REVIEW | Albert ‘Prodigy’ Johnson, ‘My Infamous Life’ Audiobook Review (Contains Spoilers)

The untimely death of Albert ‘Prodigy’ John­son half of rap duo Mobb Deep, had us all in a state of shock and dis­be­lief. In his lov­ing memory, I wanted to cel­eb­rate his life through draw­ing atten­tion to his power­ful auto­bi­o­graphy, ‘My Infam­ous Life’. Highly recom­men­ded to me by a friend who listened to the whole 13-hour audiobook in just one sit­ting, I was advised it would be some­thing I would find dif­fi­cult to listen to, but at the same time deeply appre­ci­ate. I was excited, it’s sel­dom we get insight into such suc­cess­ful artists through their own eyes and this embod­ies integ­ral Hip Hop his­tory. I’m not going to lie I did struggle to get into it at first, the con­tent is as raw as you can get, but I was com­pletely cap­tiv­ated by stor­ies of his life, not only the music but an in-depth explor­a­tion of his fam­ily life and per­son­al rela­tion­ships, tales of his upbring­ing filled with priv­ilege due to his family’s music­al back­ground, how­ever he was drawn to con­crete jungles of Queens­bridge Houses. Des­pite feel­ing like noth­ing is held back in this book due to its bru­tal hon­esty, I’m cer­tain many details were actu­ally left out to spare careers and feel­ings of those men­tioned. If you are a fan of New York’s rap music or just curi­ous about the socioeco­nom­ic state of Amer­ica, I recom­mend you have a listen, you will not find a bet­ter source of inform­a­tion detail­ing some import­ant moments about what I feel per­son­ally was the golden era of Hip Hop and gems about life les­sons in general.

Prodigy’s dis­tinct­ive deep bass toned voice is allur­ing, he is the per­fect storyteller and has you cap­tiv­ated on every word as he tells his own story. I felt like he took me there with great depth of vis­ion. The more I listened the more I wanted to under­stand the music and where it really came from, I could under­stand why this auto­bi­o­graphy is so addict­ive. It paints a very vivid pic­ture, I was aware Prodigy had sickle cell anaemia, but was unaware of the extent to hard­ships he had to endure as a res­ult, it was a real eye open­er. I have a much great­er admir­a­tion for Prodigy’s strength after hear­ing about his struggles, he’s an inspir­a­tion, show­ing you can­not let any­thing hold you back. His struggles are out­lined in the track, ‘You Can Nev­er Feel My Pain’ as he addresses his life long battle with the ill­ness, this auto­bi­o­graphy is a more in depth explor­a­tion of that sen­ti­ment, he tells us ‘pain and I became very close in those years’. It hit me hear­ing about the pain he had to go through because of his con­di­tion, for many eth­nic minor­it­ies this is left unspoken about in our com­munit­ies, I remem­ber actu­ally run­ning a Hip Hop event in aid of bone mar­row donors for eth­nic minor­it­ies dur­ing the 90’s as it was such an unknown cause so I com­pletely under­stood why Prodigy felt the way he did, such ill­ness was almost a taboo. As a child — not only did he endure the severe phys­ic­al pain but the racial pro­fil­ing and being treated as a ‘fiend’ for his high tol­er­ance of drugs, which often lead to him being left ignored on his hos­pit­al bed by staff. At times I wanted to cry but then I also wanted to laugh, he uses humour at times to cov­er the dark­ness of some of his des­pair, you really see anoth­er side to his life.

The sheer tal­ent, Prodigy said he wanted to make it in rap and he did. There were no doubts or hes­it­a­tion when he made this state­ment, he would let noth­ing hold him back. It was as if he was born to MC. Ori­gin­ally called, ‘Poet­ic­al Proph­ets’ the story of how Mobb Deep formed is told from mak­ing mil­lions at the age of just 16, driv­ing the fly­est cars and pos­sess­ing weapons. It’s mind blow­ing how young they all were at this time, merely teen­agers hav­ing exper­i­enced so much of adult life already but also achiev­ing so much in par­al­lel, he was able to get a song onto the ‘Boyz in the Hood’ soundtrack aged only 15. His first time in pris­on was at 16, it reminded him on the first time he was in the back of a police car with his fath­er at the age of 8. Mobb Deep wanted to be known as the ‘wild ones’ hav­ing the time of their lives, 6 star hotels, groupies, private jets and fast cars. He speaks openly about very real acts of viol­ence, murder sex and drugs and devel­op­ing anim­al instincts to sur­vive. It is a good remind­er of how real the con­tent of their albums are, it’s not fic­tion they have actu­ally lived these lives. Sneak­ing guns into the tun­nel club to pro­tect them­selves from inter­city gangs. Hip Hop is often blamed for incit­ing viol­ent beha­viour but this audiobook clearly exem­pli­fies, their music was a product of their envir­on­ment, the envir­on­ment was not a product of their music.

One of my favour­ite parts of the audiobook is when Prodigy was told he had to battle every­one in Queens­bridge to earn their respect, and he was taken to battle Nas and then later Cor­mega. The ini­ti­ation if you will. I really miss this essence of hip hop — the battle! I was so hyped to learn about this from Prodigy him­self! This was such an epic moment in his­tory, Nas’ aura can be felt through the audiobook a very well respec­ted MC who was seen as the best of QB, they brought him to see the KING! Nas remained char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally non­chal­ant, I can ima­gine how intim­id­at­ing that must have been for Prodigy, a new MC but even though he was scared he did it, and even though he heard Nas said he was­n’t very good he was grate­ful because that drove him to get bet­ter, a true test­a­ment to going for what you want and doing the things that scare us to excel. He could have eas­ily hated on Nas for that, but instead he thanked him for the motiv­a­tion to prove him wrong. Who would ever have ima­gined over 20 years on, after P’s death Nas would be pay­ing homage to him at his sold out shows world­wide with crowds of people recit­ing his lyr­ics to ‘Shook Ones’, it’s crazy how things work out some­times. Life is all about per­spect­ive and using this philo­sophy Mobb Deep achieved some great things.

Mobb Deep were actu­ally the first Amer­ic­an Hip Hop group to per­form in India, and des­pite how poverty stricken some parts of Bom­bay were, both Hav­oc and Prodigy still wore their jew­elry out which nat­ur­ally meant they attrac­ted a lot of atten­tion. Whilst out there Prodigy suffered from severe sickle cell sick­ness and the med­ic­al sup­plies he needed which we often take for gran­ted in the West­ern world were illeg­al in Bom­bay at the time, so he had to pay someone to get them from the black mar­ket. This was mind blow­ing to me.

There were many tales of his fab­ulous life­style, he talks about his unlikely friend­ship with Lind­sey Lohan and his rela­tion­ship with Keisha Cole, mak­ing the industry seem so small and a remind­er that you need to be care­ful how you treat people and which bridges you burn, but also that you run into very dif­fer­ent circles. There was some very inter­est­ing situ­ations Prodigy and Hav­oc ended up in, things happened to them which you couldn’t even make up if you tried. Stor­ies which stood out for me in par­tic­u­lar were his encoun­ters with the police force, it echoes a harsh real­ity for young black male in Amer­ica mak­ing a lot of money. Prodigy recalls the embar­rass­ing moment when under­cov­er black detect­ives he was trav­el­ling with were pulled over by under­cov­er white detect­ives, P says it was, ‘Clas­sic’ it really did sound like some­thing out of a movie scene. One thing that struck me was Prodigy’s abil­ity to accept and deal with some very unfair situ­ations he would end up in. He learned that after many year of para­noia and read­ing into Illu­minati con­spir­acy the­or­ies the feds were actu­ally track­ing them, known as the ‘Hip hop police’, they had been assigned to mon­it­or high pro­file rap­pers such as Mobb Deep and G Unit.

Prodigy recalls when he was sub­jec­ted to an illeg­al car search and a fire­arm was found. He had not giv­en per­mis­sion for the search and there was no war­rant but even so he faced incar­cer­ated as a res­ult. It was sur­real, as he was in pris­on uni­formed officers were ask­ing for his auto­graph and tak­ing pho­tos on their phones. Oth­er detect­ives were less impressed telling him how much they hated rap music and how hard they had to work for low wages and didn’t appre­ci­ate rap­pers like him­self mak­ing so much money from music. In return for his free­dom P was asked for inform­a­tion on oth­er rap­pers, in par­tic­u­lar 50 Cent. Prodigy even goes on to describe how he was asked if he has access to 50’s cars if he would be able to plant a gun or drugs for the feds to bust him. This is when P learnt the hard truth that there were cov­ert ops col­lect­ing inform­a­tion illeg­ally on rap­pers such as the Wu Tang Clan, Nas, Puff Daddy and Tupac the list goes on. Der­ick Parker’s book, ‘Notori­ous COP’ exposes all of this if you want to read more into it. It reminded P of how the Black Pan­thers were being mon­itored. If you have seen the recent movie about Tupac, ‘All Eyez on Me’ this issue is also touched on.

The audiobook ends with some very real self-reflec­tion as the time comes for Prodigy to serve 3.5 years in pris­on for car­ry­ing an unlaw­ful fire­arm. Instead of being angry at the sys­tem P believe he had got away with a lot and now his time had come to serve time and he was just look­ing to get the most out of it, be pro­duct­ive to keep mak­ing music, keep healthy and fit (pris­on cookbook).

How the music industry has changed, artists no longer selling units like they used too.

‘We in a class of our own’ that atti­tude brought us this far, the moment you for­get this you’re fin­ished and that’s why I need to keep it mov­ing on you’ Prodigy said to Hav­oc, he appre­ci­ated P being his driv­ing force, he always motiv­ated him. He reveals Hav­oc was not great at net­work­ing it the music industry, I guess he’s more intro­ver­ted. The most import­ant words of wis­dom in this book: ‘Yes­ter­day is gone, and tomor­row doesn’t count unless you take care of your pri­or­it­ies right now’. He men­tions how oth­er rap­pers have inspired him and the prob­lems they all had with each oth­er was just street bravado, they were all a spe­cial breed of black men. Des­pite their dif­fer­ences they were broth­ers, rising above pet­ti­ness.  He kept think­ing about this book ‘the Evol­u­tion of a Revolu­tion­ary’ an auto­bi­o­graphy of Afeni Shak­ur (Tupac’s moth­er) writ­ten by Jas­mine Guy’. In this book Afeni made him real­ise why he was try­ing to live right­eous but keep mess­ing up all these years, but were miss­ing God. The Black Pan­ther party had over­whelm­ing power men­tally and phys­ic­ally, cre­ated an incred­ible amount of amount of pos­it­ive change in the black com­munity and influ­ences oth­er races to stand up in their own communities.

He knew he was always cap­able to do good things in life but real­ised he didn’t have the power to do great things without faith in God. Once he found this faith and real­ised God will always been in his life, God is every­where and in everything once he ack God has always been and will always be in his life, it gave him the power to handle any situ­ation, but his anger in check and to approach prob­lems as les­sons, noth­ing was a chal­lenge but an exper­i­ence. Don’t com­pete just cre­ate. no such thing as oppos­i­tion it’s just nature at work.

Any reser­va­tions I had about listen­ing to this audiobook at first, were gone by the end of it, in fact I was left want­ing to hear even more stor­ies, this was a very sober­ing account about the harsh real­it­ies of life. I will nev­er tire hear­ing Prodigy’s voice, he was the per­fect story tell­er and it’s even more deject­ing now he is no longer with us. I would recom­mend a listen to any­one who is a fan of hip hop, if you can look over the gri­mi­er details; there are some great insights into the lives of men who made a huge impact on the hip hop industry and on a grander scale — the world. Rest in Power Prodigy, you will truly be missed by many.