As a teenager he immersed himself in New York’s emerging hip-hop culture, writing graffiti and competing in break dancing competitions.
His mother worked as a hotel housekeeper, and his father was in the merchant marine. He spent much of his childhood in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. “The more I swung, the more blood flew/ Then he disappeared and my boys disappeared too/ Then I felt just like a fiend/ It wasn’t even close to Halloween.”īushwick Bill was born Richard Stephen Shaw in Kingston, Jamaica, on Dec. The song is alarmingly spooky, and Bushwick Bill’s verse, which comes last, described a disturbing hallucination in which he was being attacked while trick-or-treating: Geto Boys returned to Rap-A-Lot and continued to release strong work, including the outstanding 1991 album “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which featured the group’s biggest single, “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” The influential producer Rick Rubin signed Geto Boys to his Def American imprint and rerecorded that album as “The Geto Boys.” Rubin was forced to find a new distributor after his original one declined to release the album over its graphic content. Bushwick Bill alluded to their criticism on “Talkin’ Loud Ain’t Saying Nothin’,” from the 1989 album “Grip It! On That Other Level”: “You don’t want your kids to hear songs of this nature/ But you take ‘em to the movies to watch Schwarzenegger.” That made Geto Boys a flash point for cultural conservatives upset about rap lyrics. The group was known for its incendiary, sometimes grotesque lyrics, and also for songs that grappled with morality in stark terms. Last month, Bushwick Bill announced that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.īushwick Bill - who was born with dwarfism and stood approximately 3 feet 8 inches tall - was a member of Geto Boys, the Houston trio whose work in the late 1980s and early- to mid-1990s on the Rap-A-Lot label was among the most formative in Southern rap. His death was confirmed by his sister Ann-Marie White. Bushwick Bill, who helped inject vivid psychological horror and lightly morbid comedy into Southern hip-hop storytelling in becoming one of the genre’s most recognizable characters, died on Sunday at a Colorado hospital.