In 1995, Havoc and Prodigy were trying to rebound from their disappointing debut album. They went into the studio and came out with a project that not only redefined their careers, it breathed life into the borough they called home. By Paul Thompson By the time he was 29, Herbie Hancock was already one of the best piano players on earth. This was 1969; the Chicago native had just left Miles Davis’s second Great Quintet—or rather, he’d been fired while holed up in a Rio de Janeiro hotel room, honeymooning and food-poisoned—and satisfied his contract with Blue Note. He was seven albums into a solo career and had played in countless sessions with the most celebrated jazz musicians of the era. It would be a few years before he’d bend critics’ brains with HeadHunters; in the meantime Hancock scored cigarette commercials, Standard Oil spots, and a movie. In November of that year, NBC aired Bill Cosby’s animated special Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert, complete with songs by Hancock. Those would be collected and expanded for his first release on Warner, an album called Fat Albert Rotunda. Most of Rotunda is bright and breezy, fitting for a cartoon. The lone exception is the first song on the B-side, a subdued cut called “Jessica.” In its middle, “Jessica” is supremely laid-back—a glut of horns and some light keys like the ones you might hear right before the bar closes, tranquil and happy enough. But the song starts with an eerie piano theme that doesn’t recur until it shatters the mood around the three-minute mark, a bad dream biting at your heels. “Jessica” is far from the most famous song on Rotunda—it’s not the one Quincy Jones would later cover or the one Pac would flip when he was living in Oakland—and Rotunda is far from the most famous Herbie Hancock record. But it stuck around in record crates from Chicago to Rio to Queens. Skip to 1994. Though still teenagers, Albert Johnson and Kejuan Muchita—who rapped under the names Prodigy and Havoc, respectively, in a group called Mobb Deep—had reached a dead end. They were a few months removed from an album, Juvenile Hell, that sounded rote and tonally confused. Their friends didn’t play it, and when they signed autographs at record stores, employees piped in music by a different rapper from Queens. There were certainly no Cosby specials. Their record company had dropped them, and they were looking for a new deal, but wasn’t everybody? Havoc began producing out of necessity, and he was digging for records to sample. Prodigy’s grandfather Budd Johnson had been a world-famous jazz musician, and he gave his grandson an extensive LP collection to go with the recording equipment his grandmother, one of the original Cotton Club dancers, purchased for her home in Hempstead, on Long Island. But that’s not where they found Fat Albert Rotunda. “That was actually from my father’s record collection,” Havoc says today. “He used to DJ in the house, spin records for him and his friends.” So Havoc, alone at his mother’s place in the Queensbridge housing projects, took Rotunda, then just “Jessica,” then just that haunted piano, and finally a few choice notes, pitching and morphing them into a Satanic metronome. Spotting samples is one of the great hip-hop pastimes, but it would be decades before a message board user cracked this particular code. Record nerds had tried and failed for years to find the source of that bass line, mostly because they were looking for a bass line. Havoc did away with everything else: the muddy calm in the middle of “Jessica,” the Technicolor of Rotunda writ large. He was left with a spare part as sharp as the scythes from their last album cover. There was a moment, sitting there alone in his mother’s apartment, when he felt dissatisfied, and almost erased the beat in progress. But friends trickled in from outside to hear what he was working on and convinced him to keep it. “Shook Ones, Pt. II” is one of the most unmistakable songs in the rap canon. From its dedication (“To all the killers and the hundred-dollar billers … to real niggas who ain’t got no feelings”), to that siren (sampled from a song by Quincy Jones, whom Prodigy’s grandfather taught to read music), to the fact that the hi-hats are actually sampled sounds of a housing-project stove flickering awake, it has the texture of an aluminum bat hitting skull. Welcome to The Infamous. It also marked the breakthrough for one of the greatest writers the genre would ever see. Prodigy rapped coldly and unsparingly. His introduction on “Shook Ones”—“You heard of us / Official Queensbridge murderers”—gives way to this neat little rhetorical trick. After threatening to stab you in the brain with your fractured nose bone, he quips: “You all alone in these streets, cousin,” which sounds like a direct threat, only to be stretched out into a maxim (“Every man for theyself …”). He raps about rival crews for a few bars, then circles around, again, to the second person. “I can see it inside your face / You’re in the wrong place.” This push-and-pull continues throughout P’s verse, the “you” in his bars ping-ponging from the abstract to the chillingly specific. Its very end comes with a warning. “Take these words home and think it through Or the next rhyme I write might be about you.” When P was an infant, he was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia, a disorder in which red blood cells, misshapen like crescent moons, trigger excruciatingly painful attacks in patients. As a child, Prodigy tried to manage the disease by sitting in sunbeams on the school bus. “I’d be in the hospital all my life, near my deathbed,” he said in a 2015 interview. “Feeling like I ain’t gonna make it. When Havoc would make these dark-ass beats, that’s exactly how I felt inside.” And so, after a handful of false starts, Mobb Deep finally dug
