LIL UZI XO TOUR LIFE VIDEO BREAKDOWN FULL
"What about n**** with the cane and the black suit? And what about cancer?", he asks himself, calling back to the specter of death he envisioned on "Mind Playing Tricks." His trauma gets progressively more severe as he compares himself to a "Vietnam vet with a thousand yard stare" and claims, "I'm know I'm here somewhere, but I can't find me." This is almost a full mental breakdown. "I got a head, but ain't no screws in it," he raps, after describing how he can't talk to his father about his affliction. "Diary of a Madman" differs profoundly from the similarly-titled aforementioned Geto Boys track "Mind of a Lunatic." Violence still surrounds it, with 'Face describing shooting a man in the head, but the main conflict takes place within him. Scarface began his solo career in '91, the same year "Mind Playing Tricks" dropped, and on his debut album, the song that would later inspire the title of his book took his introspection further than ever.
His entire career has subsequently been spent relating that hardship and recounting those tests. And it will test you every step of the way." He writes, "If you really want to go, dying is the easy part. In retrospect, he admits he was depressed, but believes that if he truly wanted to die, he would've seen at least one of his attempts all the way through. Not the first time he tried to off himself, 'Face downed a bottle of sleeping pills and after surviving, spent the better part of the next two years in a mental institution. In his 2015 autobiography, named after 1991 solo track "Diary of a Madman," the rapper opens by recounting an attempted suicide from his high school years. Like many other artists who have been slapped with the "gangter" or "horrorcore" tags, Geto Boys' gruesome tales may not have been entirely nonfiction, but we know one thing for sure: Scarface's depression was no myth. "I often drift while I drive, he raps, "Havin' fatal thoughts of suicide/'Bang' and get it over with/And then I'm worry-free, but that's bullshit." That type of internal debate, that admittance of severe depression simply didn't happen in hip hop, let alone its most macho subgenre, in '91. Real and imagined threats bleed into one another during Scarface's two verses, which depict a sleepless night fraught with a plethora of fears: of death, of disappointing his family, and of leaving a fatherless son behind. Other contemporary gangster rappers made songs that played like highlight reels of their exploits "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" depicted the off-camera aftermath of a murderous lifestyle that, despite frequent glamorization, has clearly never been a cakewalk. 90% of that exploration was carried out by Scarface, the most devoted rap psychologist of all time. But what made the group special was their exploration of all sides of violence and crime, not just the pulpy, in-the-moment gore. Their depiction of violence, both on record and on record cover, surpassed N.W.A.'s and soon begat darker heirs like Three 6 Mafia and Brotha Lynch Hung. In their heyday, Geto Boys very much fit within the gangster rap genre that stayed, by today's standards, unbelievably marketable for nearly a decade. Most of what followed in Scarface's original verse was pretty standard for the Geto Boys at the time (IE: horrorcore), including outing himself as a "homicidal maniac with suicidal tendencies," but that vivid imagery and palpable claustrophobia would soon be given its due elsewhere. First uttered by Scarface on Geto Boys' 1989 track "Mind of a Lunatic," those words would appear two years later in the intro of "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," perhaps the pioneering Houston group's best-known song. There's a case to be made that all depressive, paranoid, and anxiety-afflicted rap music stems from that one line.
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