“Beauty ain’t always a little, cute colored flower. Beauty is anything where people be like, ‘Damn.’”
― Prodigy
“I have a deadly disease called Sickle Cell Anemia that I was born with that affects millions of others – primarily in the Black and Latino cultures. I feel I can inspire others with this Sickle Cell disease to be strong and believe in themselves.”
― Prodigy
“When we were making ‘Juvenile Hell,’ we were listening to the Jungle Brothers, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Biz Markie, A Tribe Called Quest.”
― Prodigy
“I’m not scared to speak my mind and tell you what it is.”
― Prodigy
“You have to find a sound that reflects what our souls feel like inside, how our bodies actually feel. That’s why we made our own beats. We couldn’t find a producer who could give us the feeling to match our lyrics.”
― Prodigy
“I was a very serious child who never got to enjoy life to the fullest like a normal, healthy kid.”
― Prodigy
“You gotta be careful and just learn from your mistakes.”
― Prodigy
“Music and physical activity goes hand in hand. Music and basketball, man.”
― Prodigy
“Nobody’s unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody’s an individual anymore.”
― Prodigy
“Extreme pain to extreme pleasure has been the story of my entire life.”
― Prodigy
“People of all races need to come together to control our government and run a giant comb through it so we can see the filth that comes out.”
― Prodigy
“You got a lot of fradulent rebels and revolutionaries who are really false prophets.”
― Prodigy
“I don’t like new people coming around me. I’m going to really be leery and watch you and take my time before I embrace you.”
― Prodigy
“I found that preparation is everything when you cook.”
― Prodigy
“In the beginning, we might have been focused on totally just music and being famous, just wanting to have fame and make hot music, but as we got older, we had to understand that this is a business and that our moves need to be calculated.”
― Prodigy
“Just having conversations with God, begging God to make the pain go away, and then the pain wouldn’t go away. So I’m like ‘Who the hell am I talking to? God is not responding.’”
― Prodigy
“I couldn’t afford to get sick in prison. My sickle cell is no joke, so I couldn’t eat poorly or not exercise. And everything in jail is designed to do the exact opposite.”
― Prodigy
“A sickle-cell attack would creep up slowly in my ankles, legs, arms, back, stomach, and chest. Sometimes my lips and tongue turned numb, and I knew I was going into a crisis.”
― Prodigy
“It was the camaraderie and the friendships, too, that really drew me to Queensbridge.”
― Prodigy
“Growing up in bad neighborhoods, you see and experience a lot.”
― Prodigy
“Going to jail is beyond what anyone thinks it is.”
― Prodigy
“You have people there from all walks of life: people who made mistakes and have to deal with the consequences, mothers and fathers. You wouldn’t expect them to be behind bars.”
― Prodigy
“When I said, ‘I’m only 19, but my mind is old’ – at that time, when I said that line, I was 18.”
― Prodigy
“In my lyrics, I used to always state two years ahead. I did that to make it seem like we were ahead of our time – a time capsule almost. It had never been done before.”
― Prodigy
“At 19, I felt like I was 40.”
― Prodigy
“We didn’t have any problem with 2Pac. We liked his music.”
― Prodigy
“I just remember the feeling of being dropped from Island and having our hearts broken. Because we were given a chance to put out an album to the world. We got the chance for people to know who we were. We wanted to make our dreams come true and do hip-hop for a living, but we didn’t do it right.”
― Prodigy
“We started writing songs like ‘Shook Ones’ and ‘Survival of the Fittest’ explaining our neighborhood, but more our personal lives.”
― Prodigy
“When my family first moved to Hempstead in the 1960s, they were one of the first black families. It used to be an all-white neighborhood, but there was white flight when the black people with money started moving in. When I was, like, 13 or 14, Hempstead had just become all black, and the poverty became worse and worse.”
― Prodigy
“When we first signed to Loud, we had a 20-song demo. So all of those songs we wanted to put on the album. But we started making new ones, and through process of elimination, we wanted all the new ones. We didn’t like the old ones no more.”
― Prodigy
“That’s what ‘Hell On Earth’ was about: we felt that we were living in hell.”
― Prodigy
“All the ‘Scarface’ beats that you hear Mobb Deep sample, that was my idea.”
― Prodigy
“With Mobb Deep, we have to agree on things. We have to agree that we want to use that beat or agree on the type of song we want to do.”
― Prodigy
“I’m a big fan of Kurt Cobain. I put a picture of him holding a gun on my Instagram for his birthday. He’s definitely one of my favorite rock artists.”
― Prodigy
“I’m always vocal about people being unique and different in hip-hop.”
― Prodigy
“In the era we came up in, you had to have your own thing.”
― Prodigy
“When I was a kid, I used to love to play ‘Dig Dug.’ It was, like, this little dude, where he digs in the dirt and makes tunnels.”
― Prodigy
“I like any shoot-’em-up game with guns in it.”
― Prodigy
“’Mortal Kombat’ was an ill game. I would always be either Reptile or Scorpion. Those dudes were ill. We used to stay up all night playing.”
― Prodigy
“’Dragon’s Lair’ was real ill.”
― Prodigy
“I don’t want fans anymore, because the definition of a fan is a fanatic. The people who buy my product and ride with me are my supporters, not fanatics.”
― Prodigy
“Obama represents one-world government, a.k.a. Neocolonialism. Presidents don’t change anything locally – they only deal with foreign policy.”
― Prodigy
“My favorite Eminem song is probably ‘Lose Yourself’ because I can relate to it a lot. That’s how I feel every time I write a rhyme.”
― Prodigy
“I used to be cold and emotionless. I believe the disease I was born with made me that way.”
― Prodigy
“All I do is music; that’s my sport.”
― Prodigy
“When we signed to G-Unit, 50 made us sign the paper that says, ‘You can’t talk about nothing about me.’ He makes everybody sign that.”
― Prodigy
“Mobb Deep’s music, we represent poverty. That’s what made us. That’s who made us. That’s who brought us up.”
― Prodigy
“I wanna like Obama, but he’s all about the world government, world banking, war, and stuff like that. You know what I’m sayin’? He’s a phony.”
― Prodigy
“When you are young and rebellious, you don’t want to be in the house. You want to be on the block.”
― Prodigy
“I think the sound of ‘The Infamous’ came naturally from our lifestyle and some of the criminal things we were doing. We always rap about what we’re living, and to put a beat to lyrics like those is hard.”
― Prodigy
“Our style of hip-hop, our style of beats, our style of rhymes – you gonna give us burn. We gonna get our burn that we deserve.”
― Prodigy
“When I was locked up, I went through a big personal change with my attitude and spiritual, everything. I went through some major changes locked up.”
― Prodigy
“The NYPD is just a branch of corruption connected to a giant, corrupt tree called the United States government.”
― Prodigy
“I can’t front: I like Kanye.”
― Prodigy
“I just love his creativity; that’s what I’m talking about as far as being unique and creative and different. Kanye is doing it.”
― Prodigy
“Once I started writing, I realized just how much I really enjoyed it. I was kinda good at it, so I kept at it.”
― Prodigy
“There isn’t just one black experience out here.”
― Prodigy
“My family had a lot to do with ‘My Infamous Life.’ They were the inspiration behind me starting to write. I had an interesting family life dating way back, and they did a lot in their lifetime.”
― Prodigy
“Don’t get ‘Return of The Mac’ confused as a solo album. That was just a mixtape.”
― Prodigy
“Basically, I’ve always raised my kids that people learn from their mistakes, and every father wants their kids to be better than them.”
― Prodigy
“My kids know they can’t make the same mistakes I’ve made. They’ve been through a lot with me always being on the road.”
― Prodigy
“Premier was one of the first producers that we reached out to, and he was like, ‘Hell yeah! Let’s get to work.’ He was showing us love and giving young, new artists a chance.”
― Prodigy
“Hip-hop music was our life.”
― Prodigy
“Premier came into the picture when were starting to make our own beats and all that.”
― Prodigy
“That’s probably the key to our success and our longevity, sticking to our formula and what we do best, the hardcore Mobb Deep sound, rather than chasing trains. But we’re always experimenting with the art and the creativity of hip-hop.”
― Prodigy
“I like a lot of the new artists, but there’s only one I can name that stands out to me the most: Kendrick Lamar.”
― Prodigy
“Hip-hop basically controls the world through fashion, through music, through language, through culture. It’s basically running the world, no matter what anyone wants to think, and that’s just the way it is.”
― Prodigy
“We’ll never change the fact that we are hardcore hip-hop and we make rebellious hip-hop music, and we’re going to keep doing that and progress with our production, progress with our lyrical styles, be creative, and just have fun with it.”
― Prodigy
“Actually doing a song, going to the studio, and just getting out on paper your anger makes you feel a little better sometimes.”
― Prodigy
“Our first name was the Poetical Prophets before we changed it to Mobb Deep, and when I look back on it now, that was, like, a ill name for us because that is what we really were.”
― Prodigy
“You can never go back to a time and try to recreate that sound, because that time is done.”
― Prodigy
“I was real serious when it came to rapping. I still do, but even more so when I was real young.”
― Prodigy
“It took me a while to like Wu-Tang’s style.”
― Prodigy
“To me, I got a bunch of haters. Mobb Deep – and Prodigy, speaking for myself – I got a bunch of haters.”
― Prodigy
“From the neighborhoods that we grew up in, we had to learn how to deal with people. How to keep certain people at a distance, how to cut people off completely.”
― Prodigy
“Sickle cell was my life before hip-hop. I ain’t really have no life – that was it.”
― Prodigy
“The aggressiveness of it attracted me to hip-hop because I was angry inside. I was an angry kid because of the sickle cell. So I liked the anger in hip-hop. That’s what attracted me to it; that’s what made me want to do it. It helped me get my aggression out.”
― Prodigy
“I always make hardcore songs, hits for the block.”
― Prodigy
“I make all types of music. People wanna put me in a little box, and they get mad when I don’t stay in there.”
― Prodigy
“I’m a creative person, and I’m gonna be creative, so whoever’s upset because of that, that’s too bad.”
― Prodigy
“I’m a fan of hip-hop. I’m a fan of rap, so anything new that’s happening, I’m hip to it.”
― Prodigy
“The sickle-cell got me where doctors said I couldn’t play sports, I couldn’t overexert myself.”
― Prodigy
“I been going to the hospital since I was born, about 10 times a year, for about a week or two each time.”
― Prodigy
“When I first went in, I realized there’s no green vegetables. They serve, like, spinach once every two weeks. The three meals they serve inmates every day is like slop.”
― Prodigy
“Anything that Havoc or I do is always going to point back to Mobb Deep.”
― Prodigy
“Intellectuals that read a lot of books might not have been interested in Mobb Deep before ‘My Infamous Life,’ but now they might go, ‘Who are these guys?’ and check us out.”
― Prodigy
“Going to prison actually helped save my life, I believe.”
― Prodigy
“If you look at my rap sheet, it’s very long.”
― Prodigy
“The music is just real powerful when Mobb Deep and Nas work together.”
― Prodigy
“Nas is like King Queensbridge: he’s the man out there.”
― Prodigy
“We gotta keep our sound alive, that dark hip-hop.”
― Prodigy
“I’ve learned to respect Rick Ross’ music.”
― Prodigy
“You got to treat Mobb Deep different because our fan base is different. Our fan base is in the ‘hood across the world.”
― Prodigy
“I read certain things about history. I don’t like fiction. I read about stuff that’s real, stuff that’s goin’ on in the world.”
― Prodigy
“I love New York. It ‘as made me who I am, know what I mean?”
― Prodigy
“As you get older, everybody changes. You don’t do the stupid stuff that you used to.”
― Prodigy
“Jive is a good label, but they’re R&B’ed out.”
― Prodigy
“Mobb Deep is a street-rap group. We from off the streets.”
― Prodigy
“’Cobra Clutch’ was to let the world know we ain’t going nowhere. We got the game in the cobra clutch.”
― Prodigy
“We used to cut out of school and go to Coney Island to record songs almost every day.”
― Prodigy
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