The Infamous is the epitome of East Coast hip-hop


As the days start to get shorter and shorter and California’s   excuse for “winter” starts to creep up, my music library changes with the season. The lyrics and the beats get a little less cheery, and the overall tone doesn’t sound as sunny as my library in April or June.

Around this time last year, I also made an effort to get around to some essential hip-hop albums I had not yet listened to. The most important of such allegedly “changed the game” as one of, if not, the most “essential” album in the history of hip-hop that brought the art back to the East Coast: Nas’ Illmatic. I had high hopes  — how could I not when everyone seemed to rave about the album? I penciled in a designated time to listen to it from start to finish in one sitting in my room after class one day.

I wasn’t impressed. That’s a controversial opinion to say the least, and I recognize how essential this album is in the history of hip-hop, but I was not as enamored with this album as everyone else seemed to be. However, looking for something to replace this feeling of guilt I had after not liking Illmatic as much as I was supposed to, I checked out an underrated classic that I had heard something about here and there. This was how I discovered my own personal Illmatic.

The Infamous, by the duo Mobb Deep, is everything the Illmatic should have been and more. When people talk about the nitty-gritty of what living life in the ghetto is actually like, this is one of two albums that I think about immediately. N.W.A was among the first to speak about the realities of being black and living in the hood, but they still had a whimsical aspect to them. It wasn’t all fun and games, but they still were able to make the occasional joke here and there and have a laugh about their situation. The Infamous has none of that.

Everything about this album is bleak, which shouldn’t be hard to guess based on the menacing album cover. The first thing I noticed, as with the majority of the albums I listen to, was the production. Most of these beats were minimal but haunting in nature. Half of the beats sounded like a funeral march, which matched the morbid rhymes that the duo lay over them.

In “Cradle to the Grave,” the beat consists of a lo-fi bass and a low distorted brass instrument that slowly climb up and down in sustained tones, accompanied by a subdued bass drum, snare and hi-hat. It’s sluggish, and the beat feels like it’s dragging at times, only being pushed forward by lyrics that explore the themes of getting into a shootout with the enemy, seeing a friend get shot in the head before your eyes and not having time to cope with their death, since the corrupt justice system will give you 25 to life.

And that’s just one song. Nearly every beat and rhyme effortlessly pushes the atmosphere of paranoia and encroaching death without feeling like it’s being over the top. Even the short skits on the album aren’t corny in any way; in fact, “The Grave Prelude” is one of the most off-putting and horrid depictions of a shootout I’ve ever heard, and it’s able to accomplish in 50 seconds what shows like The Wire do in an episode.

This is something you didn’t hear in hip-hop at the time, which was mostly focused on the glamorized gangsta life on the West Coast. The album’s most well-known and commercially successful song, “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” is essentially a death threat to anyone who is pretending to live the life of a criminal while simultaneously giving a rundown of what living a life filled with illegal activities is actually like.

If you’re a Hamilton fan and you enjoy the lyric “I’m only 19, but my mind is older,” you actually have Mobb Deep to thank for creating it, albeit in a much darker context. With debating whether or not you deserve to live and if you’re going to hell because of the things you had to do to survive, knowing that you have to choose your lyrics on this song carefully so you don’t incriminate yourself and threatening to put someone “closer to God” with your bullets, it’s easy to see how your mentality has been forced to age rapidly in relation to your physical age.

This album is one of the most essential hip-hop albums of all time for me. It’s an all-too-real reminder of what life is like in the most dangerous inner cities, and how the glorification of them is only to sell records. It’s something that’s larger than the medium it’s presented in. It’s truly a reflection of a way of living, and an experience of the disenfranchised.

In other words, it’s the the missing link of how hip-hop went from fun and sometimes ridiculous to an intimate outlet of self-expression. On the more technical side, the rhymes are concise, saying what they need to say in a darkly poetic way, and the beats aren’t lavish, but they still manage to speak volumes: everything the Illmatic was supposed to do, but better.

Spencer Lee is a junior

majoring in narrative studies.  His

column, “Spencer’s Soapbox,” runs every Tuesday. He is also the chief copy editor of the  Daily Trojan.