9/25/2023 0 Comments Mobb deep 1995There were so many memories of Queensbridge, stuff that just “floated up, when you weren’t even thinking about it,” said Havoc, recalling how he first met Prodigy, the way “P was this crazy motherfucker and I was a little more calm except being around him made me a crazy motherfucker too.” That was why tonight’s show was going to be so special, the group returning to the roots after so long. “Inside you could get killed, there was always gunfire,” Prodigy remarked, “but out there were the dreams - big dreams.” Sometimes he and Havoc would simply kick back on a project staircase, watch the planes head for La Guardia, and shoot the bull - and then, wham, a hit song would come out. That was the “dichotomy” of the landscape, the artistic tension, said Prodigy, something of a dichotomy himself in that he grew up in Hempstead, Long Island, the grandson of jazzman Budd Johnson (who played with Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, etc.) but didn’t find his “true voice” until he met Havoc and made his “spiritual home” in Queensbridge. From the roof of the place you could see “the whole city - the boats on the river, the cars on the bridge, the Empire State Building like you could touch it.” Unlike many New York projects that were set out in remote parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, self-contained islands of despair that often felt like reservations, Queensbridge, 50-plus acres pitched along the banks of the East River, was “right there,” said Havoc, who grew up in the six-story red brick building (which resembles the 95 other red brick buildings nearby) at 41-19 12th Street. Much is owed to the Queens housing project’s sheer size, said Prodigy it was the biggest one not only in New York City but in the entire country. The QB’s fecundity was a product of “time, space, and motion,” said Prodigy, the erstwhile boy genius who, like his equally diminutive partner (neither tops five foot six), turns 40 this year. It is a roster that includes the great Nas, Capone (of Capone-N-Noreaga), Marley Marl, Roxanne Shanté, and Mobb Deep itself, whose 1995 album The Infamous is considered a classic of hard-core urbanity, a formidable East Coast response to Dr. A few hours before their “homecoming” concert in Queensbridge Park last Thursday night, Prodigy and Havoc, the two halves who make up the whole of the rap group Mobb Deep, were philosophizing as to why “The QB,” which is what the giant public-housing project adjacent to the park is often called, has produced so many hip-hoppers.
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