video review: 'deeply rooted' by scarface

And that knocks my two biggest discographies to retrace off my list. Whew, maybe the next few weeks will be a little lighter... although judging by the release schedule, that seems like a fool's hope.

Next up, Billboard BREAKDOWN - stay tuned!

album review: 'deeply rooted' by scarface

I've said before it's hard to talk about legends, artists with careers that span decades and have made history in their respective genres. But you know when it becomes the hardest? I'll tell you - when you invest the hours of work to go through an entire lengthy discography of one of these legends... and realize most of it wasn't all that great.

And yeah, I'm talking about Scarface, member of the Geto Boys and legend of Houston hip-hop. On his own, the man has put out around a dozen albums of material and I went through every single one of them, including the double albums. And when I started, I was excited - Scarface throughout the first half of the 90s may not have seemed to do much outside of the gangsta rap formula, but he brought personality, strong wordplay, and a selection of pretty damn solid old school funk and soul to his beats, and I'll still hold that his album The Diary is damn close to a classic, taking the depression that has crept through all of his work to underscore his bleak insight. But going beyond that, there's a gap of about ten years where the albums were mixed to say the least. Quite frankly, there's only so many places Scarface could take his brand of gangsta rap, and it got repetitive in a hurry. Coupled with an influx of weaker guest stars and production that could be hit-and-miss, and you're left with a lot of filler, enough so that I understand why despite his longevity and his presence in the underground as a figure of southern hip-hop, his name doesn't always come up. Really, consistent quality only began to return by records like Made or Emeritus- after the latter of which Scarface announced that he was retiring. And really, I was okay with this- go out on a high note, nothing wrong with that.

And that's why the announcement of a new record threw me off-guard, and you have to wonder what it was that pulled Scarface out of a solid eight years of retirement that was only really split by a mixtape in 2010, one of the closest things to a significant departure in from hip-hop that wasn't caused by prison or drug addiction or death. But to be fair, the guest verses I've heard from Scarface over the past decade have been solid, especially when he worked with Freddie Gibbs on Pinata, so did Scarface come back with something worth caring about?