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Expectations are fine, but I've always bought the line from artists that you can't spend your career attempting to meet them. What audiences think they want is often not the same thing as what they react most emotionally to; it's harder to get excited about knowing exactly what's coming. That said, this album is titled Murda Muzik and it's coming from the camp of the infamous Mobb Deep after a three year break from full lengths. Over that three year period the two had started appearing separate from each other on various features, mostly soundtrack work or close associates, but there was really no reason given to anticipate that the strings were starting to come loose on Mobb Deep's tightly knit feel.
This album is all over the place, and I've always really struggled to reconcile the argument from certain fans that it's just as enjoyable as their other two '90s albums with the actual content of this LP. "Let a Ho Be a Ho" has one of the better beats on the album, and yet is full of horrible high school sex poetry (no one is interested in edible thongs), hinges on a chorus of "A ho gonna be a ho / And a nigga gon' definitely be a nigga," and the 2Pac reference is so on the fence between a diss and a begrudging nod of respect it's a wonder nobody in the studio recommended it get cut.
Here is how the first six songs play out: dead homies song complete with tuneless chorus, throwback cut, advocation of peace during wartime (a noble stance if slightly confusing coming from these two on an album called Murda Muzik), sex rap, unexplainably bad and un-fun club track. "Allustrious" kicks off a brief moment where the Mobb is back to what they do best, but even then Prodigy balances "I count on one finger all y'all rap niggas that excite me" and "Take a walk, jerk" (all-time diss, trust me) with "Your shit's weak, your best song's mediocre / Fuck a penis! How dare you entertain the thought," which is just emblematic of every problem with this album. On paper, and on airwaves, it's impossible to tell if Prodigy is telling his hater to fuck a penis or admonishing them for considering the activity. Murda Muzik should have been the Mobb's most focused album yet - it's right there in the title - but instead it's all over the place seemingly as a rule.
It doesn't help that Havoc's production has taken a significant step back; it's clear that he still wanted to make dark, horrific music, but the times had moved on from that and so he's stuck trying to fit in with the current trends of mainstream hip-hop filtered through the things he pioneered and mastered. It's a bad fit that leads to far too many just serviceable beats ("Adrenaline" and the title track are two great examples of this) that struggle in equal measure alongside Havoc and Prodigy's increasingly boiler plate, formulaic gangster philosophy.
Of course, it's not all bad here. Murda Muzik is Mobb Deep's best selling album for a reason, two primary culprits being the rightly venerated lead single "Quiet Storm" (though even this feels dated and lost in a way so much rap from the jiggy era does), while Eightball's surprise appearance on "Where Ya From" makes for both an unlikely but welcome combination and also one of the more well rounded tracks on the whole album. Havoc really finds a groove in the more southern style of production he uses on that track, leaving one to wonder how much more palatable some other songs would've been if he'd leaned further in that direction similar to Erick Sermon or someone like that. Nothing is more emblematic of the creative stagnation at hand here than inviting Nas to do a Monica rendition on "It's Mine".
As I said in the open, it's not necessarily true that Mobb Deep shouldn't have tried to expand their sound, nor should they immediately be reprimanded for trying. But when the result is as middle of the road and unfocused as this - particularly given the spectacular heights they'd reached just four years prior - you can't even necessarily blame the 1999-as-hell story that the album leaked in the spring and, not being due out until the late summer, the album had to be reworked so the fans weren't buying the same release they'd pirated. Murda Muzik is simply the result of the culture passing a pair of men by, and the beginning of the story of their struggle to reconcile what they're best at with what the world expects out of rap. Prodigy directly quotes "Shook Ones, Pt. 2" to close "Thug Muzik", and it might be the most vibrant moment of the entire LP. That says something, something not good.
I'm curious to see how I react to H.N.I.C. with more time and wisdom, but to my mind as of this writing it would be over a decade before either artist recaptured or even completely understood what it was that made them great artists in the first place. If you were a huge fan of the group and not as predisposed to disliking this era of hip-hop production as I am I could see how the combination of Prodigy and Havoc plus production that isn't entirely mired by misguided attempts to push boom bap forward and very little direct evidence of the jiggy era happening would make Murda Muzik one of your happier 1999 hip-hop memories. But I wasn't especially aware of the group aside from their singles back then - I was in elementary school, after all - and so I can only come to this album from the perspective I've got, which is that it's so uninspired at times and so perfectly fine at others that Murda Muzik is the very definition of an average album propped up by two guys more talented than their overall effort here implies.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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