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Prodigy’s favourite albums of the 1980s

Tue 4 November 2025 21:00, UK

Mobb Deep emcee Prodigy’s sound was unmistakable: hardcore, eloquent and profoundly dark. But his music taste was far more expansive than that, which is probably a legacy of his family. His mother was a member of the ’60s girl group The Crystals, while his grandfather was a legendary jazz saxophonist and clarinettist who worked with, among others, Billie Holiday, Quincy Jones and Dizzy Gillespie. Music was a part of who Prodigy was, and he took inspiration from many different sources.

Prodigy was born in 1974, so, naturally, the 1980s were a big decade for him, at least in terms of the development of his musical tastes. A lot of the era’s albums stuck with him for the rest of his life, as he revealed to Complex in a conversation about his favourite albums in 2012. Of Marvin Gaye’s Midnight Lover, released in 1982, Prodigy said, “That one was special to me because my father used to always play that album nonstop, too. He had the fucking ‘Sexual Healing’ on his answering machine, the whole thing. He used to sit there and school me about Marvin Gaye. Like, ‘Yo, listen to his voice, listen to the words he saying.’”

Marvin Gaye, despite his artistic height arguably coming during the ’70s, was a huge influence on so many artists who grew up in the ’80s, but Michael Jackson was the true star of the decade. Thriller came out in 1982, and Prodigy was among the many people to be swept up by it. But, unlike most people, Prodigy actually had a loose familial connection to the album.

“Michael Jackson was a big influence to me because my grandmother had a dance school in Jamaica, Queens, and she raised a lot of choreographers,” he explained. “A couple of the choreographers, they were the ones that created the choreography for ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller.’ That was close to home for me. I used to want to be Michael Jackson when I was little and then my family had connections with him. That album was big for me. As a little kid, I was doing the moonwalk, all that.”

The ’80s was the decade in which hip-hop really began to cohere, so the developments within the genre were obviously a huge influence on a young aspiring rapper such as Prodigy. Run DMC’s self-titled debut album was a big one for him, as was Too $hort’s 1987 record Born To Mack. But Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid in Full really fed into Prodigy’s burgeoning style, with one track in particular blowing him away.

“‘Check Out My Melody’ was one of the illest songs ever… That’s the best song in rap music of all time,” he claimed. “The beat and how he’s rhyming. It’s the beat, it’s his rhymes, but it’s also the EQ on his vocals. It sounds like he’s in a park rhyming. It’s like a mic with a little echo on it so it sounds like some real original hip-hop shit.”

Prodigy was also a big fan of MC Lyte’s debut Lyte as a Rock and Biz Markie’s The Biz Never Sleeps, but NWA were real stand-outs. Describing the group as the “Wu-Tang of the West Coast,” Prodigy recognised the degree to which they had managed to successfully incorporate street culture into their music on Straight Outta Compton—and he and his fellow East Coast hip-hop fans admired them for it.

“They brought the whole street mentality, the gang culture to hip-hop,” he said. “We didn’t know it was that serious out there until they came out with ‘Fuck tha Police.’ We learned about the whole gangster culture that was out there… That made New York turn it up a little bit… When we saw that, they got the machine guns in the videos, running from the police, cursing out the police in the video. Yeah. That made n—as in New York step they shit up a little bit on the street level.”