Given the misogynistic imagery that saturated “Gangster of Love,” it’s easy to understand why Miller would be uncomfortable when he heard his 1973 recording of “The Joker” (its four-bar slide-guitar solo looped fifty-four times in the mix) providing the rhythm and chorus for such an uncouth song. To listen to “Gangster of Love” for the first time was pretty much inseparable from the shock one felt at its vulgarity, and even the favorable media reviews for The Geto Boys in 1990 took specific exception to the song’s lyrics. (“This track spends a solid five minutes viciously denigrating women,” wrote a Rolling Stone critic. “There’s no excuse — literary, comedic or otherwise — for this kind of malice.”) Furthermore, Miller’s decision to sue the Geto Boys could not be chalked up to some racist loathing for hip-hop, since he hadn’t protested when black rap artists like Too $hort, N.W.A, and the Jungle Brothers had sampled his songs around the same time.
Nevertheless, Miller’s move to disallow the use of his song in “Gangster of Love” did carry racial undertones. When the white, Milwaukee-born rocker croons “call me the gangster of love” on “The Joker,” he is actually echoing a line from his 1968 cover of a different “Gangster of Love” arrangement — a blues tune originally recorded in 1957 by a black, Texas-born musician named Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Under American copyright law, a Houston bluesman like Watson couldn’t prevent Miller from recording a cover of his song, yet Miller was perfectly within his rights to restrict a quartet of Houston gangsta rappers from sampling his lyrical allusion to the Watson original.