Prodigy is one of the most convenient and favorable characters for studying a multifaceted phenomenon like hip-hop. By just looking at his biography and discography, you can study in detail not only the rap of the ’90s and 2000s but also familiarize yourself with numerous aspects of this musical direction. Unfortunately, the hip-hop legend passed away.

During his creative journey, P collected a vast number of hip-hop artifacts that are distinctive features of the genre. Such diversity and originality are not something that all rap scene representatives can boast of.

The life and career of Prodigy are inseparably connected with the legendary group from the New York underground, Mobb Deep. Together with Havoc, these street cats elevated an entire layer of creativity based on everyday life in urban slums, standing alongside underground representatives such as Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, Rakim, and many other founders and contemporaries of the so-called ‘golden age’ of rap. Prodigy emerged from the ’90s, experiencing the heyday of this ‘golden era,’ becoming one of its apologists and inspirers, and in the 2000s, he attempted to find his place in hip-hop mainstream and continues to be creative to this day.

Many confuse the New York rapper with the British electronic group The Prodigy. The difference is only in the article ‘the,’ which causes certain confusion. The article can indicate that after ‘the’ is a proper name, something definite and understandable, with no analogs, something that cannot be confused with anything else.

In rap, acronyms are widespread. They give it additional mysticism and mystery. Only those who are in the know, the initiated and knowledgeable people, can understand you. Acronyms are a kind of ‘tags.’ They gained their spread in another wing of hip-hop culture, namely in the art of graffiti. Writers mark walls, fences, trees, poles, and slabs with certain inscriptions, understandable only to those who ‘get it.’ Similarly, as in this community, they might mean nicknames, team names, or urban areas, acronyms and initials are also used by rap artists. Group, artist, or album names are often encoded in the form of an abbreviation. Besides, entire phenomena, manifestos, and concepts related to hip-hop exist in the format of acronyms.

Rap is the genre where you don’t have to go far for this because its very name is an acronym. RAP = rhythmical American poetry. America is rightfully considered the birthplace of rap. Due to its geographical origin, despite the genre’s spread worldwide, the most ‘old-school’ and ‘true’ fans of street culture rate only American rap as a benchmark and ‘real.’ Within the genre itself, all rappers’ creativity is also tied up in code.

An example can be the famous C.R.E.A.M (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) by Wu-Tang Clan. D12, NWA, LOX, The D.O.C, OG, OJ—all this is well known to a devoted hip-hop connoisseur and reflects only a microscopic part of the acronym legacy that rappers encoded for the rest of the uninitiated world. Using the generally accepted penchant for abbreviations, Prodigy used them for the titles of almost all his solo albums. The abbreviation ‘H.I.N.C,’ meaning ‘Head Nigga in Charge,’ graced the covers of the entire trilogy released by P.

No significant hip-hop artist of the ’90s could do without ‘beefs’ during their career. The subject of intra-genre showdowns is still relevant today. However, the ‘excesses’ and attacks towards the artist then and now are, as they say, two different stories. ‘Hit Em Up’ by Tupac and ‘Takeover’ by Jay Z are somewhat different from exchanges on modern Twitter. Despite the heated atmosphere between the coasts, to ‘deserve’ a beef with the leading industry names, one had to earn it. Yes, yes, even this had to be earned. In our time, artists like Jim Jones, the aforementioned Game, Beanie Sigel, 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, and others expressed their desire to battle it out with Jay-Z, yet Jigga did not respond to any of them.

When it comes to Tupac, after the phenomenal success of his double disc ‘All Eyez On Me,’ he and Suge Knight, inspired by the triumph of ‘Death Row Records,’ decided to establish a branch of their label on the East Coast. The main claim to the current New York rap functionaries was the lack of support from their side for new talented street poets. They say, those like Nas, P Diddy, Mobb Deep, and others climbed to the top and dangled their feet. No one nurtures the young and gives newcomers the chance to rise, earn ‘green,’ and escape their neighborhood. Tupac declared precisely these goals, creating ‘Death Row Records East,’ but due to his untimely death, these plans never came to fruition. The enterprise folded, but the listeners got several great, meaty ‘disses’ that became part of genre history, firmly establishing a noble tradition of mudslinging and threatening opponents.

In 2005, after Game was kicked out of the G-Unit label and group, 50 Cent announced that besides the existing names, he would recruit other artists to the team. The surprise of hip-hop connoisseurs was great when those artists became Mobb Deep, M.O.P, Ma$e, and Spider Loc. Except for the latter, all of them started their creative journey in the distant ’90s, long before 50’s career began, not counting the ‘React’ video clip in 1997 with Onyx as a starting point. It’s notable that not every rapper manages to escape from the underground to the surface. Among those who succeeded, one can quickly name Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Eminem. Others either never even tried to break into the mainstream, or they failed. Some, with the rise of R&B, even stopped doing rap, ending their careers in the mid-2000s.

It’s worth saying that Mobb Deep’s path from the underground ‘into the light’ began at the start of the new millennium. Their songs increasingly changed, almost adopting romantic and dance motives. But a hit for radio or television still eluded them. Except for the video ‘Got It Twisted,’ which somewhat introduced the general public to the underground cats. Joining the most hyped hip-hop gang of 2005 became a breath of fresh air for Mobb Deep. ‘I’m young, I’m black, I’m rich,’ raps Prodigy on the track ‘Outta Control’ with 50 Cent. You would have never heard these lines from P before. All of this seemed like an oxymoron. A symbiosis of the incompatible. Street guys who contributed to the creation of the ‘golden collection’ of hip-hop classics, who placed their youth on the altar of rap, after 10 years rap about girls, champagne, clubs, and life’s other joys. Unlike Jay-Z, who declared in ‘Reasonable Doubt’ that he would eventually get his house, jacuzzi, lawn, and servants, Mobb Deep guys never touched upon such themes in their creativity, professing asceticism and commitment to street ideals.

New R&B superstars didn’t emerge from Mobb Deep. Contrasted to their boss, 50 Cent, who started his career almost immediately with rap for MTV, not counting the first few years that went into his ‘introduction’ as an artist, Prodigy, and Havoc, along with M.O.P and Ma$e, still didn’t suit the broad blue screens, turning out to be non-standard personas for those who buy glamorous discs and glossy magazines. The album ‘Blood Money,’ released in 2006 on G-Unit Records, did not meet the expectations placed on it and didn’t give the group a new creative push. Despite reaching number three on the Billboard 200, the album sold only a hundred thousand copies in the first week, which was absolutely a failing figure for that time. Since then, cooperation with 50’s gang became purely formal. Mobb Deep, under the G-Unit umbrella, released no new albums or videos.

If Prodigy’s career peak as part of Mobb Deep was in the ’90s, his zenith as a solo artist can be attributed to 2008 and the release of the album ‘H.N.I.C 2.’ It was on this release that Prodigy returned to his roots, to his usual tough style. It became clear that the mainstream experiment was absolutely foreign and unnecessary for the street poet. Rap connoisseurs once again heard familiar tones and were transported back almost a decade. Naturally, the album’s sound was held with certain changes and innovations, but the red thread of aggression, straightforwardness was maintained exactly as the listener needed.

The album’s sound was significantly influenced by the legendary Alchemist. A producer with a rich background in the industry, starting his journey in 1998 with collaborations with Dilated People and Ras Kass, Alchemist worked with almost the entire array of top-tier rappers: Snoop Dogg, Jadakiss, Nas, and of course, Mobb Deep. Hardcore fans of the genre remember his collaborations with Eminem, Nelly, and Curren$y. He was responsible for the main singles of ‘H.N.I.C 2’, as well as in other parts of the trilogy. Alchemist helped P bring the street spirit back to the beats and advised the right musical direction to return to the game after experiments within the G-Unit fold.

Prodigy often addresses the so-called ‘Illuminati’ theme in his tracks – a secret world community, global backstage, masters of the world, and other masons. P is one of the most ‘obsessed’ with conspiracy theories among rappers, preferring to believe that the planet has been captured by members of secret transcontinental communities. From album to album, Prodigy’s tracks feature the word ‘Illuminati,’ replete with references to Freemasonry. The ‘Illuminati’ topic was touched upon by Rick Ross, Jay-Z, Kanye West, and many other hip-hop artists, yet none of them provided any evidence of these masons’ existence. However, fascination with such things fits well into the mythology of rap itself. Notably, the same ‘Blood Money’ album cover depicts the pyramid from the dollar bill, symbolizing the new world order and the ‘all-seeing eye,’ which is also one of the world government’s symbols.

P’s bandmate always remained in his friend’s shadow when it came to evaluating verse quality or skills. Havoc understood that he would never become as successful a rapper and, over time, shifted to producing tracks for other artists. In this field, he achieved great results, writing beats not only for the lion’s share of his group’s tracks but for a host of significant rap albums by other artists. Among them are Nas’s ‘It Was Written,’ Lloyd Banks’s ‘Hunger For More’ and ‘Rotten Apple,’ Game’s ‘The Documentary,’ 50 Cent’s ‘Curtis’ and ‘Before I Self Destruct,’ Kanye West’s recent ‘Life Of Pablo,’ and many others. Writing music was always more interesting for Havoc than rapping. Although he managed it just as well as rhyming words in songs, he never surpassed Prodigy, probably because this task was never on his agenda. The previously sparked beef between the bandmates did not evolve into anything substantial, marking itself only as a fleeting creative conflict.

It must be stated that Prodigy became one of the brightest representatives of hip-hop of all times. A person who is an undeniable street legend of New York, absorbing a whole array of various rap phenomena. He never became a businessman like Jay-Z or Diddy, but stayed true to his underground roots, not selling out completely to the media industry of numbers and charts. Rakim, KRS-One, Big Daddy Kane, Doug E. Fresh, and many other rap kings of ’90s New York have long retired, while P continues his path. A model of a rapper who can make beloved music without regard to public reaction and without chasing cheap hype. Every rap fan somehow has a handful of favorite artist songs, that, albeit co-authored with his group partner, gave the world such eternal hits as ‘Shook Ones Pt. II,’ ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ and ‘Hell On Earth.’

P.S. The last collaboration of Prodigy with former boss 50 Cent. No champagne, pools, models, and other luxury-rap attributes. It seems that Prodigy looks most organically in such settings.