For the past two weeks I've been listening heavily to Houston rapper Scarface, largely due to his 1994 album The Diary, a rugged, faux-operatic gangsta rap album that is at once totally badass and weirdly dated, its gangsta rap cliches sounding cartoonish and overblown nearly 20 years later (you can witness the ridiculousness of some of these songs in Mike Judge's Office Space, which is required viewing). While I've been trying to get my friends into Scarface's music, some of them are having a hard time connecting with it because of how violent, angry, and foul some of the lyrical content is. But part of what I really enjoy about Scarface is how his bullfrog voice conveys a world-weariness that comes from being forced into a life of crime by economic and social circumstances.…
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