Mobb Deep: The Icaruses of Hardcore Hip-Hop

When I was cleaning my house up for a date, I reorganized my tape crate as the tapes had begun to spread across the floor of my living room. Since more were out than in, I dumped the whole crate out and started over again. In the process of doing this, I found a copy of Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, which is an album that I swapped for in middle school but was scratched up and, therefore, unplayable. Up until finding this tape, I thought that Mobb Deep was just some dudes that were really weak, considering how Jay-Z whipped their asses badly on The Blueprint. I also remembered them from the song that they did called “Quiet Storm.”

Neither of these things were really all that impressive in the grand scheme of things honestly. “Quiet Storm” is a good song, but it’s whatever. As well, many rappers have been destroyed on album to the remembrance of no one (Canibus, anyone?), so getting put out on wax isn’t that much of a deal. The result of these two things is that Mobb Deep flew past my radar until this past couple of weeks.

Working in my kitchen, I popped The Infamous into my kitchen boom box and hit play. From the first hit on “The Start of the Ending,” this album establishes itself forcefully. Over a homemade beat, Havoc and Prodigy spit crazy verses about living and working in the streets, full of imagery and no-nonsense descriptions about what they see day in and day out. There is no sense of fetishizing the streets. They don’t think that they are glamorous or anything. They think that the streets are hard and say so. This spirit continues over the course of the album as the duo tell stories about being set-up, having a friend sent down the river, and bucking on fakers.

Before you say that this is every rap album, this album came out in 1995, for one. This wasn’t every rap album back then. Secondly, Havoc and Prodigy aren’t your average hardcore rappers. These two MCs have extensive vocabularies and a solid grasp of metaphor and simile. Rather than just talking about what’s in the streets, Mobb Deep puts you on the streets in its paranoia and danger. As stupid as this might sound, there are certainly times on this album where the scene can be seen taking place. An example of this is “Temperature’s Rising,” a song which is suppose to be a phone message to a friend who’s under the cop’s blue eye. Not only can you visualize the phone call taking place, the listener can see all of the stuff that is happening on the street like cops snapping photos from opposite towers. These skills, in my mind, put Havoc & Prodigy at the top level of rap’s storytellers with B.I.G. and Slick Rick. Furthermore, they have excellent cadence and are actually pleasant to listen to on a vocal level, even though they are telling stories about killing dudes for chains.

Adding to the quality of the verbals, the production from Havoc and Q-Tip (yes, that Q-Tip) is excellent. It’s very dark, full of muted bass hits and distorted pianos. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of trip-hop production in its sparseness and the desolation that it creates. The production creates a world outside of which nothing exist. This can be best summarized in a starting line from Portishead: “Please could you stay a while to share my grief?” Mobb Deep does not ask that you stay; they demand it. All you can see is the world of Queensbridge and its poverty, grief, depression, and violence. I think this is best seen in the production on “Cradle to the Grave,” which is a perfect example of the claustrophobic nature of Mobb Deep’s world.

Overall, this album made me wonder about two different things. The first is that The Infamous deserves its place as one of the best rap albums of all-time. After listening to this album end-to-end well over 10 times in the past 10 days, I’m confident that this is certainly a remarkable piece of music to come from two young rappers in Queens. Although it’s over an hour, it certainly does not seem like it is that long. The second, more important thing is what happens to Queens rappers? They all do amazing things, but seem to fade away after an album or two. Let’s look at the facts. Nas did Illmatic. MC Shan was really good. The Juice Crew, as a whole, was super talented and are still referenced as making one of the greatest posse tracks ever in “The Symphony.”

Mobb Deep adds to this long lineage as well with The Infamous, but also because they are no longer a relevant rap group. This is sad because this lack of relevance means that a lot of people are going to sleep, like I did, on a really good rap album, one that should please the car banger, the backpacker, and porch dweller equally.

To come back to the title of this post, maybe Mobb Deep did fly too close to the sun, thinking they could take down one of the true GOATs in Jay-Z. But, just like Icarus, they must be respected because they are competent and super clever, developing their own aesthetic and presenting it to the gratefulness of hip-hop heads all over this blue planet. They had the daring to step out on their own and do their thing. They might have failed overall in the legacy discussion, but we can revel in The Infamous, Mobb Deep’s moment of true artistic genius and one of hip-hop’s truest expressions of creativity.