting Bill in the eye. Bill tried to get his girlfriend to shoot him.
One night in 1991, Bill was high on grain alcohol and PCP, and he was suicidal.
When Bushwick Bill died over the weekend, after a short public battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, it wasn’t the first time. And at least two of those deaths were literal.
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