With its creaky beats and blood-soaked lyrics, 6 Feet Deep is easy to write off as golden-age rap’s answer to a horror movie—cheap thrills and low nutritional value included. But in the same way Night of the Living Dead was less about zombies than the metaphorical nightmare of life in a conformist society, Gravediggaz took the subtext of a lot of classic hip-hop—the streets are a scary place to be—and made it real, conjuring a vision of city life so violent and unsettling it’s funny, or at least the kind of thing you have to laugh at in order to get through. The cackling brainchild of Wu-Tang’s RZA and producer Prince Paul (of Stetsasonic and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising), the music here is both an example of early-’90s gangsta rap and a send-up of it. They don’t just want you to die, they want to watch you feed yourself to alligators (“1-800 Suicide”). They don’t just smoke weed, they suck on tailpipes (“Defective Trip (Trippin’)”). And while America has done its part to marginalize them, it turns out they were cursed by demons long before the housing projects they emerged from ever existed. This was the era of N.W.A., but also of movies like Candyman, which turned the pain of young Black men into ghost stories and urban legends. Gravediggaz weren’t just here to live large and get money, they were here—explicitly—to scare you. Interestingly, the album had already been started before RZA founded Wu-Tang Clan, and certainly before he was the influence he became. And for Paul, who’d just come off of the eternal sunshine of 3 Feet High, the album proved that his kaleidoscopic style could be applied with just as much creativity and humor to the dark side as the light one. Yeah, the Geto Boys had dabbled in horror, but Gravediggaz were more playful about it, setting the stage for a history of underground hip-hop with a similarly misanthropic sense of humor (including the classic Kool Keith/Dan the Automator collaboration Dr. Octagonecologyst) and mainstream rappers like Eminem, who played with ultraviolence in similar satirical ways. “To the A&R who couldn’t understand the product/Now look who’s on top,” Paul—credited as the Undertaker—says on the outro to “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide.” Self-governance and success on your own terms? To the oppressor, nothing could be scarier.