r.i.P. Season Begins - A look at HNIC 2

Money is worthless


Real power is people

Real strength is in the streets
Where everybody is equal

fuck jewelry, fuck rims
Lets spend on our protection

Get Armor get cameras
Get wit it lil n***a this man sh*t.

The first hook from HNIC 2 turns out to be its most revealing. Survival – whether by getting protection or turning your back to the flossy side of the game – is something Prodigy has mastered. Staying relevant for over a decade in the rap game one must have the ability to either constantly reinvent themselves to keep with the times, or stay true to themselves, trusting their style and aura to last on the strength of their own effervescence.

In the case of Prodigy, he entered the game and took it by storm with the grimy dark sound of Mobb Deep. After beef with Jay-Z and Nas and hip hop turning into pop music, Prodigy and Havoc took the Mobb Deep name to G-Unit to try to make hits for the club. The result was immensely unsuccessful and Mobb Deep and its two cohorts seemed to have fallen off too deep to ever resurface as hip hop heavyweights.

Prodigy, realizing reinventing the Mobb Deep sound, sacrificing hardcore street lyrics for shake your ass hooks was not going to sustain the Mobb Deep franchise in the ringtone era, did what smart men do: he brought it back to what he knew and returned to the style that put him on the map in the first place.

Return of the Mac, Prodigy’s last solo and first post-G-Unit disaster disc, brought back the Prodigy we had all known and grown to love: stories of devastating drug use erecting mental cages, murder and a genuine love for his guns, as if they were his girl or kids, leading to entrapment within the revolutions of the dark-side’s vicious circle.

Well HNIC 2 offers the same Prodigy of Return of the Mac - only on HNIC 2 the 70’s funk and soul loops, masterfully put together by Alchemist on Return of the Mac, are traded in for ominous synth lines and cinematic strings.

While the highlight of the cd is clearly its opening track, Real Power is People, there are a few other moments worth noting:

1) Young Veterans – the song details the early, often too soon, forced coming of age for those growing up in streets of rage. Highlight of the song: how Prodigy says ‘boy’ on the hook. Random, I know, but trust me, it sounds dope…

2) A,B,C’s – The whole hook, with the children chanting an old (ABC) nursery rhyme – kind of like something Nelly would do, but a thousand times more gutter…who holdin down NYC, huh? Being the second highlight of the song.

3) Click Clack – HNIC 2 proves to me that Prodigy and his producers have a wonderful understanding of dynamics. In response to Prodigy’s monotone - which makes him the gangster Guru of his day – the producers of HNIC 2 surround him with beats that are all dark yet never the same and pair Prodigy with other rappers whose voices stand in complete contrast.

On Click Clack, the smoothest beat of the album, we find the disc’s first feature by Twin Gambino. Now Big Twin Pop-Off probably has one of the grimiest voices I’ve ever heard, I mean he makes MOP sound like pre-pubescent children. Putting Twin on the smoothest of the album’s beats only makes sense to someone with a great understanding of dynamic. It’s a good look.

4) 3 Stacks – On the hook of 3 Stacks we find P going all Quasimoto on us, raising the treble in his voice while killing the bass, to constantly repeat 3 stacks, 3 stacks, and a pocketful of hats. Right after the first hook and our first taste of Quasimoto P, Twin Gambino returns to hit us with the growl of his voice, which stands in striking juxtaposition to the preceding hook. Again, another great use of dynamics.

5) I Want Out – On the hook of the last song of HNIC 2, guest rapper Un Pacino notes how Havoc’s strings sound like the end of a gangster flick. He spits about if this was a movie this would be the part where he pulls his gun out because he wants out. This raises an important issue…

To me, I Want Out represents the struggle of every gangster’s inner Stringer Bell verses their inner Avon Barksdale - take the dirty money and build a clean empire or stay on the corners and do what you know.

In The Wire, Stringer tries to go legit and forego drugs for real estate and ends up getting murked by his own man – his past gets the better of him. As for Prodigy, he took the Mobb Deep dirty sound and tried to go clean with G-Unit but ends up returning to the dirt that took him to the top of the game in the first place. The last song on the album, plus Prodigy’s recent up north trip, may seem like a part of him wants to move on from the toil of his profitable past, but the first 11 songs suggest he’s comfortable back in his role as hardcore lyricist P.

On the Side: The Wire, in having Avon trump Stringer and depicting a gangster’s past to be too insurmountable to overcome, is a very depressing realization as it basically declares the war on drugs and murder in the streets to be never-ending epidemics. Ironically, in the case of Prodigy, the gangster overcoming the desire to be legit (in this case a rich G-Unit rapper) actually proves encouraging and a great sign that real music still has a place in today’s rap game.