GETO BOYS’ BUSHWICK BILL WAS ‘STANDOUT’ HIP-HOP ICON
Rapper, hype man’s ‘captivating voice’ detailed struggles
A Caribbean immigrant with dwarfism whose stage name derived from the New York neighborhood where he grew up, Bushwick Bill was an outsider in just about every way, which made him a quintessentially Houston artist. Richard Stephen Shaw — one-third of the classic Geto Boys lineup — died of pancreatic cancer Sunday evening in Colorado at age 52.
With the Geto Boys, Shaw added his voice to a trio of classic hip-hop albums, and played a starring role in one of the most notable album covers ever made. He was typically fed his rhymes by writer/rappers Brad Jordan (aka Scarface) and Willie Dennis (Willie D), but he played the part of rapper and hype man with unparalleled flair and distinction.
Public Enemy rapper Chuck D (born Carlton Douglas Ridenhour) said Shaw was “totally an icon and a standout character and probably had one of the highest IQs of any rapper I’ve known.”
He also was a formidable vessel for all sorts of thematic content written by Jordan and Dennis, who crafted rhymes specifi
cally for Shaw and his struggles.
“I interpreted all his verses as his own personal story,” said musicologist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins, who grew up listening to the Geto Boys. “He was able to use this very bone-chilling, sometimes emotionless yet captivating voice and delivery to detail the psychological struggles that come with living in an urban environment as an African American.”
Wilkins compared Shaw’s ability to turn his troubles into stories to Richard Pryor’s. “They were intensely personal, and he expressed them through such creative means,” he said. “And in those songs, he told us in a very direct way how he dealt with them.”
Break-dancing beginnings
Shaw first found the stage as Little Billy, a break dancer who worked various club stages around the city.
Before the classic Geto Boys lineup was set, the group was the Ghetto Boys, which featured neither Dennis nor Jordan. Shaw was recruited by James Prince, who would found Rap-A-Lot Records. Then known as Lil’ J, Prince built the original Ghetto Boys around beats by another northeastern artist who had moved to Houston: DJ Ready Red, a New Jersey transplant. Little Billy was recruited as a hype man and break dancer.
Shaw was born in Kingston, Jamaica. His family moved to New York when he was 6, and he grew up in the city’s Bushwick neighborhood, and came of age in the city’s nascent and vibrant hiphop culture. In the mid-’80s he packed up for Houston, where he lived with his sister. Around 1986, Little Billy began transforming into Bushwick Bill, a frenetic and comic voice that first appeared on “The Problem,” the sketch that closes the group’s “Making Trouble” album from 1988.
Shortly after that album’s release, the Ghetto Boys were overhauled with new MCs — Jordan and Dennis — and a new name: the Geto Boys.
As the new ensemble began work on what would become “Grip It! On That Other Level,” Shaw was recruited into the Geto Boys as a member.
“J wanted him to be a dancer at first, but he jumped off of that real quick,” Ghetto Boys rapper Raheem (Oscar Ceres) said in the book “Houston Rap Tapes” by Lance Scott Walker. “He didn’t want to be a gimmick.”
Dennis recalled hearing Shaw rapping some Public Enemy lines and suggested he be given some material.
“You pick your own lane and create your own character,” Shaw said in Rolf Potts’ book about “The Geto Boys,” the trio’s third album. “When I became a rapper, it’s like if you heard the name Bushwick Bill and heard my voice, I promise you’d never forget that you’d heard me.”
Prince, founder of Rap-A-Lot Records, put it succinctly in his book “The Art & Science of Respect”: “The new Ghetto Boys lineup was a blend of interesting characters with colorful personalities who had already been through a lot in their lives. Willie D was born in the Fifth Ward to alcoholic parents. He often talked about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother and how that affected him as a child. Scarface had dealt with depression as a child; he’d tried to commit suicide, and often joked about making another attempt. Bushwick Bill was a Jamaican dwarf with a drug and alcohol problem. What did America expect them to talk about on their records?”
Proving provocative
The Geto Boys struck a nerve with “Grip It!” — a bracing blast of sound from Houston, a city largely kept out of the rap conversation that was often defined by sounds from New York and Los Angeles.
Shaw voiced some of Dennis’ grievances about cultural hypocrisy, as on “Talkin’ Loud Ain’t Saying Nothin’”: “You don’t want your kids to hear songs of this nature,” he rapped. “But you take them to the movies to watch Schwarzenegger.”
“The Geto Boys,” released in 1990, had wider distribution and included some repurposed material from “Grip It!” It was a fevered album, with slasher film violence described so vividly that some retail outlets wouldn’t sell it. It’s a remarkable album capturing the trio on the brink.
Then came “We Can’t Be Stopped.” Released in 1991, the album remains a rap classic, and it proved provocative on arrival, thanks to Shaw.
Prior to the album’s release, Shaw got rampaging drunk on Everclear in May 1991 and ended up in an violent altercation with his girlfriend. Their accounts of the incident differed, but the end result was the same: Shaw ended up with a gunshot wound to his right eye.
“By the time the story hit the morning news, Bushwick had lost his eye,” Prince wrote in his biography, “but everything else about him seemed pretty Bushwick Bill.”
Prince and Rap-A-Lot made good use of Shaw’s unflappable response to the incident. The following day, Prince summoned Dennis and Jordan to the hospital, where they flanked Shaw on a gurney, cellphone in hand and bandage removed, for a gruesome image that would grace the cover of “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which was released later that year.
The album proved as dark as the cover. Local rapper Lewayne Williams, a rapper and member of the South Park Coalition, wrote “Chuckie” for Shaw, a song that shredded rather than pushed the envelope for violence in popular music at the time, rife with murder and cannibalism.
The album was striking for its varied content. Look past the violence of the hit “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” and you find a song about struggles with mental illness. And they offered up protest music, too, paraphrasing Muhammad Ali in “F--- a War,” in which Shaw raps his reluctance to participate in the Gulf War: “The enemy is right here, G, them foreigners never did s--- to me.”
The album went on to sell more than 1 million copies within a year, and established both Willie D and Scarface as bankable solo artists. As Bill, Shaw made an appearance in 1992 on Dr. Dre’s landmark record “The Chronic.” He’d also had a vocal snippet sampled on Ice-T’s “OG: Original Gangster” album.
That year Shaw released his first solo album, “Little Big Man.”
And every so often, the three would reconvene. They were supposed to reunite in Houston for the Free Press Summer Festival in 2013, but only Dennis and Jordan appeared on stage.
Early murmurs suggested Shaw had been busted for marijuana possession, though later it was revealed he was just late arriving. A fan photo offered evidence that Shaw was in attendance, just not on stage.
A powerful honesty
Shaw over the years would toggle between the straight and narrow, including being born again and more volatile phases triggered by struggles with addiction.
But friends and admirers recalled an artist who was approachable and kind. Before becoming a successful rapper as Paul Wall (aka The People’s Champ), Paul Slayton was a 13year-old kid at Hobby Airport, who happened upon Shaw sitting alone.
“Me being an adolescent, I was completely unaware of boundaries, personal space and respecting strangers’ privacy,” Slayton said. “All I knew was that I recognized a famous rapper that I admired. At that time I had no thoughts of being a professional rapper.”
Slayton said Shaw talked to him for several minutes.
“This encounter has always stayed with me,” he said. “I’ve thought about this over the years, and I truly believe this was the seed in me that would grow into the People’s Champ. I remembered how positive he was, and more importantly how it made me feel. I felt important because somebody who I perceived as important took the time out to talk to me. That’s how I wanted to make other people feel. Happy.”
Slayton said he brought up the story a few weeks ago when he and Shaw were in a recording studio, making what will be Shaw’s final recordings.
“I definitely was inspired by Bushwick in many ways,” Slayton said. “But most personal to me was how he treated people.”
Wilkins cited one song, “Time Taker,” as emblematic of Shaw’s capacity for expressing feeling in music. The tune was on “The Resurrection,” a strong album released by the Geto Boys in 1996, though it didn’t quite make the same impact as those that came before.
“There was an honesty in that song that inspired my initial interest in hip-hop,” Wilkins said. “It’s so clear in that song, he’s narrating his own mental struggles. It’s detailed and captivating and chilling, too.”
And it serves as a brilliant epitaph for an underappreciated artist. In it, he invents a word — a synonym for “comfort,” though deeper — while baring his soul.
“Why must I always sing these sad songs?” Shaw rapped. “Because they comforance all my feelings inside till all the bad’s gone. You wanna hear my life story? Well, I told ya.”