To become a highly successful shock rocker, all it seems to take is slapping on a ghoulish makeup job, slipping into your big sister's corset and re-enacting your favorite Vincent Price movie onstage. But even in the hip-hop world, where the concept of "keepin' it real" is sometimes regrettably all too strictly adhered to, not many have taken that credo to the extreme degree that Bushwick Bill, of Houston gangsta-horror-rap group Geto Boys, has. And while thousand of singers have regaled us in countless songs about the sacrifices they would make, the three-and-a-half-foot-tall rapper actually put his money where his mouth is -- or, rather, where his eye was.

The Geto Boys, with Scarface and Willie D rounding out the trio, formed in the late '80s, and from the beginning were awash in controversy. Owing their early sound to gangsta rappers such as N.W.A., the trio would subsequently present a world view a lot more gruesome than even the harsh ghetto realities portrayed by their West Coast counterparts. With psychopathic tales of murder and necrophilia turning up in tracks like 'Mind of a Lunatic,' they laid the foundation for the hip-hop subgenre of horrorcore, as practiced by '90s rap groups the Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz.

In May 1991, Bushwick Bill, either in a suicidal funk, a drunken rage or as a scheme to have his mother collect on his insurance policy (Bill himself intimates that it was a combination of all three), began goading his 17-year-old girlfriend into shooting him. Some reports say he had threatened to harm the child they had together if she refused to go through with the deed. What actually transpired has never been divulged by either party involved, but by either his or her hand, Bill caught a slug in the right eye. A photo of Bill, his eye clearly and significantly bloodied, being wheeled down a hospital corridor on a gurney with the other two Geto Boys flanking him became the front cover of their next and most successful album, both creatively and in sales, 1991's 'We Can't Be Stopped.' The novelty of Bushwick Bill going from being a dwarf rapper to a one-eyed dwarf rapper helped the record gain both publicity and credibility. It also helped that the platinum-selling LP contained the Geto Boys' undisputed high point, the bleak yet affecting 'Mind Playing Tricks on Me,' the trio's only No. 1 rap single.

These days, Bushwick Bill has reinvented himself as a Christian -- one can wonder if a certain line from the Book of Exodus concerning an eye for an eye will be part of his hip-hop homily.