Cracking up
Beech-Nut Lifesavers, television advertisement (still). 1966.
For a moment in the nineties, some rap songs achieved a believable ambivalence to drug dealing. It’s easy to forget—often through association with their videos, where a combination of overly-literal interpretation and fear of censorship tended to skew messages toward moralizing. I went into this at some length when I wrote about the video for Juvenile’s “Ha”—the images are too easily categorized and what is reflected isn’t the actual voice of the song, but its subject-matter. Scarface’s “Money and The Power” (Rap-A-Lot, 1992) is a single in which he builds a tightly-wound narrative pattern without denaturing the song’s voice.
It maintains an ambiguous moral relation to its law-breaking that is more believable than, say, NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta,” (which finally has Ice Cube “dressed in the county blues”). NWA’s song employs an abrupt (and, one suspects, half-hearted) cautionary ending, a format usually invoked as a token entry on gangsta rap records—there are many good songs in this tradition, though few of them on the basis of being narratively convincing: UGK’s “Dirty Money,” T.I.’s “Better Than Me,” Young Jeezy’s “Talk To Em,” and so on.
Scarface has a long-standing reputation for integrity, which traces clearly back to this relatively early stage of his career—here, he is clearly interested in finding a convincing balance in his narrative and doesn’t lean entirely on his considerable rhythmic gifts. The hypnotic chorus chant is a yes-man backdrop to the speaker’s swagger, which is throughout undercut by an underlying sense of self-deception (throughout he is talking himself up, but there is also the sense that he is also just talking to himself). Scarface’s voice has a characteristic gruffness that settles into a near-monotony but which belies an exceptional permeability to subtext. My friend Justin Mitchell, writing about the 2007 album Made on Some Trajectories, observed that the very sound of it, despite being so even and consistent, nevertheless seemed capable of informing and being informed by what was being said:
[It] reflects a range of emotions or mental states: exasperation, self-doubt, anger, regret, yearning, etc… It sounds older, wiser, even a little defeated at times.
Sasha Frere-Jones celebrated the verbal dexterity of The Clipse several years ago in the New Yorker but in their work I can hear almost no communication between the complex elocutions and the way they actually sound. The coherence and realism of this early-nineties gangster cut stands in stark contrast to the subgenre Frere-Jones writes about—“cocaine rap,” “trap rap,” etc.— the (perhaps now fading) fashion of Rick Ross, et al. Many came out from the overcoat of Jay-Z armed with cat-hat rhyme schemes entirely about cocaine—inflated sales figures tabulated into a flow as bland as a 10K. There it is, though—drugs as source of income for musicians, to whom it became a comfortable subject-matter, and, with success, a genre form, and then, through the machinery of marketing, it once again became their bread and butter—but from the other direction.