Requiem for Prodigy
- blogpublish21
- Nov 22, 2018
- 3 min read
“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.”
Of course, this is not an article about Electronic group “The Prodigy, but to the delight of all rapper fans, it’s about rapper Albert Johnson, known as Prodigy and half of the duo Mobb Deep.
How come we start to remember and recall one person’s life only when he passed away? This exactly happened when I read about tragic death of one of the most influential rapper Albert Johnson, better known as Prodigy. Yes, I felt guilty as charged. The news said that on June 20th, one half of Mobb Deep, the rapper born Albert Johnson but known to the world as Prodigy, died in Las Vegas at the age of 42. And that sad news all of the sudden brought all the memories concerning Prodigy and his work, so I really had to post this short article!
Prodigy and Havoc, formed Mobb Deep before they were old enough to drive, and brought an unprecedented sort of psychological verisimilitude to hardcore rap, crafting music that was cinematic in its ambition, its scope, and vividness of feeling. Prodigy was responsible for many—though certainly not all—of the duo’s most memorable verses. Mobb Deep’s catalog boasts a wealth of greatness, but anyone looking for a diving-in point should start with 1995’s The Infamous, the group’s sophomore LP, which is one of the best albums of the 1990s and one of the very best hip-hop albums ever made.
This Mobb Deep Infamous album is a classic hip-hop album. There are just a few songs that I do not care for but the majority of the songs that I do like. I personally would gave this album deservingly five stars because of the authentic raw lyrics that these rappers are rapping about on this particular album. Great credit to this album is because of the mixture of hip hop beat and gangster rhyming give the two-duets a kind of chemistry that you can dance and listen over and over again. It’s an album that you can never tired of hearing because it not disposable music.
Assembled from creaky and austere jazz and R&B samples dropped over bludgeoning drum loops, Mobb Deep’s music was undeniably violent, although in a vastly different mode than the SoCal gangsta rap of the early 90’s. In Prodigy’s lyrics violence existed in a perpetual dialectic, the line between defense and aggression constantly shifting and straddled. Mobb Deep’s singular triumph was their ability to make songs about violence that doubled as songs about fear, a groundbreaking concession for a hardcore rap group to make. Fear is also the subject of The Infamous’ most famous track, “Shook Ones Pt. II,” which is also the most famous track in Mobb Deep’s catalogue. “Shook Ones Pt. II” is a perfect recording, and for my money the most compelling and sophisticated exploration of fear in all of hip-hop, if not all of music.
Mobb Deep made a lot of excellent music after The Infamous—the follow-up, 1996’s Hell on Earth, is nearly as great as its predecessor, while 1999’s Murda Muzik became their first (and only) platinum album, and in 2014 the group released The Infamous Mobb Deep, a double album made up of one disc of new material and one disc of outtakes and unreleased tracks from the original Infamous sessions. This is what crossed my mind when I learned of Prodigy's tragically sudden death at 42 years old. Yes, much has changed since Prodigy began as a fresh-faced youth in the 1990s, but the violence and poverty and hopelessness in America's inner cities remain the same. But rap and hip hop without Prodigy would never ever be the same!
R.I.P Albert.
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