Born Brad Jordan, Face grew up in Houston, a city he would eventually introduce to many rap fans from the coasts and the Midwest. And when the creator is one of the greatest rappers to ever live, it becomes an absolutely arresting window into his creative life at the end of the 90s.īy the time My Homies came out, Scarface was already seen as a legend by some including, and perhaps especially, by those who reduced him to a regional cipher. Rather than a tome dedicated to status or biography, it’s a double album that was allowed to experiment, to lower stakes, to sprawl in any direction its creator saw fit. Released in March 1998, Scarface’s My Homies is an anomaly of form, a 137-minute record that feels, somehow, small. And when the Wu-Tang clan reassembled in the studio after a string of massively successful solo debuts, their feelings about sustained supremacy were very clear: Wu-Tang Forever. Big was rapping on and about yachts he was glowering at the Nasirs of the world who wanted the New York throne he was recreating Delfonics songs with the band from the strip club next to the studio. was more calculated, but no less ambitious: his sophomore album, which he’d been writing and recording on both American coasts and in Trinidad, surveyed the entirety of mid-’90s rap and swallowed every style whole. (When Pac was assassinated seven months later in Las Vegas, he was already mostly finished with a follow-up album.) All Eyez On Me, the yield from a few weeks of marathon sessions, was breathless and brilliant. 2Pac was fresh out of jail – as in literally he was bailed of a maximum-security prison in upstate New York and flew immediately to California to write and record––and determined to exact revenge on, well, everybody.

Each was by a superstar rap act at the height of their power, and all three were acts of real-time mythmaking. Those three double albums came out in quick succession, between February 1996 and June of the following year.

Three case studies: All Eyez On Me Life After Death Wu-Tang Forever.

Scarface homies and thugs