Keep it moving scarface8/24/2023 ![]() We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths". "Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves.” ![]() Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, Masters of the small reality we create. In the end, however, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this connection is through creative activity. We indulge in drugs or alcohol, or engage in dangerous sports or risky behavior, just to wake ourselves up from the sleep of our daily existence and feel a heightened sense of connection to reality. Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. It’s grief and a little hope as you “spit phlegm on the streets” with “Suede Timbs on your feets.”Ī chant, an incantation perhaps, to be held and examined by all and from many angles.“We are all in search of feeling more connected to reality-to other people, the times we live in, the natural world, our character, and our own uniqueness. It’s never one emotion at once, which is a good lesson for writers of all kinds to take in. (Is it coincidental that Oliver Stone is from NYC too?) It sounds like the kind of hope you can only find in New York City. I'm out for dead presidents to represent me I'm out for presidents to represent me (Say what?) I keep fallin', but never fallin' six feet deep I can't call it, the beats make me fallin' asleep Whether cruisin' in a Sikh's cab or Montero Jeep Suede Timbs on my feet makes my cipher complete Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the streets Time like Pappy Mason, with pens I'm embracin' The mind activation, react like I'm facin' ![]() The fiend of hip-hop has got me stuck like a crack pipe A few hard moves getting to, and working past another bolt lead to an exciting. ![]() The thief's theme, play me at night, they won't act right Climb the thin crack, passing a bolt and get established in a slabby corner. Understandable smooth shit that murderers move with To hold the mic I'm throbbin', mechanical movement Writin' in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin I sip the Dom P, watchin' Gandhi 'til I'm charged, then It's mine, it's mine, it's mine-whose world is this? Here, producer Pete Rock’s sampling and looping of Ahmad Jamal’s “I Love Music” feels like sonic equivalent of magic realism. This track comes right after “Life’s a Bitch” where the refrain is “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” The song “The World Is Yours” (co-written with Pete Rock) is a moment of weightlessness and optimism amidst otherwise brutal subjects as Nas holds a metaphorical and unrelenting camera up to his young life in the rough Queensbridge public housing development in Queens, New York. Just as the phrase “THE WORLD IS YOURS” resonates with Tony Montana, it also resonates with Nas. “The World Is Yours” is a song less about emulating Scarface and more about finding inspiration in his mantra. It’s on another Illmatic track that Nas takes a sublter approach. Nas himself on the track “NY State of Mind” asserts: “I'm like Scarface sniffin' cocaine / Holdin' an M16, see, with the pen I'm extreme / Now, bullet holes left in my peepholes / I'm suited up with street clothes, hand me a. For decades, MCs have espoused their reverence for everything from The Public Enemy (1931) to The Godfather Trilogy and especially to Scarface.Ī cadre of rappers, in their lyrics (and in Houston rapper Scarface’s case, in name), have tended to equivocate themselves to Tony Montana’s sheer violent outlaw power. There’s plenty of great literature and scholarship on this topic. No one needs this blog post to plumb the influence of the gangster film genre on rap and hip-hop. In the script we see “The World Is Yours” examined from multiple vantage points. The appearance of the phrase adheres to the storytelling convention of rule of three.
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