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.
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