SCARFACE DISCUSSES POTENTIAL ALBUM WITH DJ QUIK

[The Predator]

Scarface (supposedly) dope

Brad Terrence Jordan is the undisputed king of the dirty south.

The Case for Scarface as the Greatest Rapper of All Time



Scarface might have been born here, but the city has never defined his music.

By Elisabeth Carroll Parks April 20, 2026 Published in the Summer 2026 issue of Houstonia Magazine

Scarface won't let a little lie slip to ease somebody's mind. He didn't become one of the greatest rap artists of all time by trying to make everyone else feel more comfortable.

Talking with Scarface on the phone this spring, I wanted to better understand how and why he writes so heartbreakingly and mind-bendingly well. When I asked him whether a song can build empathy—if a verse can change a listener's mind by taking them deep into another person's lived experience—I was guilty of anticipating a misty-eyed response, perhaps involving a warm quote about the power of art. Instead, my question was met with silence, then a firm, "That's not gonna happen."

I stared at the phone, a bit disoriented by the clear break from platitudes. And just like the first time I listened to Scarface's groundbreaking 1994 album, The Diary, I leaned forward so I could hear him better, because I knew he'd be telling the truth.

"People still walk around in life oblivious to the reality of what's going on," Scarface said. "Everybody's in their own little bubble. A lot of people just don't see it," he added, calmly and softly. He's referring to the fundamental and often hardest truths in other people's stories. "They don't want to. They would rather pretend that it doesn't exist."

Born Brad Jordan, Scarface was raised on Houston's Southside in South Acres. He grew up writing poems, seeing hard things too young, and feeling mad and sad too often. Music coursed through him. Johnny Nash, the Houston native who wrote "I Can See Clearly Now," is his cousin. His grandmother sang beautifully, and his Uncle Eddie bought him his first electric guitar. Scarface rapped early and well, but he loved KISS and psychedelic rock, too. "I think the first language I learned to speak was music," he wrote in his 2015 memoir, Diary of a Madman.

At 16, Scarface signed his first record deal. That teenager went on to become one of rap's preeminent voices, a master auteur, vibe architect, and beat maker with a conscience. Across seven albums with the Geto Boys and 11 solo albums, he shared his sharply drawn stories, anthems, and confessionals. In 2000, he launched and led Def Jam South, shepherding Southern hip-hop with foresight and well-honed intuition, and along the way, he became a legend, praised by music fans and critics alike.

After his 2023 NPR Tiny Desk Concert went viral, conversations about his artistry resurfaced. In a piece for Forward Times, journalist DeVaughn Douglas called for a recalibration of Scarface's legacy. Douglas maintains his position today, deeming Scarface "the greatest MC by a long shot.... Everybody can have their preference," he says. "But Scarface is the best rapper. There's no getting around it."

Andrew Dansby, the former longtime arts and culture writer for the Houston Chronicle after a stint at Rolling Stone, says Scarface's writing is what sets him apart from other rappers. "Scarface is a storyteller at heart," he says. "He creates an environment for each story. Sometimes that environment is a Houston intersection, and sometimes it's a corner of his mind."



"I'm Houston proud like a motherfucker, but I don't want to be the best rapper in Houston. I want to be the best rapper in the world." —Scarface

Image: Courtesy Scarface

It's challenging to find anyone in any genre or medium who writes about human suffering, occasionally entangled with tender hope, better. "He has songs where he witnesses a shooting, goes home, and realizes he is dead, then he's speaking as a ghost," Douglas says. "In his early work, when he's talking about the mindset of someone who's living the life of a gangster or drug dealer, he's dealing with complex emotions of paranoia, guilt, and justification."

Scarface can devastate with a single line. The opening of "I Seen a Man Die" is a stunning example: "He greets his father with his hands out / Rehabilitated slightly, glad to be the man's child."

Scarface calls them "come lines," a defining characteristic of his writing. He explains his approach to me: "What's the first thing I could say that would captivate this particular audience for this particular record?"

Then, there's his delivery—sometimes hushed and hoarse, other times frenetic and driving, but always as potent as the words themselves. He admits he's long since grown tired of MCs rapping in monotone patterns, no matter the subject. "It's super important to address the songs in the right mindset, the right tempo," he says. "If you don't approach each song in the right manner, you fail. You didn't do that song any justice."

Some of Scarface's ingenuity lies in his timing. "If he gets to a point where the rhyme and beat don't serve him, he just doesn't do it," Douglas says. "He'll just talk. Then, he'll catch the beat or rhyme later. It's incredible."

Ask Scarface how he finds his words and the delivery they deserve, and he is characteristically blunt. "I think weed puts you in a different mindset than normal," he says. "It makes me not scared to be creative." His song "Mary Jane," a politically provocative ode to cannabis, underscores his point.

Houston also has its role in his development. The city proudly claims him, and he claims it right back, but he doesn't give it more credit than it's due, nor does he attribute his artistic instincts to his hometown. Houston didn't make him. "I know everyone's always made a big deal about us being from the South, but I was never really concerned about where I was from," Scarface wrote in his memoir. "Not like that."

In his iconic song "On My Block," Houston scenes rush in and out of focus over a brilliant sample of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway's "Be Real Black for Me." While lines nod to Houston streets ("from Holloway, Bellfort, to Scott"), the song's themes of local kinship are global. Scarface credits James Prince, the Rap-A-Lot Records founder who signed him to his first deal, with recognizing the Geto Boys' and Scarface's potential reach. "We were all still kids, and we'd never left the hood, but James knew that the whole world was a ghetto before we'd even made our first song," Scarface explained in his memoir. "He had a vision. He wanted us to touch all those people that he knew were there, but weren't being spoken to and needed a voice."     



Scarface wasn't interested in cultivating a specifically Houston sound, but in building something entirely his own. Dansby says that's what makes his perspective and artistry "just about peerless." His skills as a producer are also often grossly underestimated. "I think his time as an office guy at Def Jam did a lot for music in the South," Dansby says. "So, if that woozy, syrupy sound is one's indicator for Houston hip-hop, he sounds a little removed from it, but it's because he's so fully formed as a storyteller who builds scenes."

Scarface mines the veins he knows well, resulting in songs that paint vignettes in exquisite detail. The deathbed scene from "I Seen a Man Die" is a stunning example, where struggle, fear, and ultimately, freedom jump from the lines:

I hear you breathin', but your heart no longer sounds strong
But you kinda scared of dying, so you hold on
And you keep on blacking out, and your pulse is low
Stop trying to fight the reaper, just relax and let it go
Because there's no way you can fight it, though you'll still try
And you can try it 'til you fight it, but you'll still die
Your spirits leave your body, and your mind clears
The rigor mortis starts to set, now you outta here

It's a masterpiece, worthy of study in college courses alongside T. S. Eliot, Maya Angelou, and Bob Dylan. Scarface is elite not merely in the contexts of Houston hip-hop or international rap rankings, but in broader realms of writing and art. "I'm Houston proud like a motherfucker, but I don't want to be the best rapper in Houston," Scarface tells me. "I want to be the best rapper in the world."

Credit for Scarface's unique constitution goes, at least in part, to his life experiences, strong musical genes, Pink Floyd, spiritual depth, and good weed. While Scarface has doubts about a song changing a mind, he believes in music's power, both for the listener and its maker. "To be able to make music mean something is phenomenal," he tells me. "Like, ‘Wow. Look at what you said. Out of all the shit you could have said, you said this. Wow.'"

Ultimately, Scarface shaped himself. But Houston does get to feel proud. While internationally renowned Houstonians like Beyoncé and Billy Gibbons maintain close ties to the city but opt to live elsewhere, Scarface keeps choosing us. Houston remains his home. Scarface—the greatest there's ever been—is still ours.

https://www.houstoniamag.com/arts-and-culture/2026/04/scarface-houston-rap-hip-hop-greatest-mc-profile

-------------

Why Scarface is One of the Greatest of All Time



Why Scarface's unparalleled pathos makes him a GOAT.

In this series, we'll be making the case for specific rappers to be included in "greatest of all-time" discussions. The more obvious choices (such as André 3000, Lil Wayne, Eminem, Jay-Z, Nas, Biggie, 2Pac) will be ignored in favor of artists who tend to get overlooked these days, for one reason or another. Previously, our writers have made cases for Pusha T, Ice Cube, DJ Quik, Big Boi, DMX, and Ghostface Killah. Today, we're going to bat for Scarface.

"I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles."

There's a case to be made that all depressive, paranoid, and anxiety-afflicted rap music stems from that one line. First uttered by Scarface on Geto Boys' 1989 track "Mind of a Lunatic," those words would appear two years later in the intro of "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," perhaps the pioneering Houston group's best-known song. Most of what followed in Scarface's original verse was pretty standard for the Geto Boys at the time (IE: horrorcore), including outing himself as a "homicidal maniac with suicidal tendencies," but that vivid imagery and palpable claustrophobia would soon be given its due elsewhere.

In their heyday, Geto Boys very much fit within the gangster rap genre that stayed, by today's standards, unbelievably marketable for nearly a decade. Their depiction of violence, both on record and on record cover, surpassed N.W.A.'s and soon begat darker heirs like Three 6 Mafia and Brotha Lynch Hung. But what made the group special was their exploration of all sides of violence and crime, not just the pulpy, in-the-moment gore. 90% of that exploration was carried out by Scarface, the most devoted rap psychologist of all time.



Other contemporary gangster rappers made songs that played like highlight reels of their exploits; "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" depicted the off-camera aftermath of a murderous lifestyle that, despite frequent glamorization, has clearly never been a cakewalk. Real and imagined threats bleed into one another during Scarface's two verses, which depict a sleepless night fraught with a plethora of fears: of death, of disappointing his family, and of leaving a fatherless son behind. "I often drift while I drive, he raps, "Havin' fatal thoughts of suicide/'Bang' and get it over with/And then I'm worry-free, but that's bullshit." That type of internal debate, that admittance of severe depression simply didn't happen in hip hop, let alone its most macho subgenre, in '91.

Like many other artists who have been slapped with the "gangter" or "horrorcore" tags, Geto Boys' gruesome tales may not have been entirely nonfiction, but we know one thing for sure: Scarface's depression was no myth. In his 2015 autobiography, named after 1991 solo track "Diary of a Madman," the rapper opens by recounting an attempted suicide from his high school years. Not the first time he tried to off himself, 'Face downed a bottle of sleeping pills and after surviving, spent the better part of the next two years in a mental institution. In retrospect, he admits he was depressed, but believes that if he truly wanted to die, he would've seen at least one of his attempts all the way through. He writes, "If you really want to go, dying is the easy part. It's the living that's hard. That shit takes a lifetime. And it will test you every step of the way."

His entire career has subsequently been spent relating that hardship and recounting those tests.



Scarface began his solo career in '91, the same year "Mind Playing Tricks" dropped, and on his debut album, the song that would later inspire the title of his book took his introspection further than ever. "Diary of a Madman" differs profoundly from the similarly-titled aforementioned Geto Boys track "Mind of a Lunatic." Violence still surrounds it, with 'Face describing shooting a man in the head, but the main conflict takes place within him. "I got a head, but ain't no screws in it," he raps, after describing how he can't talk to his father about his affliction. "What about n**** with the cane and the black suit? And what about cancer?", he asks himself, calling back to the specter of death he envisioned on "Mind Playing Tricks." His trauma gets progressively more severe as he compares himself to a "Vietnam vet with a thousand yard stare" and claims, "I'm know I'm here somewhere, but I can't find me." This is almost a full mental breakdown.

The Diary, Scarface's third album, is where his attention to internal struggle reached its peak. I remember hearing the album's "No Tears" as a kid, and chuckling at the line, "I got this killer up inside of me/I can't talk to my mother so I talk to my diary," because 'Face sounded so hard but was saying stuff that even I would be embarrassed to say. Though I didn't realize it then, that's what makes him so important: the fact that he can be an imposing dude and candidly discuss private thoughts. If I could go back to 12-year-old me, I'd tell him to skip to track six, the horrifically detailed "I Seen a Man Die," and promptly shut him up.



'Face has matured gracefully, letting the gangster aspects of his music fall to the wayside as he's come to peace with himself, and instead honing in closer on the big issues and questions of life and death. His heartbreaking verse on Jay-Z's "This Can't Be Life," and his insanely well-produced 2002 album The Fix are definite late-career highlights. He continues to drop music that resonates and speaks truth, and seems like more of a prophet with every passing year. His biggest contribution to rap, however, is the fact that he made it okay to discuss mental health.

We wouldn't have 2pac's Me Against The World without Scarface. We wouldn't have Biggie's Ready to Die, UGK's "One Day," Eminem's "Rock Bottom," Future's "Codeine Crazy," or Lil Uzi Vert's "XO Tour Life" without him. That's not to say that every one of those artists considers Scarface a key influence, but rather that he changed the genre's climate to allow space for such wide-ranging feelings. Rap's not just boasting, and no one is more responsible for proving that than Scarface.

In closing, here's what Chuck D had to say about 'Face in the introduction to Diary of a Madman, which beautifully sums up his genius:

"He can put the fear of God in you, turn around and uplift you, then take you down a path that you never saw coming. He can put fear into your heart and also touch your soul at the same time. He can take you on a journey to the dark side and also bring you to the light. That is the beauty of what he does. There is so much to him, so many layers to peel back as an MC, as an artist, and as a man."

https://www.hotnewhiphop.com/94449-why-scarface-is-one-of-the-greatest-of-all-time-news

-----------

For nearly 30 years, Scarface has been putting out consistently great material, and he has NEVER fallen off. He is a trend-setter, a truth teller, and an extraordinary lyricist. So, why is he so rarely considered in the discussion of Hip-Hop's greatest MC? A new video makes the case for why he is the GOAT.

[Sharif86]

Two of my favorite artists together. It could be one of the greatest album of all time. Let's hope it happens.