Sometimes the lasting value or allure of a pop song is how it nails a time and/or place. In this case, the crack era gangster life and its milieu in the Dirty South and urban Trap housing in cities more or less everywhere in the 1990s. The Wire TV drama, trying to document the same, never quite gets it as perfectly as "Mind Playing Tricks on Me." The song reached 23 on the Hot 100 in 1991. The Stax sound gives soulfulness to a crude, funny, wildly paranoid Robert Altman Short Cuts-like take on the crack era, busted drug deals, paranoid Halloween fantasies, living with the relentless threat of stress and violence that can turn desperately touching: "Goddam Homie, My mind is playing tricks on me."
Big sample source behind this one is Isaac Hayes' instrumental "Hung Up On My Baby" (1974):
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