Prodigy

Prodigy helped shape New York rap in the 1990s and beyond, both as a solo artist and as a member of the legendary duo Mobb Deep. Born Albert Johnson in Hempstead, New York, in 1974, Prodigy came from a family of musicians. He met Kejuan Waliek Muchita, later known as Mobb Deep’s other half Havoc, while the two were classmates at New York City’s High School of Art and Design in the early ’90s. Mobb Deep’s first album arrived in 1993, followed in 1995 by The Infamous, a groundbreaking East Coast hip-hop album that helped set the scene’s menacing vibe. Mobb Deep put out two more albums in the ’90s, and Prodigy dropped his first solo LP, H.N.I.C., in 2000; that album showed off his emergent conscious side. Three more albums with Mobb Deep came out in the 2000s, but in 2007, Prodigy was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on a firearms charge. After his release, he dropped three more solo albums and a final Mobb Deep album, 2014’s The Infamous Mobb Deep, before passing away in 2017 from complications related to sickle cell anemia.