The Fix had a couple of truly touching love songs, but on MADE Scarface shows us the other side of romance, vividly documenting the end of a relationship on a couple of tracks. "Burn", for instance, is a chilling murder-ballad, as Face explores the emptiness he feels immediately after killing someone: "My hands got powder-burns, I just murdered a man/ Took his life for nothing/ If you ask me, fuck it." His voice isn't the only thing he has in common with Johnny Cash.īut MADE gains emotional force only when Scarface leaves that behind for the sincerity and vulnerability of a string of relationship songs. When he's talking hard, as on "Big Dogg Status", Scarface can be both thrilling and terrifying: "He's a nerd, and they fuck nerds in jail I heard/ As a nigga, I came in here with my balls and word." He's also still a gifted technical rapper with a gift for unshowy but intricate and alliterative rhymes: "I roll over roaches in Rovers with rims on 'em/ Sniffing out a rat, I expose him and then dome him." We've heard him say this stuff hundreds of times before, but his tough-talk gets more interesting as it gets more specific. Over its ten songs, Scarface mostly treads familiar ground: harder-than-thou street-rap boasts, intimate grown-man relationship talk, wide-angle society-gone-wrong laments. But those beats- slow and heavy melodic monsters laced with soul-samples and organ-blurts- mesh beautifully and intuitively with Scarface's weary drawl. MADE is a decidedly minor album: Barely 40 minutes, it has no guest rappers and its beats are entirely from Rap-A-Lot's house producers. On "Git Out My Face", he explains his reasons for returning to rap, and they're predictably confrontational: "This shit ain't go the planned, I'm caught in a cross/ And if I leave, they won't respect the South 'cause niggas soft/ Talking 'bout what's in they mouth, talking 'bout they cars and house/ That ain't what we about." After all these years, he still can't relinquish his messianic role. But now he's back with a new album on Rap-A-Lot, the venerable Houston indie that first launched his career nearly 20 years ago. Sometime last year, he announced that The Fix would be his last solo album, that he was sick of the music business. Soon after its release though, he left Def Jam, and he's only occasionally dabbled in rapping since then, recording worthy albums with old crew the Geto Boys and new crew the Product and popping up for a few guest verses. When he recorded that record, Scarface was president of Def Jam South, where he signed Ludacris, and he had at his disposal both A-list guest-spots from the likes of Jay-Z and Nas and bluesier, more expansive beats than any he'd rapped on. Face hasn't released a solo album of new material since 2002's The Fix, an epic about love and death in America's ghettos and a late-career masterpiece.
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