Scarface Made Album

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We got on the horn with Brother Mob himself to talk about his massive catalog and got a lot of incredible stories from one of the genre's most respected lyricists. Face didn't always explain his writing process but he had plenty of oblique observations. He ranted about everything from the importance of "come lines" to how Jay Prince is the realest gangster to how he never made real money from rap until he became the President of Def Jam South.

He also spoke about the darkness that haunted him, the heavy drug use that fueled his songs, and a childhood of manic depression and multiple suicide attempts. Continue reading to see what happens when Scarface Breaks Down His 25 Most Essential Songs.

That's why the feds was watching us all. Back in 1999 or maybe 2000, the feds came to see me. One of my really close friends sold dope to a confidential informant. So they were trying to get him to roll over on me to try to get me to roll over on Jay. But that plot failed. They always had a hard-on for [Jay Prince] because he did his shit legitimately. In the United States, it's against the law for a young black man to be doing anything constructive to uplift his community, even today."

Long story short, I was doing a solo album. I had originally done the it as a solo song but then the owner of Rap-a-Lot heard it. They sent the song out to Priority and the people at Priority were doing fucking flips over the record.

Scarface: "That title was brought to me by John Bido. The idea of the song was to write a movie, to tell a story. That song gave me my title as one of the greatest storytellers ever because [one of my first story telling songs]. That was one of my best fucking stories.

I pride myself on my come lines. What I mean by come lines is how you start a record. Like I take my come lines very serious. Listen to every beginning of every song I've ever made and listen to those first words. Those first words set the tone every time.

I met Jay-Z in 1998 or 1999. I was recording The Last of a Dying Breed and Jay-Z was out there doing something in L.A. and I met him. Jay-Z came in to lay a couple records down for me. He was so damn fast it was sick the shit that he did.

I was making $350,000 to $400,000 a year working at Def Jam. Plus I played the A&R role so I cleaned up over there. I had the deal and Lyor Cohen said when he signed me to do my album, he was going to make a deal with me that was going to knock my socks off. He broke bread. Lyor Cohen got my utmost respect because he wrote that check.

Producer and engineer Mike Dean has worked with everyone from Kurupt to Devin the Dude, Selena to Z-Ro, Young Jeezy to UGK. In the early 1990s, he helped create the sound of Rap-A-Lot Records and the bones of Dirty South rap.

In 2002, while working on Scarface's The Fix, he mixed a song produced by Kanye West and performed by Scarface, Jay-Z and Beanie Seigel, called "Guess Who's Back." Kanye liked his mix so much, he asked Dean to work on his solo debut, College Dropout. Over the past 10 years, Dean and Kanye have worked together more and more, until they've reached the point where, Dean says, "Me and Kanye are like a band."

MUHAMMAD: Yo, you're ridiculously talented. It's no wonder. I mean just, everything that you've done and actually seeing you live a couple of times. Just to hear those sorts of things ... So, you're listening to Black Sabbath, probably Vangelis, all that Deep Purple, right? How'd you get into hip-hop? What was the first hip-hop track you heard?

DEAN: It was a group called Def Squad. This is like 1989? It was just a local group in Freeport, Texas, like by Houston, and I met the guy in a music store where I bought equipment at. And he said, "Oh, you can play that?" I had a drum machine and s---. So we went and made my first hip-hop song. It's whenever all the New York hip-hop was popping off.

DEAN: Like when she'd be singing and she'd sing flat, I'd hit a note on my keyboard real loud on stage to be like, "OK ... ding ding ding." I worked with her since she was like 8 until she was 13.

DEAN: First time I smelled cocaine burning. I was like, "What the f--- is that? What are they doing in the bathroom?" I was like 16. I didn't smoke weed, I didn't do anything; I was straight.

DEAN: Yeah, we were just listening to the old Rick Rubin s---. Trying to make s--- like that without an 808. We didn't know what an 808 was. We didn't use drum machines for a long time, it was all samplers. We just put sounds in there. You know N.O. Joe? He produced all the Geto Boys stuff with me, and he was the first guy that came to Houston with a drum machine, had a MPC. We were all like, whoa. Before that, we made everything with just a sampler and one keyboard.

DEAN: Yeah. We was there when they recorded it, then after Pac died, we re-made the beat again, 'cause the beat was kind of crap that they rapped on. 'Cause Pac would rap on anything. He wanted to get his lyrics out before he got killed. He knew he was dying, he was kind of going for it, trying to record as much as possible. So he didn't get lost in the minutiae of beats. That's why you hear him rapping all over all kinds of crap.

DEAN: It's a true story, the song. He called me and said, "Man, this b---- broke in my house and took my chains and took her kids and took all this s---. I'mma to kill that b----." I was like, "Man, come over to my house, let's make a song about that b----." He came over and we hung out. We smoked some weed and drank some syrup and made "I Hate You, B----."

DEAN: Yeah, for slapping somebody. Saw him knock out a Guitar Center salesman one time. The day he got out of prison, I took him over to Guitar Center to get some s---. The dude said he didn't like his last album and he was like "pow!"

DEAN: Yeah, that was a process. She didn't just go into the booth and rap that s---, you know? They wrote it together. She was rapping, he would listen to her for a while, be like, "Nah, that's not good. Come back." I wasn't there for those sessions, I just heard about 'em. I came in two months into that album.

DEAN: "Power." "Power" was our "Stronger" of that album. "Stronger" was the hardest song off Graduation; we had like, 14 different people mix it, literally. Each person did 20 mixes on the song. Finally put three different people's mixes together to make it be the one.

"Power" was the same way. I mixed that song for a month, then we sent it off to like, three other people. I think Manny [Marroquin] ended up mixing it. It's like, I mix the song, I get it up to a certain point, and then I send the session to another mixer. And then they just carry it on from there.

DEAN: I start fresh every time. When we work on a song recording, we work on the mixes as we're making it. So it's like 95% there. When we pass it off to the mixer, they just have to tweak it, make it a little better.

DEAN: We did more partying than we did music. We were just really good friends. I did "Pocket Full of Stones" with him when he was like 15, 16 something like that. So I knew him for a long time.

I think I was the one of the first people that really started playing a lot of live instruments on rap stuff. Before that, it was all samples. I've always been anti-sample. I've never put a sample in a song myself. I always cover up samples and elaborate on samples. I always try to be original.

DEAN: Yeah, it's the same thing as the hip-hop thing. I've turned into a sample fixer, elaborator. Sometimes we'll put a sample in something and build on it, so much that we take the sample away. And it turns into something else.

DEAN: It's awesome. Like Ashanti, "Baby." I woke up one morning to go to 7-11 and heard this on the radio. I'm like, "Awesome." Never knew it was going to happen until it was on the radio.

We're talking about making an album one day just of instrumentals for people to sample. Me and Kanye talked about that a couple years ago; just making music to be sampled, basically. Have hundreds of samples per song that people can snip away from.

DEAN: I'll show you. You'll know it when you hear it. This ["Played Like a Piano," by King Tee feat. Ice Cube and Breeze.] is like the best West Coast song, besides "Behind the Walls."

DEAN: 'Cause you can be a 10-minute cab ride away from any meeting you want to pull; instead of having to go somewhere. There's so much recording going on here. Although, all the young rappers have kind of went west now.

DEAN: I was in a meeting with Atlantic Records about doing my album, and I was talking about wearing a Mexican wrestling mask. And they thought I said Mexican Wrestling Association. So we just adopted that name because I was mumbling.

DEAN: Just read the music business books, to start with. Just business of music. And really start trying to understand publishing and points and business of the music. I didn't care about that s--- for 15 years. That's why I'm not like, a billionaire. If I would have known about that s--- when I started, I would be seriously having some Jay-Z money.

MUHAMMAD: Well, that's important for people to know. I mean, you don't know that, and you don't hear that when you're starting out. You don't know. You're just excited that people are interested in your work and they want to carry you and make your dreams come true. And then you find out. Maybe eight, 10 years later you're like, "What is going on?" Sometimes, it's too late to do anything about it. You've had a blessed run.

That's why our s--- is always so epic. He pushes boundaries. Remember at Coachella when he came out on that lift? It was the lift Michael Jackson used on his last tour. Anyways, he was like, "I want that lift." And two people got fired because they couldn't get it. But he finally got that lift.

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