This ain’t normal.'” The track’s vivid mix of mean-mugging and emotional weight (“I’m only 19, but my mind is old/And when the things get for real, my warm heart turns cold,” he raps) would influence a generation of rappers. That was one of the first ones where we were like, ‘Whoa. “Probably weed, probably was some dust in there, mad 40s, getting twisted. We wrote that in the crib high on drugs,” Prodigy told Complex with a laugh. Over a hard breakbeat chopped and pitch-shifted by Havoc, the pair commit lyrical acrobatics with cold-blooded effortlessness. Steely, hard, ice-cold and ultraviolent: “Shook Ones (Part II)” was a definitive moment in returning gangsta rap back to New York City’s grittiest, grimiest streets after a pair of summers enjoying the backyard barbeques of Los Angeles. Here’s 10 essential tracks from a wild and storied career. Prodigy went to prison for 3½ years for gun possession, but upon his release in 2011, he spent his final years as a hip-hop Renaissance Man, writing one of the best rapper autobiographies ( My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep’s Prodigy), penning a cookbook ( Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook) and recording with everyone from Childish Gambino to Curren$y to Alchemist’s revolving crew of indie spitters. Though never achieving a Top 40 pop hit on their own, Mobb Deep remained well-respected as they weathered career ups and downs.
The group’s influence hit its apotheosis when Mobb Deep-influenced Queens MC 50 Cent sold millions and ultimately signed the group to his G-Unit Records. Forming Mobb Deep with Kejuan “Havoc” Muchita as a teenager, the duo recorded one of the most important albums in hip-hop history, 1995’s The Infamous, an album of effortless, cold-blooded raps about street life that replaced gangsta glamor with a flickering black-and-white grit. The rapper had a tumultuous upbringing – plagued by sickle cell anemia, depression and a broken family – but, as his lyrics show, he was the type to turn setbacks into triumph.
Albert “Prodigy” Johnson, one of the great voices from New York’s thug-rap renaissance in the Nineties, died on June 20th at the age of 42.
0 kommentar(er)
