If the memoir is an opportunity to celebrate Scarface’s contributions to hip-hop, it is also a way to account for the obstacles in the way of both his and hip-hop’s rise. He also served as the president of Def Jam South, signing and developing the careers of artists like Ludacris. Any rapper knows that.” The albums didn’t undersell either - Scarface has six gold- or platinum-certified solo albums and three as a member of the Geto Boys. You cannot get to four without mentioning Scarface. As Chris Rock said, while picking his top 25 hip-hop albums for Rolling Stone: “He is the most underrated rapper of all time and absolutely in the top three.

Soon after, he launches a solo career and releases such influential records as The Diary, The Untouchable, and The Fix, all of which received high praise from hip-hop critics.

Instead, he ends up an integral, perhaps the most significant, part of James Prince’s Rap-A-Lot Records, becoming a member of the Geto Boys, a group that was largely responsible for the rise (and notoriety) of Southern gangsta rap in the early 1990s. If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you straight up: I was ready to go.”īut he doesn’t go. Slitting my wrists with a box cutter and bleeding out all over the bathroom floor, putting loaded guns to my head, all of that shit. As Scarface explains: “You name it, I’d tried it. At 13, Scarface, tired of not getting attention from his absent mother and overworked grandmother, his father long dead, decides to take all his mother’s blood pressure medication. Scarface’s memoir, Diary of a Madman, frequently reminded me of Dave Lewis’s photographs, because, like them, the memoir tries to simultaneously hold color and depression - life and death - in a single frame.

The photographs are especially memorable for the glowing colors they employ to filter the black man’s image, the melancholy on the subject’s faces dully reflecting the brightness around them. The second shot is taken from underneath a glass table, capturing the bewildered face of a black man dressed in denim and a wool beanie, as he studies, palms outstretched on the table, a scatter of colorful pills. IN 1991, two poignant frames hung in the exhibition “Black Youth and Mental Health.” Both by black British photographer Dave Lewis, the first photograph shows gradients of radiant yellow that crop a black man’s face, focusing on a single eye, brow, and half of a nose.

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