Mobb Deep: Infamy : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

On their fifth album, queens gangstas Mobb Deep almost literally stick to their guns. Torture, torment, revenge and various other handcuff high jinks are the lyrical order of their day. The question is not whether the duo of Prodigy and Havoc can make it all seem vivid and scary, because of course they can. As rhymers, both are deadpan blunt and verbally agile enough, though they forsake any truly memorable ciphers for copious cussin'. As a producer, Havoc gives everything a horror-movie ambience, and he has a gift for building tense tracks around truncated guitar and bass riffs, which act like funky semaphores of panic-stricken dialogue. And the hook in "Live Foul" is a great and creepy synthesizer meltdown, courtesy of Dr. Dre associate Scott Storch, which nearly transforms the track into a martial drum-and-bass tune. The problem is that harder-than-hard rappers make a bargain with their audience, which amounts to a paraphrase of something Oscar Wilde once said: If you're gonna tell the truth, you damn well better make it entertaining, or people will kill you. On Infamy, Mobb Deep get by on the strength of their eerie music. But judging from the uninspired rhyming above the beats, Prodigy and Havoc are close to reneging on their end of the deal.

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 888 - January 31, 2001)