The story behind Mobb Deep’s ‘Eye for a Eye (Your Beef Is Mines)’
With their second album, 1995’s The Infamous, Mobb Deep helped to secure a renaissance of East Coast hip-hop, following some difficult years for the scene. The sheer quality of the record proved that New York could still produce some great music, but the duo didn’t do it alone.
A couple of members of the Wu-Tang Clan, who were themselves contributing to the East Coast’s revival around this time, appeared on The Infamous, with Ghostface Killah and Raekwon showing up for some verses. Both of them appeared on the track ‘Right Back at You,’ while Raekwon rapped on ‘Eye for a Eye (Your Beef Is Mines)’ alongside another New Yorker in the form of Nas.
Mobb Deep, Raekwon and Nas is a legendary line-up for a track, but, as Havoc explained to the Red Bull Music Academy for a feature in 2012, the collaboration came about with relative ease. “It was a lot of good energy going on at that time,” he said. “We was labelmates with the Wu-Tang, and we clicked with Raekwon and them really good, like we really gelled with them. And Nas is from around the way.”
Havoc admitted that he didn’t even fully remember how the arrangements for this legendary collab were made, but Prodigy seemed to have a better idea of how things played out. According to him, the pair found themselves getting high with Rae and Ghost on Staten Island one day.
“That night I remember Raekwon, he drove us back to Queensbridge, cuz we had took the ferry out there,” Prodigy recalled. “And on the ride back, he was like, ‘Yo, what’s up with that dude Nas, man? We trying to do a song with him, I want to put him on my solo album.’ And I was like, ‘Yo, we gonna hook that up.’”
The following day, Prodigy and Havoc reached out to Nas. It was “through that conversation we ended up just all doing the song together,” according to Prodigy.
Once they actually got together in the studio, the process moved quickly. As Prodigy explained in another interview with Complex in 2011, “We actually made that beat and everything right there in the studio. We was in there for like four hours and knocked that whole song out. Back then it wasn’t no sequence, you just did what you felt like doing. You could make the song as long as you wanted to make it. It was just creating.”
The atmosphere, as Havoc remembered it, was easy-going. “In the studio, we were smoking mad weed, drinking mad liquor, and talking shit,” he said. “We were definitely drinking Seagrams Gin, Hennessy, and E&J. It was priceless. Everybody just had mad love for one another.”
Raekwon could confirm that part. “They called me in and the beat was already playing,” he told Complex. “I think Nas was in the booth already doing [his verse]. We was just getting high, drinking a lot of Hennessy, just popping shit about how we were going to take over the game. And next thing you know, when they threw their verses down, I just came in and put the cherry on top. I did my shit right on the spot.”