Son Raw gets the money, long time no cash.
Influence is a funny thing in hip-hop. Trends that seem inescapable suddenly vanish, while underground sleeper hits snowball into fracture points that forever change rap. Countless fantastic albums feel special precisely because the mainstream could never iterate on their innovations.
Then there’s the half-baked memes that are elevated by the listening public, sparking entire eras. Soulja Boy scored a #1 hit off of MySpace, but was “Crank That” more influential than Madvillainy’s “Accordion?” What’s more important: a meteoric pop moment or a slow-burn cultural impact? There are records that somehow achieve both, rare generational projects that shift hip-hop’s music and language so thoroughly that decades later, we’re still living in the world shaped by their innovations. Enter Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, which not only permanently transformed hip-hop upon its release, but has also revealed itself to be one of the genre’s longest lasting influences, shaping the lyrics and sonic signifiers of artists as wide ranging as Roc Marciano to Unknown T, 20 years on.
The Infamous stands upon the shoulders of giants from NWA to Schooly D to Tragedy and Kool G Rap. By its 1995 release, West Coast gangsta rap was well within its imperial phase, dominating sales charts from a Californian throne. In tandem, the East Coast’s counterpoint–dustier, jazzier and sometimes darker–was already ascendent. We had classic debuts by Black Moon, Wu-Tang and Nas. Still, a betting man probably wouldn’t have guessed that the teenage duo of Havoc and Prodigy would be the ones to define the bleeding edge of hardcore hip-hop. Their debut, Juvenile Hell, had its moments and some A-list beatmaker support, but it came and went as just another roughneck debut trying to sound grimy.
Credit due to Loud Records for seeing the vision and signing the duo after they bricked and got dropped by 4th and Broadway. Mobb Deep had taken the loss in stride, retreating to the Queensbridge Projects with a renewed focus and a determination to make the most of their second chance. Like their labelmates Wu-Tang, the Mobb began synthesizing the music they grew up on to the environment they grew up in, resulting in something darker, more violent, more idiosyncratic,and wholly unique.
Whereas Marley Marl’s frantic crack era stabs dominated their childhood favorites, Havoc now placed them over minor key jazz; it was the Black music canon reimagined as the soundtrack to a slasher flick. Simultaneously, Prodigy made a quantum leap as an emcee, matching Nas’ multi-syllabic evolution with his own languid modernity: colder, more deadpan, and always setting things off with a killer opening line. Encouraged and supported by A&Rs Matty C and Schott Free, Mobb Deep landed upon a new platonic ideal for hip-hop, one that internalized gangsta rap’s anger and subsumed its heat into icy menace.
Their beats zoomed in on awkward moments nestled between the funk of the records they sampled, identifying tiny moments of melancholy and placing them under percussion straight from the depths of hell. The sons of NWA may have been effortlessly cool over the pneumatic bounce they jacked from Brother George, but Queensbridge now announced itself as downright frozen, a Tartarus where feral youths emerged from the shadows to stab unwary passersby in the face with their own nose bones. Forget street life, record buyers were taken on a guided tour through the depths of Hades, AKA the 41st Side, with Hav and P as their boatmen across the river Styx.
Impeccably structured, the album works by guiding the listener on a tour of this hellscape. The Infamous’ first third holds some of the album’s most downright haunting moments. Compared to every other crew, The Mobb announced itself as harder, deadlier, and completely unconcerned with showbiz theatrics. Even when sparring with Nas and Rae, the effect is more seance than cypher, as Prodigy makes blood oaths for as long as the sun shines and his QB compatriot invokes the apocalypse. It’s a flawless opening sequence; you can practically see the structure of a thousand NYC mixtapes being born in real time.
From there, The Infamous’ middle section takes a sonic turn towards the light. This was Mobb Deep’s secret weapon: their lyrics were so rough and so violent, that it gave them the leisure to rhyme over just about anything while still sounding like the baddest group out there. The results are stunning: “Give Up The Goods (Just Step)” is a meditation on stick up kids that achieves an almost cosmic significance over so delicate an R&B loop, while “Temperature’s Rising” and “Up North Trip” transform being on the run and jail trips from social injustice to Greek tragedy, as the Mobb trust jazzy beats and the album’s sole R&B hook to offset the scenarios they’re rhyming about–a sonic moment of respite in between the murda muzik.
Mobb Deep developed a new form of expression, a nihilism that eschewed the brightness of G-Funk and the sensory overload of sampledelica to instead zero in on the darkness and melancholy hidden away across the dim, unlit corners of the Black musical canon. In Havoc’s hands, Civil Rights generation favorites like Dee Dee Warwick, Al Green, Quincy Jones and The Spinners were reimagined as a haunted chorus of shades, moaning seductively of violent promises, their optimism drained and their corporal bodies lifeless. Plenty of producers were mining jazz and a daring few were already finding loops in darker, more experimental fare, but turning auntie favorites into the soundtrack to Gen X disillusionment was high art: Quentin Tarantino’s cinema as executed musically by two guys who couldn’t legally walk into a bar.
To achieve this, the duo found the perfect partner in A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip. Tip wasn’t yet fully recognized as the musical visionary behind Tribe, having obfuscated his substantial musical contributions for the benefit of group solidarity, a move he’d soon repeat with The Ummah. Similarly, his three beats on The Infamous are credited to The Abstract. Beyond making sure the drums hit right, it’s easy to imagine that Tip’s most significant contribution was encouraging Mobb Deep to trust themselves and their instincts, insisting that what they were creating was dope and would make an impact, no matter how alien and different it sounded next to your average rap hit.
The album’s final third plunges listeners once more into the darkness, with everything building up to The Infamous’ penultimate track and defining anthem. Thirty years removed from its release, we’ve all heard the story behind “Shook Ones Pt. 2”: how Havoc didn’t even want to bother saving the beat until his crew insisted he was bugging, how the piano sample remained undiscovered for decades until internet sleuths figured out it’s a down-pitched Herbie Hancock phrase, and how the song became not only an instant hit, but a shorthand for all that was righteous and uncompromised in mid-90s New York hip-hop. Even B Rabbit drew for it when he needed to win a highly stylized cinematic rap battle.
Nevertheless, it’s worth emphasizing just how crazy that beat is. Mid-90s hip-hop was a fount of innovation thanks to the genre’s creative momentum and the emergence of more powerful samplers and equipment, but nothing hit like “Shook Ones,” because nothing really needed to: there were still plenty of untouched loops to crib off of, and even the genre’s most creative producers were filtering jazz to creating dub basslines, making sonic collages a la Bomb Squad or incorporating live instruments into the mix. “Shook Ones” is part of that tradition, but that piano loop is alchemical science of the highest order: two tiny sonic fragments pitched down to different intervals to create something entirely new. Producers searched for it high and low for decades to no avail because it wasn’t a loop until a 20-year-old Havoc fucked around with it.
All Prodigy could do was match that unfuckwitable energy, setting things off with the most threatening statement of intent rap had ever heard, a verse where every line has been since scratched for a hook, a mission statement for every underweight kid about to kick the ass of a much bigger opponent. “Shook Ones” is a touch of fire from the Gods that transformed two post-adolescents into grim reapers haunting the streets of Queens. No matter that it landed 10 years after Run DMC and LL Cool J–the song retroactively defined real hip-hop, forever shifting the rap’s nostalgia complex 10 years forward, unintentionally rewriting its predecessors as prelude. It still bangs.
The Infamous wouldn’t sound alien for very long, going Gold shortly after release, a strong showing for its era, but one that severely underplays just how influential the album would prove to be. In mid-95, at the peak of G-Funk and Bad Boy’s ramp up to world domination, Mobb Deep proved that zero-compromise rap could hit even harder than the crossover attempts. Along with their labelmates Wu-Tang and friend (later to be turned enemy and friend again) Nas, they formed the vanguard of a rap counterculture that was unafraid to depict violence in its rawest form. They weren’t “underground” in the same sense as Kool Keith or Project Blowed, but they weren’t trying to wear shiny suits on camera either.
Mobb Deep didn’t seem to care about the battle for hip-hop’s soul or the record industry’s demands one way or another: they were too busy trying to survive through the apocalypse the Bridge wrought, no sure thing considering just how many Mobb affiliates passed away shortly after its release, Havoc’s brother Killa Black included.
Mobb Deep’s artistic DNA is all over the last 30 years of music. Their most immediate influence, of course, was on the Queens rap landscape, as their darker, more reserved version of thun rap carved out a lane for Capone N Noreaga, a revitalized Kool G Rap, disciples Infamous Mobb and Big Noyd, the Nas-namedrops Cormega and Lake, and a half dozen other local luminaries. One of those names, 50 Cent, would even reconcile Mobb’s darkness to Dr Dre’s more commercially promising version of gangsta rap, selling over 10 million copies of Get Rich Or Die Trying in the process. Further afield, Roc Marciano’s Marcberg was nothing if not a herculean effort resurrecting Mobb Phonics and Rae’s Cuban Linx for a new decade, while the late Ka’s discography further hollowed out the beats and substituted youthful aggression for hard-earned adult wisdom.
Even acts generations removed from The Infamous owe it a great debt: powder puffs Drake and 40’s frosty Torontonian missives are Mobb Muzik minus the menace, Pop Smoke’s drill reconciled Havoc’s mournfulness to post-Caribbean bass, and even the Angeleno of Angelenos, Drakeo The Ruler, owed Cold Devil’s minor key piano licks to QB. I won’t bother highlighting just how much of Alchemist’s current run, particularly his work with Boldy James, is indebted to P and Hav–he’s made that clear at every opportunity.
There’s nothing preordained about two teenagers who whiffed on their debut album coming back from the dead to create a classic. Yes, the timing was right. The Infamous makes perfect sense next to the industrial, post-grunge depression of Nine Inch Nails or the serotonin-depleted paranoia Metalheadz Jungle. It’s also a lot harder to fuck up when you’ve got the label behind Wu-Tang backing you, along with Tribe’s MVP. But those lucky breaks should generate a strong rap album, not a multi-generational classic that’s changed music forever–that requires something of greater import based on a deal with the devil or a dark ritual. Then again, if The Infamous accurately depicted what the 41st Side was like, what did Mobb Deep have to lose? What’s certain is that once the world got a taste of that uncut dope, the true lived experiences and dark fantasies of two young men trying to survive in a world out to kill them, the hardcore rap fans would never settle for anything less.
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