The Fugees’ Wyclef Jean was disqualified when he sought the presidency of his native Haiti in 2010, and last year Dupré “DoItAll” Kelly, of the Lords of the Underground, got fewer than 5 percent of the votes when ran for an at-large city council seat in Newark. Jordan would be the most prominent rapper to win elected office, but he isn’t the first to try. “I don’t even want to be that guy no more,” he told Fox 26′s Isiah Carey in 2017. His campaign announcement was met with expressions of support on Instagram from hip-hop artists including MC Lyte, 2 Chainz, Bun B and Slim Thug.īut in recent years, Jordan has sought to move beyond his identity as an MC. Jordan also released several solo albums as Scarface on the way to earning a reputation as an elder statesman of hip-hop.Īfter the height of the Geto Boys’ fame, Jordan helped launch the careers of rappers such as Ludacris as head of Def Jam South in the early 2000s. In 1991, Jordan told The Washington Post that “Scarface is just a character.”īut it was 1991′s “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” a more vulnerable song exploring the psychic impact of that hard reality, that was their biggest hit. The Geto Boys rose to prominence amid controversy around the violent and sexually explicit lyrics they said reflected the reality they saw in their Houston neighborhood. In his first Instagram post after announcing his run for office, the man formerly known as Scarface posted a photo of a smiling Bill. Jordan’s announcement came just hours before a fellow Geto Boy, Bushwick Bill, died Sunday at age 52, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. “When he vacated that seat, it was my time to go ahead and move toward that seat, because I grew up there, I know a lot of people there, I know what the issues are.” “But four years came in a matter of 24 hours,” he said. Jordan said he had already set his sights on the council seat, which he sees as an opportunity to address the issues affecting the community where he lives, but didn’t expect Boykins to leave the seat for another four years. 5 ballot, when all 16 council seats will be contested. We’ll go on a safari trip.A post shared by Brad Jordan officials confirmed that Jordan had filed his appointment of a campaign treasurer, although he has until Aug. With the end in sight after such an excruciating experience, he joked, “I’m finna go fucking live now, man! Like skydiving and shit, I’m gonna go do that. Jordon said he was still in quarantine at his house, but believed he was finally recovered from the virus. To that end, he urged people to take the pandemic seriously, saying, “I don’t see how nobody can even want to play them games, I don’t want to have fun that bad, where it could take my life.” The rapper said he wasn’t sure where he picked up the virus, noting he hasn’t been traveling lately and lives a fairly sedentary life. He said he could barely breathe and that it “felt like there was an elephant sitting on my chest.” Jordon said the respiratory issues associated with the coronavirus were particularly brutal because he also has asthma. “I been to the point where I felt like I was going to die,” he said. He also noted that, despite everything, he only officially got his positive COVID-19 test result Wednesday night. The rapper, whose real name is Brad Jordan, described a multi-week ordeal that started with an itch in his throat and included multiple stays in the hospital, pneumonia in both of his lungs, kidney failure and a fever that ran as high as 103 degrees. Houston rapper Scarface said he has tested positive for the coronavirus during a livestream interview with his longtime Geto Boys bandmate Willie D Thursday.