369. Mobb Deep, "The Infamous"

 

There's a definite 90's hip hop sound, and this album definitely has it.  I've been trying to figure out what exacrtly makes that sound so distinctive - like, if you'd never heard this and someone put it on and asked you to guess, roughly, what era it came from, you'd instinctively say 90's - and I think it's a few things: (1) sort of trip-hoppy drums, with lots of reverb, a snap snare, really high in the mix, (2) minimal, repeating instrumentation; (3) dense, rapid-fire raps, with very little vocal affectation.  Here's a perfect example, "Cradle to the Grave," from this album:

This album has all of that stuff, but it's like the dark side of it, where something like Tribe Called Quest is similar, but definitely not dark like this.  (Not coincidentally, I assume, Tribe's Q-Tip was deeply involved in making the album.)  Even the beats are kind of menacing, and lyrics, about violence, poverty, and death in the projects of Queens, are straight-up bleak, like these, from "Survival of the Fittest," one of the singles off this album:

There's a war goin' on outside no man is safe from
You could run, but you can't hide forever
From these streets that we done took
You walkin' with your head down, scared to look
You shook, ‘cause ain't no such things as halfway crooks
They never around when the beef cooks in my part of town
It's similar to Vietnam

The whole album is like that; nihilistic as hell, but it doesn't feel like an affectation.  It feels very, very real.