Remembering Gangsta Boo’s Legacy
“My styles are slick/ Your body, bitch, that I will chop in pieces/ No fuckin’ clue to the 5-0 click, no fuckin’ witnesses/ They only saw the mask of Jason that I had on my face/ The scandalous bitch is so-so slick, that’s why I got away safe.” That’s how Gangsta Boo, the Devil’s Daughter, introduces herself on “Mystic Stylez,” the title track from Three 6 Mafia’s debut album. When she wrote those lines, Gangsta Boo was 15 years old.
Mystic Stylez came out in 1995, a tremendous year for rap music. 1995 was the year of The Infamous, of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, of Me Against The World, of Liquid Swords, of E. 1999 Eternal, of In A Major Way. Mystic Stylez has a place in that pantheon, but Mystic Stylez doesn’t sound like a 1995 album. It sounds like right now. The whole Three 6 aesthetic — the murky samples, the get-buck chants, the flickering singsong flows, the gut-rumble bass tones, the gleefully sinister shit-talk — has impacted generation after generation of underground rap.
You can trace a direct line from Mystic Stylez to the different strains of chaotic no-future hedonism that dominate so much of rap today. Within the album’s wild and unhinged morass of voices, nobody pops harder than Gangsta Boo.
On Sunday, Lola Chantrelle Mitchell was found dead in her Memphis hometown. Before Gangsta Boo’s passing, it had never even occurred to me that she’d been a kid when she was on Mystic Stylez. I must’ve known that, but I never internalized that knowledge. Gangsta Boo never sounded like a child rapper. Instead, she carried herself with unearthly levels of seen-it-all confidence. Boo was the only woman in Three 6 Mafia, but she never came off as a token. Instead, Boo talked the same hard, demonic shit as the rest of the group, and she did it with more bounce in her voice, more elastic snap in her delivery. Gangsta Boo could stand tall within one of the hardest groups in rap history. Amidst the bedlam erupting all around her, she always sounded like a star.
