The Fix is the last album to get a legitimate five-mic rating from The Source, and it’s a direct precursor of the crack-rap trend that’s taken over Southern rap in recent years. It’s been three years since his last proper album, The Fix, which stands as one of the best albums of the decade. So Scarface’s announcement that he no longer intends to make albums isn’t a huge surprise. He was one of the most powerful men in the rap industry, and he just walked away from it. But then he quit, and it’s still not entirely clear why. He served for a time as the president as Def Jam South he gave the label one of its biggest moneymakers when he signed Ludacris. And that sadness isn’t limited to the music he’s always seemed vaguely disgruntled in the way he’s conducted his career. He raps about killing and dealing, but he does it with a massive, tangible sadness and regret, like he’s trapped in this existential dystopia and can’t help himself. His lyrics had some of the violent nihilism of N.W.A, but there’s more recognizable humanity to them. There’s a bluesy, melodic quality to his delivery, and he always sounds like he’s rising right out of the warm, organic beats he always uses. His voice is a bottomless, gravelly, worn-in boom, the sort of thing you expect to hear from a fire-and-brimstone preacher. It’s hard to believe that Brad Jordan is only nine years older than me, barely out of his teens when the Geto Boys were at their commercial peak he’s sounded like an old man from day one. But more than anything else, the Geto Boys’ greatest gift to the world is probably the introduction of Scarface, one of the most powerful voices in the history of rap. Prince had never thrown the group together. The rap landscape would look incomparably different today if J. Their “one hit,” “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” is an absolute masterpiece, a deeply evocative and compelling study in bad faith and paranoia. They also have one of the most fascinating stories in rap, an epic saga of controversy and jealousy and reconciliation and attempted suicide. They were the first Southern group to be taken seriously all over the country, and they introduced a meditative style of introspective, depressive gangsta rap, which makes them indirectly responsible for some of the best music being made today (I really need to write an entry about Restless, the fucking magnificent new Trae album). But the network hit rock bottom a few years ago during one of those smarmy one-hit wonder countdowns, when they inexplicably shoved the Geto Boys in with EMF and the guy who sang “Kung Fu Fighting,” basically the rap equivalent of including Radiohead on the countdown because they never had a radio hit that rivaled “Creep.” The Geto Boys are one of the most important groups in rap history.
#Geto boys scarface nwa series#
VH-1 runs a lot of irritating shit: James Blunt videos, Flavor of Love, El Chupacabra beating the Boegy Bunch in The World Series of Pop Culture.
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