In the fourteen years since “Mind” was released, the band has showed up again on the Billboard pop charts only twice, most recently in 1996. Then Geto Boys-and Southern hip-hop-seemed to disappear. I’m paranoid, sleeping with my finger on the trigger.” For several months, “Mind” was on the radio all the time. Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned. “Mind” is an unsettling song, its opening couplets freighted with anxiety: “At night I can’t sleep, I toss and turn. Geto Boys-Scarface, Bushwick Bill, and Willie D-had deep, unmistakably Southern voices, and their lyrics didn’t celebrate or protest anything. If the song had an antecedent, it was the blues, not music you might have heard in a disco. A slow, mournful plaint, “Mind” relied on long, harmonically complex guitar samples-a departure from the short horn bursts and rapid drums then dominating hip-hop. It was called “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” and was performed by a Houston hip-hop trio called Geto Boys. In the fall of 1991, an unusual song found its way onto the radio.

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