Essential is a series from Dallas Morning News critics spotlighting timeless works of art and culture.
Essential listening: "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," The Geto Boys , 1991
A guilty conscience paves a pathway to paranoia and madness. Macbeth and his wife found this out the hard way, their murderous spree leading to hallucination and torment, the need to wash away the blood ("Out, damned spot!"). Not everyone is cut out to be a ruthless criminal. At some point the bill comes due. It doesn't matter if you preside over a Scottish castle, like a blood-soaked king, or roam the streets of Houston's Fifth Ward neighborhood, like the Geto Boys.
The Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" is hip-hop's most compulsively listenable anthem of mental despair, a macabre cry of anguish from perpetrators of foul deeds. It's the tormented flip side of gangsta braggadocio, a portrait of the thoughts and visions that haunt the guilty when they shut their eyes and try to sleep.
"Mind Playing Tricks" is arguably the defining track of Houston hip-hop, a scene that also boasts such luminaries as DJ Screw, Paul Wall and Devin the Dude. The song arrived in the wake of gangsta rap's explosion in L.A., and it brought a sort of Southern languor to the genre. But the song's sound doesn't portend doom. Scarface, the Geto Boys' leader and the song's producer, plucked a jazzy guitar lick from the Isaac Hayes song "Hung Up On My Baby" that gives "Mind Playing Tricks" an almost jaunty sound. This is a rap that makes you want to whistle along. But it's also a little melancholy; Hayes was, after all, hung up on his baby.
The instrumental track provides an intriguing counterpoint to the nightmare tone of the lyrics, which present a Geto diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. (If you want the full horror movie effect, watch the video. Note: Adult content ahead).
Scarface sets the tone in the opening lines: "At night I can't sleep, I toss and turn/Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies bein' burned." We're immediately cast into a world of unrest and torment. Scarface is convinced a malevolent force is following him into his dreams. More troubling, the menace looks familiar: "He owns a black hat like I own/A black suit and a cane like my own." He sees the devil, and the devil is him. You get the feeling Dostoevsky would nod in recognition.
Willie D, who gets the second verse, is suffering his own paranoid episode. He's living large, but "late at night, something ain't right/I feel I'm bein' tailed by the same sucker's headlights." He thinks of all the dirt he's done, and who might be seeking revenge. He's freaked, and he pulls into a Popeye's parking lot, ready to blast his enemy. Instead, he sees "three blind, crippled and crazy senior citizens" trying to get some fast food.
Paranoia. The destroyer.
"I often drift while I drive/havin' fatal thoughts of suicide"
The nightmare reaches its apex in the final verse, written by Scarface but rapped by Bushwick Bill. Bill might be the most notorious of the Geto Boys. A Jamaican-born dwarf, he was shot in the eye in an altercation with his girlfriend. The cover of the group's 1991 album We Can't be Stopped shows a photo of Scarface and Willie D wheeling Bill through a hospital on a gurney shortly after the incident.
So it feels appropriate that Bill gets the verse set on All Hallows' Eve. Or, as Bill puts it, "This year Halloween fell on a weekend/Me and Geto Boys are trick-or-treatin.' " They're up to no good, "robbin' little kids for bags," until they're accosted by a man "who stood about six or seven feet." Bill fights back: "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." The whole incident has been a figment of Bill's tortured imagination.
"Mind Playing Tricks on Me" serves as a reminder of rap's capacity to drill down into a remorseful state of mind and morality. But it's still hardcore, and it still hits with blunt force. It's a haunting tale, spun by narrators who have seen and done too much, and don't know how to stop.
