The sticker Geffen Records was going to put on The Geto Boys – before the label decided not to distribute it at all – warned of "violent, sexist, racist and indecent" content. It sounds like the perfect formula for a platinum album in 1990, and The Geto Boys goes a long way toward living up to that billing. The Houston foursome has defended its profanity-riddled, ultraviolent style of "horror rap" by comparing it to slasher movies or Psycho, grisly narratives told from a criminal's perspective. The point is well taken: Why do lawmakers and record executives tolerate The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but recoil from lines like "Shoot you in the head/Sit down and watch you bleed to death" when they're rapped by young black men?

The answer may lie in rap's resistance to creating heightened stage personas. Much of the genre's power comes from the lack of distance between rapper and audience. And for most of their major-label debut the Geto Boys play by these rules; immediately preceding the depraved psycho-fantasy "Mind of a Lunatic" is "Size Ain't Shit," the creed of four-foot-four rapper and group member Bushwick Bill and the album's most obviously personal track.

But it's the blurred line between serious reports from the front and lurid murder and rape scenarios that makes the Geto Boys so disturbing. They go after Ronald Reagan in "City Under Siege," and even if their facts aren't quite straight, their force and fury is palpable. The cartoon revenge exacted on those who cross the Boys can be grossly funny, as in "Read These Nikes": "Remorse? What the fuck is that?/I'll beat your mama's ass and go get a six-pack." But if they want to rap about killing a woman and having sex with the corpse and claim that they're not glamorizing violence, the Geto Boys should draw the line between the narrator's voice and the band's own viewpoint a lot more convincingly than they do in "Lunatic."

It isn't violence or even profanity that makes "Gangster of Love" the most objectionable cut on The Geto Boys. Over a Steve Miller sample, this track spends a solid five minutes viciously denigrating women – make that bitches, a word that seems to apply to any girl who won't immediately "give up the play" or, for that matter, those who will. "Whatever you got, you deserved it, bitch" is the Boys' conclusion. There's no excuse – literary, comedic or otherwise – for this kind of malice.

Of course, even "Gangster" sounds great. Rick Rubin, who hasn't made a rap record for years after masterminding Run-D.M.C.'s and L.L. Cool J's best work, has crafted roiling, buzzing tracks out of movie dialogue, gunfire and relentlessly funky bass and guitar samples. Rubin's taut, insistent grooves are the perfect setting for the rappers' frenzied street-gang delivery.

Shock value has gotten harder to come by since N.W.A and Ice Cube dramatically raised the stakes. But even as record executives cower in fear of this album, the Geto Boys make their own philosophy clear in the very first cut, the gleefully bratty "Fuck 'Em," proudly proclaiming, "I don't give a fuck 'cause the shit's still selling." They still may wind up in jail, but they're sure not stupid. (RS 591)

ALAN LIGHT