Backdrop

Reasons, season or lifetime

I was once told that occasionally people come into your life for seasons. I think the same also applies for music. Music genres comes in and out of your life for a season. For it seems a lifetime ago, when I was into gangster rap.

I was barely a teenager when I first heard Straight Outta Compton in 1989. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Music made by kids, slightly older than me, with a completely different slang, across the other side of the world, however spreading a message that resonated to my core. I could recite the lyrics to that album word for word and often did so on the back of a 277 bus on the way to school. When I found out that Ice Cube had penned most of the lyrics on the album I was in awe. He was easily my favourite rapper at the time.

Lion Hunting

Other generations and cultures have rites of passage to mark the transition from boyhood into manhood. Women have menstruation. Me. I had gangster rap.

It wasn’t the glorification of violence, the misogyny that struck a chord. It was the passion, the poetry and attitude. The ability to make sense of the nonsense of growing up in a ghetto. Whether that ghetto was in Compton or East London. I knew what it felt like to be a kid around criminality, witnesses absolute craziness and being treated as guilty by association. The ability to rise above that, and more critically find success on your own terms, whilst sticking up two fingers to the establishment, was something to aspire to!

My generation

It was so easy for people that do not understand the environment, to condemn the product of the environment. Whilst older people and those in ivy towers focused on the superficial content, me and my friends at the time focused on the substance. As Dr Dre put it so eloquently on Niggaz 4 Life;

Why do I call myself a nigga you ask me?
Cos my mouth is some motherfuckin nasty
Bitch this, bitch that, nigga this, nigga that,
In the mean, while my pockets are getting fat!
Getting paid to say this shit here,
Making more in a week, then a doctor makes in a year
So why not call myself a nigga?
It’s better than pulling a trigger, and going up the river.

Todays loss

Shook

By the time I’d heard Shook Ones by Mobb Deep in 1995, I’d already OD’ed on gangster rap. I’d moved on by then and had lost my passion for rap. My gangster rap season was over. I was around eighteen or nineteen. I was into girls and parties. I wasn’t trying to sit around on staircases in Tower Block flats with my boys listening gangster rap anymore.

I was also a DJ. On the day I first heard Prodigy rap, I walked into Wyld Pytch Records in Soho. The guys there knew I was only interested in party tracks. When they pulled out a rap album for me to listen to I rolled my eyes. ‘Ain’t no party, I’m DJ-ing at going to want to hear that shit. Give me the party hits!’

The man behind the counter played Shook Ones…. Prodigy’s verse kicked.

I got you stuck off the realness, we be the infamous
You heard of us, official Queensbridge murderers

For a minute, all my feelings as a twelve year old listen to NWA for the first time came back. Prodigy wasn’t rapping. He talking to me. Reminding me of the struggle. I bought the album. It’s one of the few albums that sit amongst my 12 inch single collection. Prodigy and Havoc were one of rap's greatest duos.

Passing

So today, as I was watching Netflix, my three little girls tucked up in bed, my Mobb Deep album gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere, my wife asked me... "Have you heard of Prodigy from 'The' Mobb Deep." I nodded. "He died, it's all over Twitter."

I looked around my home. Had I really gotten that old already?

Albert Johnson was only 42 when he passed today. He died due to complications linked to sickle cell anemia. I'll still maintain, that in terms of relevancy and capturing a zeitgeist, his verse that opened up Shook Ones was one of the best gangster rap verses written. One of our great street poets to rank alongside the likes of living legends Ice Cube, Nas, Jay-Z and Slick Rick has been laid to rest alongside dead poets 2 Pac, Big and Big L.

I'm only 19, but my mind is old
When the things get for real, my warm heart turns cold
Another nigga deceased, another story gets told
It ain't nothing really, ayo, Dun, spark the Philly

Alas, when your body catches up with your mind, you realise loss is something "really".

Rest in Peace Prodigy.