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Prodigy gets moody on latest release

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One could say the recently incarcerated Prodigy, one-half of quintessential New York roughnecks Mobb Deep, had a somewhat enlightened final few months before he was jailed on routine “rappers-with-guns” charges. He penned the most entertainingly indecipherable music blog ever. (This is unarguable: It was a poetic mix of barely intelligible claims to hip-hop trendsetting and lists of emcees that he thinks suck.) He starred in several awesomely bad and nearly identical music videos. Last year, he released his Return of the Mac mixtape with frequent collaborator Alchemist, a surprisingly excellent work which held up against the year’s best albums. And he somehow found time to record his second solo album, H.N.I.C. 2.

Reuniting with Alchemist for four of the album’s 13 tracks proved to be a wise decision on P’s part. Where Return of the Mac flipped retro samples into a dark blaxploitation-musical of sorts, Alchemist’s beats on H.N.I.C. 2 sound nervously urgent. “Young Veterans” rolls along in harmony with P’s ever-damaged MC sensibilities, the ideal background for his stone-faced boasts and aphorisms suggesting an utter lack of faith in rap’s new generations (most of whom he’s already cited as being terrible on his blog). The pounding synthesizers of “Illuminati” sound like a man on the run from the imaginary cabals he’s manufactured in his paranoid, dysfunctional mind.

Fellow Mobb Deep member Havoc and relative unknown Sid Roams account for eight more tracks, all of which continue the moody aesthetic pushed forward by Alchemist. “New Yitty” and “ABC” are also exceptional in maintaining the album’s certain rotted ambience — H.N.I.C. 2 is by no means a “70 degrees and sunny” listening experience.

The album lyrically lingers on caricaturized death threats and hyperbolic criticisms of often incoherent subjects, a trend that’s marked the entirety of Mobb Deep’s catalog for better or for worse. On “Illuminati,” he rambles about his abrupt pre-prison enlightenment (“I had a total recall, forget what I already knew/ It took 33 years for me to see the truth”) to the invisible conspiracies that control the world. The subject is not particularly original, but, alongside all the standard assertions of street-prowess that speckle H.N.I.C. 2, this song serves as an insightful look at the twisted inner constitution of a marginally successful rapper who has smoked too much pot and bought too many automatic weapons for show over the span of his 16-year career. I guess one might say that P’s appeal relies heavily on the “slow motion car crash” principle.

Prodigy’s rapping is an acquired taste, with a highly distinctive and at times lackadaisical flow. He famously has little problem eschewing rhymes all together (“It’s much more than rap, this is pure facts/ You’ll see what’s really good when you catch him by himself”). This habit offends hip-hop purists to no end, and it obviously circumvents the stylistic dogma we’ve inherited from the Rakims and the Big Ls of yesteryear. But this flow lends itself quite effectively to emphasizing the existential angst that dictates P’s life. The more problematic flaw for this album is sheer repetitiveness. Every song has this air of dread and synthetic malice — it becomes an exhausting listen after a while.

The circumstances of H.N.I.C. 2 are probably more intriguing than the album itself. The patient listener who doesn’t immediately reject P’s rule-breaking and seemingly effortless style will hear one of the darker albums in recent mainstream hip-hop. Alas, how much of this can we, the listeners or Prodigy himself, endure?

3 stars out of 5