We Can't Be Stopped

About

<i>We Can’t Be Stopped</i> wasn’t just the first Southern rap album to get national recognition, it was proof that rap could be both weird and imaginative and deadly real—a mix that influenced everything from Wu-Tang Clan to Lil Wayne to the slasher fantasies of Playboi Carti. Here’s a world where you visit the local cemetery just to reminisce over all the families you “done fucked up” (“Another N****r in the Morgue”). A world where rats and roaches eat better than you do (“Ain’t With Being Broke”). A world where you might have to stab a polar bear in the neck just to get a little peace and quiet (“Chuckie”). In Scarface, you had the grim ghetto philosopher; in Bushwick Bill, the comedian willing to say the vilest thing he could imagine as long as it got a rise out of you—and if it made a point, that’s fine, too. “Yeah, I wouldn’t give a fuck who dies,” he says, suggesting he fire a missile at Iraq himself. “‘’Cause I’m tired of paying these high-ass gas prices.” These weren’t the conditions of Black American life the way you got them through Public Enemy or Ice-T. It was pulpier, nastier, less morally justifiable, more extreme. But in the same way great horror uses unreality to poke at the real fears underneath, <i>We Can’t Be Stopped</i> is less an album about how things are than how they <i>feel</i>. That’s part of what made the chilled-out paranoia of “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” so unsettling: They weren’t saying violence is normal—they were just saying they’re used to it.

via Apple Music