In his early rhymes as part of Mobb Deep-which were separate from his Michael Jackson dancing days, his stint as Jive Records artist Lord–T (The Golden Child), or his time as part of Poetical Prophets-there’s nary a verse without the mention of the tightly wrought struggle between living and dying. Ides and Pina Colada champales in dunn language), but not without pouring some out for the fallen and sharing the bottle with the standing. (See: “Infamous Prelude.”) He would drink away his pain with Ease-Us Jesus (E&J brandy) or Dainy (that’s St. His lifelong war against sickle cell disease made death a more pressing inevitability for him than most and rooted his worldview that only the strong survive, but also that the strong would also perish. P’s bleakness wasn’t just depressed ghetto existentialism expressed via hyperbole, but something in his blood-literally. By then it was nothing to me but blinding.” He was Nietzsche in construction Timberlands and an Army-certified suit New York’s harshest Darwinist. I was born in it, molded by it-I didn’t see the light until I was already a man. It was as if he was saying to other rappers what Bane said to Batman in The Dark Knight Rises: “Oh, you think darkness is your ally? But your merely adopted the dark. I represent death, violence, and the Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing development in North America. These words represent what was important to him this is how he wanted to introduce himself as a greeting: “Hello, my name is P. These are not threats, but declarations of self as fair warning from real n-ggas who ain’t got no feelings. Take the start of “Shook Ones,” or the beginning of its more well-known sibling, “Shook Ones, Pt. P’s opening lines were things of depraved beauty. You heard of us: Official Queensbridge murderers… -“Shook Ones, Pt.
I got you stuck off the realness we be the Infamous. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators-no conscience, no empathy.“ But Mobb Deep weren’t dancing-they were the stone-faced super-predators that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton would decry the next year: “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she’d say at Keene State College in New Hampshire. It’s almost impossible to recapture the impact of Prodigy and Havoc, donned in Hennessy football jerseys, without realizing that less than a decade earlier, at a a time when professionally recorded rap was still novel and change was slow, Heavy D & The Boyz were dancing in Coca-Cola sweatshirts as a representation of an affront to the status quo. Even as half of one of the genre’s most vaunted duos (along with Kejuan “Havoc” Muchita), P was a singular character in hip-hop, a rule-breaker and world-creator, weary and grounded even as he threatened to stab your brain with your nose bone. But-unlike Price, who needed his first name to accentuate himself, or Williams, who characterized his name with modifiers (like “Skateboard P”)-Prodigy was simply “P.” And with good reason. Along with the late Sean Price (who died in his sleep at 43 in 2015) and Pharrell Williams, he was one of few rappers whose name could be filed down to a single letter. Prodigy-who passed away in Las Vegas this week at age 42-was one of hip-hop’s Three P’s.
Instead, Albert “Prodigy” Johnson pioneered an extraordinary rap flow full of cold-eyed nihilism that presented death as the only meaningful framework for life. He put his lifetime in between the paper’s lines, but not autobiographically, as most rappers of renown do.
Of killer kids who don’t care -“Shook Ones Pt.
It’s only your own fault, I gave you fair warning: Beware Your first time will be your last Earth memories We bring drama of the worst kind to enemies If these Queensbridge kids don’t like you The most violent of the violentest crimes we give life to