A few years back I wrote an essay on Mobb Deep's The Infamous LP that traced their musical lineage to fellow Queens legends Main Source and A Tribe Called Quest. In it, I suggest that Mobb Deep's foreboding, nearly Gothic production style parallels and illuminates their musings on eternal damnation, fatalism, paranoid claustrophobia, and fleeting escapism. Despite Prodigy's assertions on the "Just Step Interlude" that abstract spaciness was antithetical to their brand of ghetto realness, Mobb Deep were in fact preoccupied with issues of space - physical, psychological, and discursive - and their layered, eerie, Q-Tip-mentored sound beautifully reflects their grappling with these themes.Mobb Deep never actually strayed too far from these themes even over a long career that has seen their style and image go through several noticeable evolutions. Mystical esoterica, Five Percenter lingo, and ruminations on good and evil continue to define Mobb Deep's lyrical content, and recently Prodigy blogged at length about his ongoing penchant for occult profundity in a post titled "Mystery Vs. History":
...1990-91 I started reading this book called "BEHOLD A PALE WHITE HORSE". i was real intrested in the book first of all cause of the weird cover, then secondly cause the god's back in L.I. and the god's i met in queens would talk about some of the things i was reading in the book and most of the god's i knew were extremely smart and spoke intelligently and i wanted to have the knowledge that they had...
... 1996 I Started to read alot more cause i realized that it was helping me with my song writing. when you read your vocabulary get's better and stores all that information. i was able to use words people werent using in ya average everyday conversation. My nigga i grew up with in Hempstead SHAMEEK, gave me the 120 lessons and after i read that it made me want to do research and learn more about the origins of humans, religions and the earth ... Me and hav started making the "HELL ON EARTH" album at this time and i started putting lil' bits and peices of information in my lyrics
... Before we were kidnapped from our homeland and made into salves [sic] to build America, we were a spiritual people with our own connection with the creator and the universe ... Mostly every story in all of these MAN MADE religions are ALL STOLEN from EGYPT. AFRICA is the mother of all civilisation and OUR-STORY pre-dates any story. Thats why the negative forces that control this world and have everyone under the SPELL of LEVIATHAN keep OUR-STORY a MYSTERY and they made sure HIS-STORY is the only thing being taught to the entire world. Yes the rabbit hole gets very deep.
Very deep, indeed, and it is great to hear Prodigy in this mode, both in conversing with fans and on now again on wax, err mp3. A recently leaked song (from his upcoming solo release H.N.I.C. 2) titled "My World Is Empty Without You," is partly a rebuttal to critics who took offense to his anti-dogmatic stance on "Pearly Gates" and partly a free association rant complete with references to the sphinx's nose and pyramids on Mars. Prodigy's vocals are laid back but not overly subdued, which gives his occasionally meandering lyrics an air of sobriety, and matches the soulful backdrop nicely. Listen and enjoy, and peruse the rest of Prodigy's blog post, as he also discusses aspects of his early musical career and family background that are not considered to be common knowledge (though not quite as obscure as some of the topics he broaches on "My World...").
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