We Can’t Be Stopped 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, We Can’t Be Stopped is less an album about how things are than how they feel. 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.