It feels reductive to call Mobb Deep’s greatest album a do-over, but that’s exactly what it was.
Months after unloading their maiden effort, Juvenile Hell, Prodigy and Havoc found themselves without a record deal; the LP had failed to make a commercial impression, so Island cut them loose. Harsh as it was, all it takes is a quick listen to see why. The rapping potential was there. But a distinctive sound wasn’t. Tracks like “Peer Pressure” were didactic in a way that undermined the grim fatalism of their later works, and raunchier fare like “Hit It From the Back” lacked the sleazy finesse of the best thug passion records. The hooks were abrupt shouts that could be found on songs from just about any other group that might say, “here we go, yo!” Ditto for the beats, which largely played out like worse versions of “Flow Joe.” “We were still figuring out what Mobb Deep is,” Prodigy would tell Mass Appeal 24 years later. Thirty years ago today, they found it.
Photo of Mobb Deep.
Photo by Des Willie/Redferns.
Released on April 25, 1995, The Infamousreintroduced the Mobb as twin towers of Queensbridge terror — a duo that was more grizzled than juvenile. More ruthless than anything resembling remorseful. Spurred by Nas’ Illmatic, the album saw Prodigy and Havoc abandon all traces of ambivalence on their way to developing a sound that was uncompromisingly menacing, yet human. Sonically and thematically, they gave into the darkness. And the darkness gave right back.
Here, Hav and P present the danger of Queensbridge as an immutable force rather than a traffic cone that an after-school special — or a song like “Peer Pressure” — could enable you to avoid. Their piercing gaze was as unsparing as it was comprehensive. The opener, “The Start of Your Ending (41st Side),” is exactly what it sounds like, with Hav transmuting a sumptuous Dee Dee Warwick sample into something unholy; sentimental keyboard became eerily glum project buildings where inhabitants would shout at out-of-towners. Its source material is titled “Lovers Chant,” but in the hands of Prodigy and Havoc, it became a villain’s anthem. It’s a spiritual throughline for an album defined by either the beginning, ending, or aftermath of treachery.
Havoc and Prodigy revel in that sort of wickedness for “Give Up the Goods (Just a Step),” a nocturnal, yet exhilarating track about robbery, drug dealing, and shooting first and leaving no questions. Produced by Q-Tip, who had actually discovered the Mobb a few years prior, the track breathed life into the thrill of the chase, the hustle and pre-emptive airstrikes.
Mobb Deep during Mobb Deep Recording Session at Battery Studios in New York City, New York, United States.
Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage.
Harrowing and claustrophobic, The Infamous is just as much about physical threats as the psychological omnipresence of impending danger. It’s strewn across Hav production, seemingly designed for dreary days and pitch-black midnights. The bars give human form to these atmospheres where, in even the most innocent moments, tragedy is always around the corner. Exhibit A: “Trife Life.” Spinning across aqueous piano keys and spurts of foggy horns that ring through like the Jaws theme, the two conjure two sides of separate romantic rendezvous: Prodigy makes preparations for a suspicious hook-up with a girl that might just turn a date night into a premature funeral. Meanwhile, Havoc is scheming on someone who’s just traveled to Queensbridge for their own date. Prodigy’s story is a tale of someone being paranoid; Havoc’s is evidence of why you have to be. At the end of the track, Hav laments this push-pull existence with blunt clarity: “Pulling the trigger when the drama appears / ‘Cause a nigga worse enemy is fear.”
On tracks like “Eye for an Eye,” fear and anxiety morph into blood lust for retribution. Coasting over a beat that sounds like Havoc took his MPC for a vacation in a dungeon, he, Prodigy, Raekwon the Chef and Nas unspool a tapestry of violence and drug dealer lore. For his part, Nas, debuting his Nas Escobar persona, uses dense imagism to paint a portrait of the mania that accompanies life as a kingpin; or just a project dweller taking aim at forces too big for a bullet to destroy: “Shoot at the clouds, feels like the Holy Beast is watchin’ us / Mad man, my sanity is goin’ like a hourglass / Gun inside my bad hand I sliced tryna bag grams.” Chanting over a tea kettle whistle that sounds like simmering despair, P affirms a cycle of murder and vengeance as eternal as nature: “As time goes by, an eye for an eye / We in this together, son, your beef is mine / So long as the sun shines to light up the sky / We in this together, son, your beef is mine.”
If “Eye for an Eye” was made to soundtrack Rikers Island, “Shook Ones, Pt. II” was made for Mad Max. It’s a track that turns a Herbie Hancock sample into a desolate wasteland where survival is the only law. Here, Prodigy blends sensory details with do-or-die determination for some of the most haunting — and frankly, gangsta — lyrics in American history: “Meanwhile back in Queens the realness and foundation / If I die, I couldn’t choose a better location / When the slugs penetrate, you feel a burning sensation / Getting closer to God in a tight situation.” As he notes himself, he was only 19 when he wrote those lyrics. Havoc was around the same age when he made the beat.
While Prodigy will always be the more renowned member of Mobb Deep, the two are equal halves of a transcendent whole; fraternal creative twins with different, but similarly seismic gifts that defined an era of hip-hop. With more innovative sonic structures and more nuanced characterizations, they successfully transitioned from being talented juveniles to… well, the Infamous. Their coalescence rings off loudly on tracks like, “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” and really, the whole album. Perhaps never stronger than on “Survival of the Fittest.”
A genius flip of Al Cohn and The Barry Harris Trio’s “Sky Lark,” the bassline is a prelude to something wicked. Layered with warped strings, the commencement encroaches like a tumbling, troubling realization, like the moment a monster steps forth from the darkness to swallow you whole. Lurking around the ominous, Havoc-produced instrumental, Prodigy lets loose a stark declaration of impending doom: “There’s a war going on outside, no one is safe from / You can run, but you can’t hide forever / From these streets that we done took — you walking with your head down scared to look.” But at this point, Hav and P weren’t scared to look: they saw the soul of Queensbridge and stared right through it.
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