In the following weeks we dare to look back on musikexpress.de. Though tastes differ, here are ten groundbreaking hip-hop albums from the ’90s. Mobb Deep kicks off our series with THE INFAMOUS from 1995.
sins of youth
With their debut album JUVENILE HELL in 1993, Mobb Deep almost gambled away their chance for a successful music career. At first the record missed the charts. Then she released the label. Members Havoc (real name Kejuan Muchita) and Prodigy (real name Albert Johnson) were just 17 years old when the album was recorded.
Two years earlier, The Source reported on Mobb Deep in their Unsigned Hype column. At this point, Prodigy and Havoc took the marketing into their own hands: they appeared in talent competitions and spent hours distributing their demos to radio stations in and around New York. As a result, the duo found traction outside of their Queensbridge, New York neighborhood and were rewarded with a label deal at 4th & B’way.
Everything back to zero
JUVENILE HELL’s style was reminiscent of the crew’s later releases. Mobb Deep already rapped skillfully about violence, drug use and crime. However, it still seemed artificial. In addition, the album lacked a red line and the ultimate consequence in enforcement. JUVENILE HELL made no lasting impression, flopping and Mobb Deep had to reorient themselves.
Prodigy later commented on the post-Juvenile Hell quest for Mobb Deep’s identity: “We regrouped, got in the booth and started really focusing on the production – that came first. How should our sound be? How does the lifestyle we lived, the lifestyle we grew up in, become part of it? The beats came out naturally as dark, spooky sounding shit, so the lyrics were easy after that.”
The Road to The Infamous
Rather than give up or go commercial, Mobb Deep locked themselves in the home studio at Havoc’s mum’s house and relentlessly reworked their creative recipe. The despair of early failure gave way to a backdrop of pointed lyrical frenzy over dirty, sample-based beats. What followed was their second album THE INFAMOUS, released on April 25, 1995 on Loud Records.
In an interview with XXL Magazine, Prodigy spoke about the difficult circumstances of his school days that inspired him during the writing process of THE INFAMOUS:
“When I started making some money in the late ’80s, I started going to Jamaica Ave, Canal Street, getting big chains, and wearing them to school,” he said. With the cash came trouble: “(Slick)Rick had to kill his cousin. When I saw that, I thought, ‘Whoa, I’m done’. The N***** will try to screw me out of my shit. Also, I went to school with all the Brooklyn n******s. We were on the train with gang members from the Decepticons and the Lo-Lifes. These N***** slashed N***** every day. Every day when I came to school someone had a new wound on their face. I thought to myself, ‘They’re not going to do this to me.’ I bought a small gun, and that’s where lyrics like this come from.”
This is matched by some of the album’s most quoted lines from the track “Survival of the Fittest. They conveyed that heated mood in Prodigy’s neighborhood:
“There’s a war goin’ on outside no man is safe from. You could run, but you can’t hide forever. From these streets that we done took. You walkin’ with your head down, scared to look. You shook, ’cause ain’t no such things as halfway crooks. They never around when the beef cooks in my part of town. It’s similar to Vietnam.”