How did Bushwick Bill lose his eye?
It’s one of the most notorious, horrifying album covers of all time.
The three Geto Boys, Willie D, Scarface and Bushwick Bill, each stare down the camera from the halls of a hospital. But there’s something wrong with Bill. Wearing a hospital gown, the right side of his face is swollen, discoloured and gnarled. The 3′ 8″ rapper, evidently, is gravely injured.
That’s because he’d just lost an eye to a bullet wound.
This is the cover of the controversial Geto Boys’ third album, We Can’t Be Stopped, which was released in 1991. The image is infamous, but the man at its centre, Bushwick Bill, had his regrets about it.
“It still hurts me to look at that cover because that was a personal thing I went through,” he once said, as quoted in Brian Coleman’s Check the Technique book. “I still feel the pain from the fact I’ve got a bullet in my brain… I think it was pretty wrong to do it, even though I went along with the program at first.”
The story behind the image is surprisingly unclear, given how notorious it is. Several versions of the tale exist, but, in any iteration, Bill, who died at the age of 52 in 2019, is depicted as someone who suffered terribly as a young man.
One version of the story says that a 25-year-old Bill, who was drunk and depressed at the time, shot himself in the eye, after his girlfriend refused to do it for him. Another version has it that he ended up getting shot after a tussle with this girlfriend.
Another version claims that it was his own mother who shot him, which is a theory that, during an interview with Vice in 2016, Bill himself lent credence to. Apparently, the shooting occurred after Bill, who was high on PCP at the time, came up with an idea for an insurance scam.
“What if I go wake my mom up, provoke her, hand her a gun, and have her shoot me?” Bill explained of his plan. “I’ll be able to get to heaven, my mom gets the life insurance, everybody is happy!”
The dark scheme didn’t play out as intended. “So she grabbed the gun,” Bill recalled, “and I put my face right in front of it. She pulled the trigger, but she closed her eyes and turned her head first, so it didn’t work out that way.”
Given that Bill told this version of the story himself, it certainly is among the more likely candidates. It’s a truly dark, horrible tale, but there is a bright side to it. The incident gave him a new perspective on life, which he carried with him until the end.
“I’m not really afraid of dying,” he told TMZ after receiving the pancreatic cancer diagnosis that would, ultimately, claim his life, “because if anyone knows anything about me… I died and came back already in June 1991, so I know what it’s like on the other side.”