Scarface -The Legend Continues
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Scarface doesn’t really feel like being interviewed. He’d rather be playing his guitar—and he proceeds to do so, even though he has to play it backwards because the busy label folk have forgotten to fetch him a left-handed guitar.
“When I was making this album I didn’t have the time to sit down and make tracks,” he says deliberately in between heartfelt strums. He’s been playing the guitar since he was a kid, influenced by the transcendental sounds of Roger Waters.
“Oh wait!” he says pausing. “I actually did play the solo at the end of the song with Z-Ro on it.”
He stops talking and refocuses on his spontaneous guitar playing. It’s an odd, but inspiring sight, watching one of the fathers of so-called “gangster rap” strumming beautiful chords on his favorite instrument. But that’s thing about Scarface—he’s always gone against the odds, and people love him for it. With his latest album, Emeritus, he’ll continue in the trend he started nearly 20 years ago, when he dropped his first album with the Geto Boys in the late 80s. While 2007’s Made found him rapping more about women than any of his past records (he recently went through a divorce), Emeritus will be an extension of where he currently is in his life.
“You think I rapped about women more?” he asks incredulously. He stops, and ponders the idea for a minute. “Well, I do have a great woman song on this album too, it’s called “The High Note”… I make women hit high notes.”
He chuckles briefly before refocusing on his guitar. Known as “Uncle Face” to rappers like Beanie Sigel, Jay-Z, Killer Mike and the countless others that he’s inspired with his brand of street-intelligent, perceptive rhymes, Face has become synonymous with consistency.
“My formula has always been that I wasn’t just doing what was hot,” he says. “There was a pattern in music that I grew up under. That’s probably why I’m always going to be as consistent as I have been, because I don’t want to be nobody but me. I don’t talk about nothing but what’s relevant.”
And what’s relevant is the state of the world. Face has always been the voice of the working class, and he’ll never stop. No matter what’s going on musically, his consciousness has remained the same, and that’s what allows him to win time and time again—being a voice for the voiceless.
“I don’t give a f-ck clothes, cars and jewelry,” he says frowning. “I give a f-ck about prescription medication being $300 or gas being $5 a gallon, the Wall Street bailout. Ballin’ comes and goes. History is forever.” –jacinta howard
