It's a familiar debate: conservative guardians call the Geto Boys' music obscene, while liberal watchdogs accuse them of glorifying violence against women and degrading the image of black rappers. In their defense, the Boys have made two contradictory claims: that their vicious lyrics merely depict values and attitudes in the Fifth Ward
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of Houston (where they come from), as well as other decrepit urban ghettos, and that their songs are merely entertaining fantasies, like horror movies.
We Can't Be Stopped, an ugly record in which
every character is a psychopath, disproves both defenses.
Almost every move on this album will be familiar to rap fans: The murderous boasts come from N.W.A, the pusher-man raps echo Ice-T, and the cruel depictions of women parallel those of the 2 Live Crew and Kool G Rap. Following the protests against their last album – which Geffen Records refused to release and some retail chains boycotted – the Geto Boys have added the self-aggrandizing martyrdom of Public Enemy. The album title, its bravado reminiscent of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, is augmented by the grotesque cover art, a shoo-in for Worst Album Cover in this magazine's annual critics' poll: a photo of Bushwick Bill in the hospital, shortly after his girlfriend blew out his right eye with a shotgun.
When the Geto Boys start We Can't Be Stopped by attacking radio stations, music critics and Geffen ("Can you believe those hypocrites/Would distribute Guns n' Roses, but not our shit?"), when they scratch a needle across Queen Latifah's "Ladies First" to introduce the hateful "I'm Not a Gentleman" and when their emotions range only from spite to malice, their claim of holding a mirror to a young, black generation is revealed as a lie – the hatred is their own, and it pervades the entire album. In "The Other Level," Bushwick Bill inverts Diana Ross's sensuous disco classic "Love Hangover" into a graphic sexual threesome with "two of the finest bitches around." This caricature of male adolescent fantasy continues on "Another Nigger in the Morgue," in which Scarface quotes Clint Eastwood while he ices foes faster than the Terminator, and on "Chuckie," an adaptation of the Child's Play slasher flicks.
Though the rhymes come in old-school couplets that sound simple and old compared with the competition's, DJ Ready Red's beats kick slow and funky, which gives the music its considerable power. All gangsta rap is layered with contradictions, but by misdirecting their rage at other blacks, especially women, the Geto Boys confuse their neighbors with their enemies. Only twice, on the album's best songs, do they focus their rage at deserving targets. In "Fuck a War," Bushwick Bill fingers the racial hypocrisies of the gulf war ("They put niggers on the front line/But when it comes to getting ahead, they put us way behind/I ain't gettin' my leg shot off/While Bush's old
