When asked how they felt about being a part of Hip Hop’s golden era during an interview with Radio.com, Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep revealed that it wasn’t until they began touring overseas that they realized the vast impact of their music.
According to Mobb Deep emcee Prodigy, he says when the pair first began making music they knew they had something special, but had no idea of the impact they would have on the genre of Hip Hop until they began doing shows outside of the United States.
“We knew we had something special and important to us,” Prodigy said. “Like the music we were making…We knew we had something that meant a lot to us, but we didn’t know that it was gonna impact the world like that until we started traveling on tour and we started seeing other countries and the crowd saying everything word for word. Certain places they can’t even speak English, but they could repeat the words to your songs. When we saw that, that just changed our whole outlook on everything. Like ‘Wow, I think we really making history right now.’”
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It’s been well over 20 years since Mobb Deep released their debut album, Juvenile Hell, and in that time the group’s beatsmith Havoc says the way he goes about finding samples has changed tremendously. He revealed that instead of digging for records at the local record shop, he now uses the internet to dig digitally.
“Back in the days I used to dig for records in old record stores and stuff like that,” Havoc said. “And nowadays because of technology I dig online. So, I’m digging online looking through a whole bunch of progressive rock records. And just really obscure records I try to find the most. And sometimes I come to more recent works like from the ‘90s and stuff like that. But it just varies. You know what I mean? It’s like a treasure hunt. Whatever I can stumble upon that sounds good. And the way that you EQ it up and manipulate it you can just turn it into a whole new sound.”
The group’s interview with Radio.com comes nearly one week after they released their most recent studio album, The Infamous Mobb Deep. Prodigy spoke briefly on the project as he commented on the personal topics addressed on the LP.
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“With this album right here we were able to share with the people what’s happening now in Mobb Deep’s life,” he said. “Personal things. Things that we seen or go through. Things that we find interesting. It just brings you up to date where we’re at mentally in our life right now. We coined the phrase ‘reality rap’ to define our music. So, it is like a documentary type of thing.”
In addition to new music, The Infamous Mobb Deep also features a number of unreleased songs from Mobb Deep’s 1995 album, The Infamous. While speaking with Complex last month, Havoc revealed that they came across the unreleased songs while filming a new documentary.
“We was actually shooting the documentary on The Infamous album,” he said. “And we had got the opportunity to get our hands on a lot of the work. So, it was like it just all correlated. You know what I mean? 20th anniversary, we doing the documentary. So, we had a lot of the original sessions. So, I mean, listening back to them it was just like mind-blowing to hear stuff that I didn’t even remember was there. Verses from Ghostface that I forgot he laid…or verses from Nas. That’s something that—Why keep it to yourself? We had to share that.”
RELATED:Mobb Deep Details Making “The Infamous Mobb Deep” Album
