Scarface has seen a dramatic change. Though he said that New Yorkers are still trendsetters, the Texas Rap icon said that New Yorkers are now “following the trend[s]” in Rap.
This stands are a marked difference from when Scarface and his group The Geto Boys were attending New York music industry events in the early 1990s as they were trying to break into and garner respect in the then-genre-leading Big Apple Rap market. “From back then when I started, from going to the New Music Seminar and getting booed, to coming out here fuckin’ in front of everybody’s line when I walk up. ‘Face.’ I would have never thought that,” Scarface told The Combat Jack Show. “To be shut out by the backpackers. ‘We don’t want to hear that shit up here,’ to hearing 2 Chainz on the radio out here, I’m like, ‘Whoa.'”
In the last decade-plus, the New York Rap market has become much more accepting of Rap from other regions than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, in part because New York rappers started regularly collaborating with rappers and producers from other regions in the late 1990s. Noreaga used the then-emerging Virginia beat team The Neptunes to produce his 1998 hit “Superthug.” The Queens rapper also appeared on the song “Fire Water” from Mississippi Rap duo Crooked Lettaz Grey Skies album a year later. David Banner was one-half of Crooked Lettaz. Jay-Z also worked extensively with The Neptunes and fellow Virginia beatsmith Timbaland starting in the late 1990s, paving the way for NY rappers who are more regionally neutral, such as Nicki Minaj and A$AP Rocky
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Scarface, who along with Ice Cube and fellow Geto Boys member Bushwick Bill became one of the first non-New York artists to work with a New York act when he appeared on Kool G. Rap & D.J. Polo’s “Two To The Head” in 1992, also discussed how shocked he was that rappers from other regions now dominate New York radio. “If you get in the car, close the door, turn the radio on and close your eyes,” he said to Combat Jack and DP, “you’d think you’re somewhere else.”
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