The Great Escape - Music & More

Reviews:

''The Fix'' is the seventh album by emcee Scarface and his first on the Def Jam Recordings. Scarface became the president of Def Jam South the year before the release of this album, which was highly acclaimed, receiving the last 5-mic rating from The Source Magazine before Lil' Kim's ''The Naked Truth''. Guests include Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, Nas, Faith Evans, and WC. Producers include Mike Dean, Kanye West, Nottz, and the Neptunes. In 2010 it was reported by Hiphopdx.com Scarface will be making a sequel to ''The Fix'' called ''The Habit''. - Wikipedia

Call him the O.O.G.-Original Original Gangster. Since his days as the mostinsightful member of the Geto Boys, Brad "Scarface" Jordan has slowlymolded an entire subset of rap in his image. The world-weary thug was just animagined condition before Face got around to documenting the less glamorouselements of life on the wrong side of the law. Pretty soon, gangsters acrossthe country were tempering their bombastic rhymes with a bit of humility. Noalbum was complete without a hustler's lament.

Leave it to Scarface, though, to make an entire album of those grim songs.After his slightly unfocused 2000 effort, Last of a Dying Breed, Scarfacehas once again found his confidence, and his piercing vision, on The Fix.The dark nightmares are everywhere. "I can't slip/ this whole worldwant me sleep," he worries on "In Cold Blood," one of three exceedinglymusical tracks produced by Kanye West. "Keep Me Down" is as movingas anything Scarface has done in his career. A vivid depiction of a communityravaged by poverty, it accentuates the thing Face has always done best-renderingthe details of a bleak house so intensely it would make anyone, even its residents,want to stay away. "These niggas in my age group is dead or they lockedup," he says, "The bitches know better/ They smoked out or knockedup." Sad but true.

As an MC, Scarface has always carried the authoritative, yet accessible tenorof a wise elder, even when recounting the grimmest tales of violence. On classicGeto Boys songs like "My Mind's Playing Tricks On Me," Face temperedviolent urges with a true believer's need for repenting. Although mostof The Fix is preoccupied with reliving the highs and lows of the gangster life,Face leaves ample room for the afterlife. Towards the album's end, he turnsreflective with a pair of songs grappling with religion. "Heaven"is a straight-ahead toast to the Lord, with Scarface proudly boasting he's"serious about religion, this ain't no song." On the Neptunes-produced"Someday" (which admirably dispenses with the duo's signaturesound within seconds of the intro), Face raps, "I was singing this morning/Got touched by the spirit/ So I wrote it down for the homies to hear."

Unlike, say, KRS-ONE, who turned gospel gab on his last album, SpiritualMinded, Scarface praises the Lord without being preachy. Scarface'sruminations on redemption aren't all that different from his musings onstreet life; there's conviction in each. And Scarface succeeds where KRSfails because he's still growing himself and, as a result, never once talksdown to his listener. Face understands that empathy goes much farther than presumptuousness,and humility is a more potent tool than pride. "Who am I to judge a man,"he asks on "Someday." "I'm a man myself."