On 2007’s Return of the Mac, Prodigy refashioned himself as a drug-addled, paranoid outsider walking the streets of New York City’s underbelly, always heavily armed, and who wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone he thought was out to get him. The gleam of promise Prodigy showed with his “Pearly Gates” verse was fully realized on his solo “mix-tape” a year later. When you have three albums on which his are the verses you look forward to, something is wrong. Havoc, the brilliant producer responsible for the incredibly influential Mobb Deep sound, was always viewed as the lesser of the two emcees.

After three unsuccessful, post-millennial Mobb Deep albums, even the most hardcore fans were starting to wonder whether P’s partner should just go solo. Unsuccessful attempts to retaliate turned P’s rapping into a series of obsessed threats that made him look like a dwarf throwing punches at a giant who had become too big to even notice. Once considered in a handful of the top East Coast emcees, Prodigy saw his street cred virtually vanish when Jay-Z, the most powerful rapper on the planet, uncovered childhood pictures of him wearing flamboyant dance attire. Many dismissed this as a shameless attempt to stir up a controversy, but there was forbidding unaffectedness in Prodigy’s voice. In the verse - which ended up being censored on even the explicit version of the album - P talked about beating Jesus “like the movie ” for all of the pain he had suffered. His controversial verse on “Pearly Gates” was the first sign that the existentialism that had long been a signature theme in his music had bled into complete nihilism.

The reinvented Prodigy first showed up on one of the key tracks from Mobb Deep’s maligned G-Unit debut Blood Money.

Prodigy hnic album pic