It took the intervention of an outside source for Willie D. and Scarface to both see the ignorance of their ways. "The mother of one of my partners that got killed asked me to make peace," Willie says with a softened expression. "She got on her knees and was crying. That shit really hit me. When you shoot a muthaf**ka and you're squabbling, you ain't got no love for the other side. You become desensitized and you don't think about the fact that the person who got killed has a family. For the rest of their mama's natural life, his sister's, his girlfriend's or children's lives they have to live with that pain. You've broken all of these hearts, and you just took another man's life like a dog in the street.

"This man's mama came up to me. She had lost her son and it was partially my fault. She begged me to stop because she was worried about me. When she approached me, it broke me down, but another part of me was like, 'F**k these niggas! I don't give a f**k about them!' But deeper in my heart, I hoped the whole thing would stop."

Houston, as it happens, only has a few high-tech recording studios, so it was inevitable that Willie D. and Scarface would run into each other again. But this time it was different.

"We both had our guards up, but we spoke," Willie remembers. "I had the whole weight of the neighborhood on my shoulders, but it was like the whole thing just lifted off. He said, 'Let me holler atcha,' and we snuck off. He said, Let's put this shit back together.' I knew he was serious because I could see it in his eyes. I knew it wasn't no joke, so I was like, 'Holler at your people, and I'll talk to mine.' We understood that it was cease-fire, and we didn't have to say nothing. Putting the G.B. back together meant the shit was over."

Unlike other beef-bearing rap crews, the Geto Boys were able to put things back together because they had become men. They realized that the violence off wax was pointless.

"It takes a bigger man to admit that you're wrong," Willie D. admits. "When we first formed the group, we didn't know each other well, but we got tight and our music made us even tighter. You might have a beef with your brother, [but] you're gonna cool off and eventually rationalize. It wasn't just the money that pulled us back together. We had genuine love for one another."

"Even though the membership changes, there will always be Geto Boys--young men who will see it as their duty to express to the world the best and worst aspects of being young and Black in a world hell-bent on their destruction. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

"A reporter asked us after we made our first record, 'What are you gonna do when you finally get paid and move out of the ghetto? What are you gonna rap about?' I told him that we're gonna rap about the same things, because they're always gonna happen," concludes Willie D. "There are always gonna be ladies who are women and ladies who are whores, men who are daddies and men who are fathers. This shit will always exist. There ain't enough tape to contain the stuff we could talk about."

By Cheo Hodari Coker, republished courtesy of Rap Pages Magazine/LFP Publications.