“The Infamous” by Mobb Deep
Celebrating one of the East Coast’s finest contributions to hardcore hip-hop
This album review celebrates the 30th anniversary of one of the very best hardcore LPs in the hip-hop canon.
Genre: Hip-Hop, Gangsta Rap
Label: Loud
Release Date: April 25, 1995
Vibe: 💯
👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform
When you hear the term “real hip-hop” come up in conversation between self-proclaimed “true” fans, the vibe they’re referring to oozes out of every sample and syllable of Mobb Deep’s The Infamous. The album is a flawless document of street-level tensions and truths that updated the gangsta rap model for a post-Golden Age audience. It’s a gritty, unrelenting, and, unexpectedly, as poetic as it is menacing, adding more nuanced emotional notes to what had become the genre’s baseline for male braggadocio. At its core, it’s a record about survival in the face of violent neighborhood externalities and the ensuing trauma that haunts dreams and ruins futures. All this has made The Infamous a defining hip-hop album, not simply a great one.
Released in Spring 1995, this record was the breakthrough moment for Havoc (born Kejuan Waliek Muchita) and the late Prodigy (Albert Johnson, who we lost at age 42), making them essential voices of the East Coast movement overnight. But it wasn’t their first. In 1993, the duo dropped Juvenile Hell when they were still in their teens, an LP that included the moderate underground hit, "Hit it From the Back.” Otherwise, though, it didn’t register locally in New York despite having names like Large Professor and DJ Premier attached as producers. Forgettable rhymes and less distinctive beats were, in retrospect, two of several factors that sank that record’s potential. Capitol Records eventually kicked Havoc and Prodigy to the curb, a denouement that motivated the duo more than anything else. “We learned from that,” Prodigy said later. “It was like, alright, now we know what not to do.”
So they regrouped, intent on sharpening their rhymes by raising the stakes in the process. Every visceral image, every narrative payoff is distilled down to its purest essence, with no filler or wasted breaths to be found anywhere on this tracklist. Their impressive songwriting technique is best observed in the opening lines to some of their best-known tracks, where they instantly create a cinematic atmosphere through mood and an uncanny sense of dread. “Temperature’s Rising” opens with Havoc’s side of a phone call that’s straight out of a gangster film (”I heard they got you on the run for a body/Now it's time to stash the guns”). At the same time, “Trife Life” lets you know exactly what Prodigy thinks the paranoid daily grind of living in the hood right off the bat (“It's just another day, drowning my troubles wit' a forty”). Most compelling are the first words from “Survival of the Fittest,” one of the best hip-hop tracks of the decade, which sums up the album’s main theme in a handful of words: “There's a war goin' on outside no man is safe from.”
Part of what makes The Infamous so special and distinctive is how single-minded the duo was when it came to creative control. Unlike their first outing, which relied more on external talent, the lyricism and production were kept mostly in-house, with Havoc building the majority of the beats from scratch on an Ensoniq EPS-16+ keyboard sampler. Jazz and soul samples are reversed, pitch-adjusted, and stretched to their absolute limits, laying the foundation for an aesthetic that would go on to inspire several generations of rappers, producers, and tastemakers trying to level up within rap’s hardcore scene. “Our goal wasn’t to sound hard,” Prodigy later told MTV. “We were just being honest.” It’s not a coincidence that Mobb Deep’s uncompromising style got them signed to Loud Records, the label that had just helped turn the Wu-Tang Clan into superstars. At that point, the stakes were realer than ever before.
Prodigy and Havoc recorded The Infamous mainly in Manhattan and Queens, calling on some familiar labelmates (such as Raekwon and Big Noyd) and neighborhood friends to help crystallize this classic. A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip was brought in to do the mixing and is also credited as a co-producer on key tracks “Give Up the Goods (Just Step)” and “Drink Away the Pain.” “Tip really brought us to another level,” Havoc admitted. “He had that experience and ear.” Despite a more mainstream ear trained on their early versions of now-iconic tracks, it’s gratifying to know no one involved tried to polish these gems any more than they needed to. As a result, the beats on this album are weathered, splintered, and mercilessly brooding. They sound like cold nights and broken elevators, with ghostly piano loops and drums that, several times, could be mistaken for muffled gunshots heard through an open window. It’s arguably the strongest sonic evocation of street psychology in hip-hop history.
Then there’s “Shook Ones Pt. II.”
If “Survival of the Fittest” represents Mobb Deep at their most philosophical, “Shook Ones” is them at their most matter-of-fact. It’s become the heartbeat of The Infamous because it’s the opposite of performative. It’s rap’s equivalent to a live report from a crime scene, with Prodigy’s observations delivered with absolutely surgical precision. The lyrics are spouted so often in GOAT conversations that they’re considered hip-hop’s equivalent to scripture. From the ballsy opening line (“I got you stuck off the realness/We be the infamous, you heard of us”) to throwaways that give his point of view instant weight (“I’m only 19 but my mind is old”), it’s storytelling that gave voice to an entire demographic of young, Black men trapped in a vicious cycle of systemic neglect and internal demons that push them to the brink of collapse. It’s no wonder the track has landed on university syllabi and greatest-hits-type lists.
The other aspect of “Shook Ones Pt. II” that makes it unforgettable is its instrumental. What’s most striking is how few ingredients Havoc needed to create such a heartstopping backdrop. He made the beat using a slowed-down snippet of Herbie Hancock’s “Jessica,” filtered and twisted until the original sample was unrecognizable. The chopped-up scream effects were taken from The Exorcist III, and a 1971 Quincy Jones song was worked into the mix to flesh everything out. Although it was one of the first tracks Havoc worked on, the instrumental nearly didn’t make the final cut for the LP. “I didn’t even like the beat at first,” Havoc told Complex. “I was going to erase it. But then P came in and started rhyming over it and I was like… oh s***.” When you know, you know.
While many of Mobb Deep’s contemporaries were more interested in turning their tales of survival into self-centered mythmaking, The Infamous is far more interested in the collateral damage you can incur going down that path. On this record, casual violence and necessary crime are not held up as spectacle but as conduits to deep regret and mourning. In that sense, it’s far closer to modern horrorcore, the subgenre it helped popularize since the turn of the century, in tone than it is straightahead 90s boom-bap. Its cup runneth over with anxiety and psychological dread, obsessing over the moral grey areas that lead to an unshakeable sense that, no matter who you are or how decent your intentions are, no one escapes this life totally clean.
If that ethos sounds familiar in the annals of hip-hop, it should. You can find this record’s fingerprints all over horrorcore-adjacent material from acts like the $uicideboy$, Bones, and early Denzel Curry. Anyone who took claustrophobic beats and eerie keyboard accents and threw them into a lo-fi meat grinder owes at least a passing debt to Mobb Deep. Ditto for the Soundcloud rap explosion, which encompasses artists like XXXTentacion and Juice WRLD, as well as their more lyrically proficient counterparts like Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE, and Mach-Hommy. Prodigy’s understated, haunted delivery in particular was one of the chief architects of “whisper rap” records whose power lies not in its toughness but in the residue of what got them there. Then there’s Griselda, an independent label that turned The Infamous’ aesthetic into an ecosystem unto itself. Westside Gunn, Benny the Butcher, Conway the Machine—all emcees who’ve hitched their legacies to slow-burn street chronicles.
All this to say, Mobb Deep made much more than a classic album. They accidentally spawned multiple subgenres or, at the very least, the mood board from which other producers could kickstart an untold number of underground movements and motifs. The Infamous is the kind of album that offers you a slice of reality, not fantasy. Clear-eyed realism instead of escapism. It’s a rare breed of rap that doesn’t overrely on nostalgia or rhetoric to sound vital. After more than three decades, it remains a reference point precisely because it avoids those traps and tells its truth so vividly, without pandering to its core audience.
That’s how you endure to the point of becoming transcendent.
What’s your favorite track from this cold-blooded classic? Let me know in the comments.
Now here we have a gem. This is so well written and goes into the breadth and depth. Another one back on my Spotify!