Somewhere between The Art of War and BTNHResurrection the group lost touch with that thing that made them special. What I’m trying to convey with all this is history is that the mystery of Bone is gone. One of their best songs, “Days of Our Livez”, opens with the wholly depressing line, “only time will tell who dies.” Now it’s 2007 and Bone are still alive, trying to make money on novelty nostalgia. The guilt of street life was always heavy on the members of Bone. Where they would go from there was left open.

Their biggest success, “Tha Crossroads”, was a song about death, but with a hopeful refrain: that the band would someday meet all their loved ones at the crossroads. But for all their flirtation with the dark side, Bone were always spiritually minded. They were, and still are, one of the weirdest groups to attain commercial success (and a Grammy). A slight exaggeration, obviously, but Bone did have a powerful aura. He said that the group’s sound was “mesmerizing and hypnotizing”, that it put him in a strange trance that could only be connected with dark forces. He told a story about his first experience with the group through a video he saw on MTV. In one segment, Lewis held up the same booklet for East 1999 Eternal I held up in the mirror when I was 13-year-old and explained that the backwards liner notes had their roots in a satanic curse and that anyone who read them put a hex on themselves and were left open to the devil’s whims. Craige Lewis, attempts to point out the satanic intentions of popular rap stars. In The Truth Behind Hip-Hop, preacher on a mission, G. But it was the sheer ability of the group which made it seem like their skills could come from nowhere else but a higher (or lower) power. We found signs everywhere of their supposed satanic connections: the frequent ouija board allusions, the constant refrain of “Mo Murder”, like a chant, and the skull-n-bones imagery. It sounds silly now, but at the time, steeped in Bone Thugs lore, it seemed possible. The devil was going to kill them all simultaneously on January 1st, 1999. My friend heard a rumor that the members of Bone had sold their souls to the devil (a la Robert Johnson) so that they could rap as fast as they did.

I remember gathering around the mirror with all my neighborhood friends, reading the cryptic backwards liner notes from East 1999 Eternal. None of them had that mysterious aura that Bone had, either. But none of them touched Bone, especially Bizzy Bone. Obviously, they were all from the Midwest: Twista, early Mystical, Tech N9ne, Crucial Conflict, Do or Die. Maybe its because I’m from the Midwest, but my friends and I would compete to discover the fastest rappers.

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