Mobb deep cuts: 13 Prodigy tracks that showcase his raw power For those who wish to dig even deeper, I highly recommend DJ Mister Cee’s Best of Mobb Deep mixtape, which focuses on the era immediately preceding the one covered here. With this in mind, the following selection is meant as an introduction to Prodigy’s writing outside the confines of commercial rap stardom – looking past his singles and best known albums with Mobb Deep. II’, ‘Quiet Storm’ and ‘Keep it Thoro’ will forever go down as rap anthems, this pain is best represented on cuts lurking immediately below the surface – album tracks and mixtape cuts that don’t usually make mix-show rotation on your favorite rap oldies station. Quietly, this style has had a major impact on underground New York hip-hop: you can see shades of Prodigy’s hard boiled noir in the work of Roc Marciano, Ka, and anyone whose bars seethe with subtle rage instead of boiling over into clamor. Like Snoop Dogg, Prodigy learned to temper the barrage of words of his early rhymes into a more economical style, leaning into the cracks in his voice, making sure listeners focused on every threat of violence or piece of advice he dispensed. Though slowed down by beef Jay-Z and Nas and hobbled by an ill-fitting alliance with 50 Cent and a stretch in jail, Prodigy’s latter-day oeuvre remains one of rap’s most underrated. And no conversation debating the best rapper out was complete without someone advocating for Mobb Deep’s chief lyricist. Between Hell on Earth and the closing of Loud Records in 2002, you couldn’t pick up a mixtape, compilation or many rap solo albums without hearing P’s laconic drawl on a verse or two. This is where the best of Prodigy’s non-LP output is found: beyond Mobb Deep’s eight official albums and Prodigy’s own seven solo releases, there exists an entire shadow catalogue of mixtape exclusives, guest verses, alternate versions denied sample clearance and unreleased bootlegs. It’s impossible to imagine 21 Savage’s style being quite as cold and detached without Prodigy doing it first.Įxiting the immediate trauma of street life, Prodigy’s writing only became more confident, taking on the swaggering quality of New York’s late ‘90s boom without ever losing the grim edge that made his words so distinctive. This style, epitomized by Mobb’s classics The Infamous and Hell on Earth, marks Prodigy’s first great peak, the moment where he synthesized Rakim’s cool monotone and Kool G Rap’s vivid crime tales into an entirely new compound. To trace Prodigy’s career from beginning to end is to start with a teenage rapper taking Hillary Clinton’s infamous (pun intended) super-predator stereotype and spitting it back in the establishment’s face: embodying the caricature of the nihilistic, gun-toting black teenager and imbuing it with pathos, intelligence and a novelist’s eye for detail.
He warned: “do not try to inflict more pain on me and those I love, for I shall strike first, and I promise overkill.” Prodigy didn’t just want to win – he wanted to annihilate and maim his opponents. Even when writing battle raps, a huge part of P’s catalog followed unspoken rules to establish the writer’s rap supremacy. When he indicted the system in his latter-day work, he was searching for the root cause behind the pain of contemporary African-American life. When he bragged about his riches and sexual conquests, that was an escape from pain. Whether illustrating his everyday mental and physical suffering or promising to inflict a terminal dose of violence upon his enemies, P’s constant was pain, and it colored every topic he approached. Son Raw files through P’s litany of mixtapes, guest appearances and remixes to pull out the rapper’s very best deep cuts.įew songwriters dealt with pain as eloquently as Mobb Deep’s Prodigy. He was only 42 years old, and leaves behind a vast catalogue of music, most of it unfairly underrated. Legendary Queensbridge rapper Prodigy, best known as one half of influential East Coast duo Mobb Deep, died on June 20, 2017.
0 kommentar(er)
