mobb deep - c or d?

It's a hip hop album in which fear can turn to total all out aggression in a matter of seconds (or a matter of one line). As Artiste said above, you get lines like "Heart pumps foul blood through my arteries, and I can't turn it back it's a part of me" and 10 seconds latter they're lashing out again with "Fuck the whole world kid, my loot comes first". If those rhymes reflected their own realities, then these guys were at breaking point when they made it. It's that intense.

However they were pretty poor when I saw them recently in London, with Prodigy rapping all of Havoc's verses. A shame.

Sounds like Shook One behavior to me.

now, prodigy wearing a tutu is another story entirely ...

"you was a ballerina, I got the pi'tures I seen ya!"

It's kind of hypocritical in a way though to call rappers phonies (note: nobody in this thread did) because they come from an affluent neighborhood but rap gangsta...

I hear a lot of people do that and some of these are the same people who listen to, oh, Cannibal Corpse, and goregrind acts who don't exactly act out the imagery they scream about! :)

I just got The Infamous today...loving it so far.

I hated that song they did with 112 that had that stupid line "he must be out his monkey assed mind...."

the new havoc album is pretty bad.

k, resumed listening to The Infamous and god these are some sweet beats....

new album in the spring, playing B'more 3/30

whoa

Albert Johnson (born November 2, 1974), better known by his stage name Prodigy, is an American rapper and one half of the Hip-hop duo Mobb Deep with Havoc. He is the great-great-grandson of the founder of Morehouse College.

new album's out next week, with a second disc of unreleased tracks from the Infamous sessions. (no idea if this is truly unheard stuff or songs everyone already has.)

anyway, anyone heard the new stuff? thoughts? i love the first single

loved the alchemist/prodigy album, prodigy off the beat off the rails into fantasy murder shit, less cinematic more high number cable channel true crime mind of the killer documentary, scarier for its attention to tiny details, shooting into cigarette lights. havoc in 2014 better production better flow lyrically better than i've heard from him in the last decade.

but, no, this won't be good or interesting.

homey just said prodigy from mobb deep dropped a singer-songwriter

― johnny and luther (johnny and luther), Saturday, July 31, 2004 4:59 PM (9 years ago)

i have heard Prodigy say this April marks 20 years since The Infamous, but ... it doesn't. it's 19. unless I'm missing something?

stream the new one here
http://www.pandora.com/station/play/1932140457487230704

maybe this one http://www.pandora.com/station/play/1411412518987239135/8230260838111

i have heard Prodigy say this April marks 20 years since The Infamous, but ... it doesn't. it's 19. unless I'm missing something?

― alpine static, Wednesday, March 26, 2014 4:05 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he said this when i did a phone interview recently, and i was like "..." and just let it stand and went into my next question, i didn't have the heart to be pedantic with fucking Prodigy from Mobb Deep

lol iv bn fsn 2 hell on earth https://soundcloud.com/asfcz-xzcc/rtaht-udd-dj at 35;xx m;s scuze teh francolatin arabi

two tracks in and it's fairly meh

I do like the beat on "Say Something", or at least the chorus...Prodigy's verses are fairly boring tho

https://soundcloud.com/asfzxdc-assdw/euinhytgvb 6;48

some dude: apparently he means 20 years since they made it in '94 (i asked)

whatever it takes to get product out, i guess, i dunno

yeah i know they recorded the album in '94 and the new outtakes are in '94, but he keeps specifically saying this April is the 20th anniversary of the album, which, did they record it all in April 1994 and then it took a year to come out? maybe, but i doubt it.

this is my article btw, i took pains to work a "bring to the table" reference into the headline:
http://citypaper.com/music/more-than-famous-1.1656970

yeah i'm not saying it's airtight reasoning, just saying that's what pr told me. i figure someone said "hey 20-year anniversaries seem to be a thing let's just say that and most people will just go w/ it"

nice piece, al

p is a ... challenging intvw

actually he's not that bad, i retract

Whiney seemed to give it a semi-positive review in RS. wasn't too taken by the opening two tracks but admittedly that's as far as I got. will probably stream it later

using Prodigy's logic on the 20th anniversary thing, Chinese Democracy is celebrating its 16th anniversary (or possibly 20th, depending on where you set the starting line at) this year.

Enjoyed what I heard after a quick stream. Gonna get it.

I wound up getting it after all, changed my mind somewhat on the first two tracks when I heard them on better speakers lol

4 tracks in this is def a vast improvement over that "Black Cocaine" ep of a few years back

for sure

I dig the single/first track. Love the sorta wavy/gritty feel of the repeating synth line. Havoc's solid, and Prodigy is OK, but I love his delivery on the "i'm the worst demon you could ever ask for"

yeah, definitely got rid of the commercial trappings that were being hinted at on Black Cocaine...

beat's good enough that I don't need Prodigy to be perfect anymore. they were in town tonight and debated seeing em but dunno, they did way too many Blood Money and Amerikaz Nightmare tracks last time.

mack wilds is michael from the wire, wtf. also, cd version is only 13 tracks plus the bonus disk... WTF

feel like some ppl in this thread are questioning Prodigy's trendsetting >:(

i'm questioning the omission of four tracks (two produced by Havoc) for the cd version, which is like thirty minutes long.

hahaha: https://twitter.com/PRODIGYMOBBDEEP/status/454005765691293696

lol

lol, lord he's sensitive. he replied to me once when I made a crack about how nobody bought H.N.I.C. 3 although he was in better humor than this.

I think Greene's wrong though. I mean, obviously, this isn't a dent on their early classics; they aren't capable of generating iconic lines anymore, Prodigy is still blunted and detached, but I mean I find their rhyming effective and the production surprisingly warm. I'd put this in the 7-ish range.

In that review, Greene said Q-Tip raps on "Give Up the Goods." Is he talking about, like, an outtake verse on this reissue's unreleased tracks? Or did I just misread what he meant?

i was a little confused by the review, which appeared to of a reissue of the original 1995 album that's packaged along with the outtakes and the new album, afaik that's not the case at all?

definitely not, it's just the new album and outtakes unless there's a package that I was unaware of.

Yeah, there's nothing on Amazon or Discogs about a reissue of The Infamous. Super-weird that Pitchfork covered it as a reissue.

the news stories from multiple outlets in advance of now said it would be a reissue-plus-album-plus-outtakes

the cd available on amazon is 2-disc, just the new album and the outtakes, but if you go to the mp3-only format, it seems to have the original album thrown in as a third 'disc'

I got mine from Best Buy and it was the same. lol if the reissue was just them throwing in mp3s of the 1995 release in with the new album

j. is right though, Spin and PItchfork both broke it in January that The Infamous was being reissued.

all this proves to me is that Prodigy is as scatterbrained as ever.

I like the new album but their performance at the show I saw months ago was one of the laziest 'who gives a fuck' things ever. I left it early.

Tough to parse out to what extent this is scatterbrained, and to what extent it's willfully misleading people to get press for the new record

Also, don't know if this is linked upthread, but one of the prizes from the Mobb Deep crowdfunding site was a limited addition "Infamous" bike

http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/theinfamousmobbdeep/

Word rapidly going around that Prodigy has apparently passed on, per a posting from Nas

Prodigy of Mobb Deep has passed away at age 42. RIP to the legend. pic.twitter.com/Y3w6I9ap7I

— Complex Music (@ComplexMusic) June 20, 2017

holy shit

WOW oh no

pic.twitter.com/H8bINCq0Iq

— Hanif Abdurraqib (@NifMuhammad) June 20, 2017

Some details

http://www.okayplayer.com/news/prodigy-mobb-deep-dead-42.html

The group’s publicist issued a statement confirming the news stating:

“It is with extreme sadness and disbelief that we confirm the death of our dear friend Albert Johnson, better known to millions of fans as Prodigy of legendary NY rap duo Mobb Deep. Prodigy was hospitalized a few days ago in Vegas after a Mobb Deep performance for complications caused by a sickle cell anemia crisis. As most of his fans know, Prodigy battled the disease since birth. The exact causes of death have yet to be determined. We would like to thank everyone for respecting the family’s privacy at this time.”

:(

ugh only 42, so sad

all time great
rest in peace to the god

I'm goin' out blastin', takin' my enemies with me
And if not, they scarred, so they will never forget me
Lord forgive me the Hennesey got me not knowin' how to act
I'm fallin' and I can't turn back
Or maybe it's the words from my man Killa Black
That I can't say so it's left a untold fact, until my death
My goal's to stay alive
Survival of the fit only the strong survive

rest in peace, P. cot damn that sucks, another legend gone way too soon. knew he'd had sickle cell since childhood but damn.

Havoc's tweet was p heartbreaking and touching at the same time.

Aw, damn. One of the absolute greats.

go buy a prodigy album.
as time went by, out of all the nyc 90s rappers that mostly got by off like nostalgia shit and doing fairly tasteful work, maybe it was the knowledge that every day he woke up could be his last, the experience of his illness, going to jail, whatever-- he was an original, challenging artist. i think probably not many here checked out the bumpy johnson album, which is where he sorta steered off the radar and sounds like it was made in 1999 instead of 2012, probably prodigy at his lyrical best apart from hnic / mobb deep material. or albert einstein, four years ago, alchemist beats and a flow that's as far from what 2017 rap flow is like as possible, only occasionally maybe accidentally structured like a rap verse is conventionally structured, or rhymed or showing any sort of formal constraints, full of psychotic imagery, like weed smoke floating through a gunshot in the back window of a car. or the hegelian dialectic from this year, which was disappointing as i expected an album promoted on infowars and called the hegelian dialect to be less chilled out conventional rappin than it was but it has its moments and i like introspective prodigy.

https://streetknowledge.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/prodigy.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbaDNpjSJ1Q

i never went back to 'murda muzik', even though it was next up after 'hell on earth', b/c i had bought the disappointing 'infamy' on release, checked out probably until 'hold you down' - but listening to it today, it's good. kind of surprising to hear 8ball on a mobb deep record.

prodigy's delivery has got to be one of the all time artistic coups in rap history. there's nothing at all that you'd say is bad about it, the way some limited rapper might sound stiff or mechanical or whatever - but it's not at all inviting, he swings about the least of any new york rapper from his era, he's deliberately monotone and jams everything together to mute the rhetorical edges of his utterances, the contours of his clauses, he conceals a lot of what he has in the way of punchlines and wordplay or even the internal rhymes that new york rappers are so dependent on - but he knows the secret of making you listen.

'those that listen, get addicted to my diction'

oh jesus i only just read this

RIP

now i want to buy his cookbook

https://www.amazon.com/Commissary-Kitchen-Infamous-Prison-Cookbook/dp/0997146230

RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZDu5rTJWM

my fav off MM ^^ outside of Quiet Storm. organ squeals always gonna get me hyped.

good posts j and dylann

kind of surprising to hear 8ball on a mobb deep record.

― j., Tuesday, June 20, 2017 10:25 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

suave house production suited mobb deep just fine.

shit!

http://nahright.com/2009/05/08/prodigys-open-letter-to-esquires-stephen-marche/

"Outta Control" was #1 on my decade-end list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjzSEdKNIsw

yessss

thats great, whats it from?

http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2017/06/prodigy-dj-whoo-kid-hnic-pt-1-mixtape/

:)

http://www.stereogum.com/1948494/atlanta-newscasters-sneakily-pay-tribute-to-mobb-deeps-prodigy/video/

thx xp

pac's bars on 'hit em up' particularly ugly rn

the rap tribute i prefer is from 'still not a player':

I lay your head on my chest, come feel my heartbeat
We can park the Jeep, pump Mobb Deep, and just spark the leaf

if that's not a description of heaven i don't know what is

prodigy on Pac:

2PAC pac grew on me, i really started liking pac when he made i get around and then really when he made hail mary and when he was going at mobb deep, i was feelin the fire in his heart. pac wasnt afraid to speak his mind about anything and the beats he chose were dope, i went back and bought alot of his older shit and had a new respect for him later on. people say "how you gonna like pac when he dissed you?" but i dont make my decisions off of what people say, i move on my own instincts. dont care if pac said shit bout my sickle cell, i still like 2pac regardless. so whoever disagrees, so what................................................................

his interviews and writings are gold mines

Enjoyed this Song Exploder episode about "Shook Ones Pt. II" with Havoc:
https://songexploder.net/mobb-deep