Island / Universal / Urban Legends (2018, Reissue)
Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for thirty plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.
People in hip hop love Mobb Deep. I mean, they really love Mobb Deep in a way that I was keen to try to understand. They made there bones starting in 1995 with the release of their nearly universally acclaimed sophomore album The Infamous... That's after my prime time of hop hop fandom, so I wasn't around for that when it originally came out. That means it's time to backtrack and while that album probably is the place that most people would start considering its reputation, I had to start with their debut, Juvenile Hell. Part of that is because it's their debut and why not start at the beginning, but the other part for me is that it came out in 1993, right in that sweet spot of hip hop production that I love.
And the production is really solid. It tends to be on the slower side of things, which is something that I don't always have the most patience for, but the tempos vary enough and the sample selection is strong enough that the beats really do sit in that sweet spot I mentioned earlier. Lyrically, I completely understand where Mobb Deep get their reputation of being storytellers of the highest order. The tales they tell veer towards the complex, telling stories of the neighborhood mixed with some other tracks that are a bit lighter, content wise. They keep the lyrics tight and tidy, able to effortlessly string together rhyme schemes without it feeling like they're shoehorning in a word just to make the rhyme work, every syllable serves the story they're trying to tell.
It's also an album teetering on the line between confidence and arrogance as Prodigy and Havoc were still in their late teens when they recorded this debut. They have the sort of swagger and poise of much older MCs and listening to it in hindsight it's really interesting to me that the album didn't seem to make much noise in 93 (to be fair, I never heard of it back then and I couldn't have been more obsessed with hip hop at the time) and the group was subsequently dropped. They came back a couple of years later with The Infamous.. and their trajectory changed massively. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that the charm of their debut might actually connect with me a bit more. The production is more in my wheelhouse and these guys are no slouches on the mic.
Mobb Deep - Juvenile Hell:
