How Mobb Deep changed the hip-hop landscape with ‘The Infamous’
“I’m only 19,” raps Prodigy on the Mobb Deep hit ‘Shook Ones (Part II),’ “but my mind is old.” If there is a single line that best captures the mood of The Infamous, the duo’s legendary second album released in 1995, then it is, arguably, that one.
Mobb Deep’s music dealt in violence and darkness, and, between them, Prodigy and his partner Havoc deliver plenty of lines throughout The Infamous that plainly express the challenges of life as young Black men growing up in a fiercely racist society.
But none do it with the grace and subtlety of “I’m only 19, but my mind is old.” Prodigy doesn’t invoke blood and gunshots here, but, instead, he simply reveals himself to be a young man forced by the world around him to grow up too soon. There is a terrible sadness in that.
Both Prodigy and Havoc knew what it meant to suffer. Growing up surrounded by violence and poverty, life was tough from the get-go, but sadly, this is a regular way of living for huge swathes of America. However, in Prodigy’s case specifically, things were a little tougher as he lived with sickle cell disease, which, tellingly, is a condition that particularly affects people of Black African and Caribbean heritage. There were, then, social forces beyond Prodigy and Havoc’s control that unfairly dictated the course of their lives. Their genius was to capture that fact in their music.
Not long before he died in 2017, Prodigy spoke to Vice about the “I’m only 19” line. “What I meant was, all the stuff that I’d been through in my life — dealing with sickle cell and just dealing with life period. It forces you to grow up quickly,” he said. “I was forced to deal with the pain and hanging in the streets, and wilding out. It makes you think like an adult and make adult decisions and be way more mature than your actual age. We’d been through so much. At 19, I felt like I was 40.”
Perhaps that is what marks The Infamous as unique — lots of rappers, by this point in time, had managed to talk about the violence that young Black men in America are so frequently exposed to, but not many touched on the melancholy of that. Even though The Infamous is sinister and horrifying at times — “There’s a war goin’ on outside, no man is safe from” — the quiet tragedy of young lives shaped and twisted by a cruel social system is perhaps its most enduring feature.
“We talked about our real life,” Prodigy told Vice, reflecting on The Infamous and its legacy. “The shit that was really happening: the dramas, the ups and downs, the positives and negatives. Let’s try to put a real message in our music. What’s happening in our neighbourhood. Let’s give our perspective on things.”
Their perspective necessarily meant parsing through some terrible subjects. “A lot of my homeboys’ moms or family members were on crack,” Havoc explained, speaking during that same conversation with Vice. “A lot of kids my age were getting arrested for small drug crimes. There were shootouts and shit like that.”
These were experiences that shaped Havoc and Prodigy, and, in turn, shaped The Infamous. This is an album that reveals, plainly, some of the awful things that young Black people are forced to live through in America, and it emphasises the tragedy of that. But it also offers hope. Mobb Deep, by the very act of producing this album, demonstrate that beauty and poetry are always within reach. Amid the darkness, their record is a streak of light.