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 past 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, deeming him “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
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 adds. “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, a living legend whose story originates in Houston.
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.