#Geto boys best of the geto boys songs movie

He was like: 'And you know, it's like that Geto Boys song, when your mind's playing tricks on ya.' He was breaking down the depression, the drugs, the anxiety, the everything - he was corralling all of this into his sermon. 'Somebody was preaching at church - you know how preachers do analogies with their sermons. 'The first time I actually heard the song analyzed and broken down was at church,' says music journalist and Southern hip-hop historian Maurice Garland, recalling one of his earliest encounters with the song as a kid back in the '90s.

Pretty soon, you even had preachers using the song as text for their Sunday sermons. 'Mind Playing Tricks' became the Trojan Horse, giving a generation the language to consider something we'd never let down our guard to talk about. Therapy was still a huge taboo - and really a privilege - that most black folks just weren't privy to. But the survival tool we'd really been missing all this time was a way to process our pain, to process our reality. If you were black, if you felt the pressure of growing up with a target on your back, 'Mind Playing Tricks' was your anxiety anthem. You didn't even have to be from the ghetto like Geto Boys. Geto Boys lowered their masks enough to reveal their inner fears, but you didn't have to be an ex-drug dealer like Scarface to relate. The track got a creepy music video that would probably be labeled Afro-Surreal today, like something out of a Jordan Peele flick. They were haunted by their own demons, but also by the economic degradation that hollowed out the hoods from which they came. I feel I'm being tailed by the same sucker's headlightsДЄll of a sudden, the villains depicted on record - and by society - were cast as the victims.

#Geto boys best of the geto boys songs movie

Prince decided it was the breakout record he needed for the label's flagship group.Д®verybody know me, it's like I'm a movie star He wrote three of the four verses in this song, originally intended for his solo album until Rap-A-Lot Records founder J. It was hard not to stand out with a group that included Willie D, a former Golden Gloves boxer Bushwick Bill, a brash Brooklyn transplant and former breakdancer who stood less than four feet tall and Brad Jordan, a lyricist with enough street cred to wear the stage name of rap's most celebrated kingpin: Scarface. When 'Mind Playing Tricks' came out, the Geto Boys were already legendary in the South. And ' Mind Playing Tricks on Me,' by the Houston rap trio Geto Boys, was bumping out of nearly every car with speakers in the trunk, putting a voice to the angst and paranoia that defined what it meant to be a young black man in America at the time. Rodney King's beating by LA cops was on virtual loop on the small screen. John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood was playing on the big screen. But Tony Soprano wasn't the first gangster to expose his sensitive side to the world: That distinction came nearly a decade earlier, thanks to three gangstas of a different stripe. When HBO's drama The Sopranos began airing in 1999, the idea of a mob boss seeking therapy was revolutionary.