This past week, one of my favorite duos of all time stated that they were the best duo of all time. That’s a categorical shift. The first thing is my loving dark, militaristic like rap music in which enemies are all about you and no one can be trusted. The second is a vast overestimation of the lengths such rap can go. Mobb Deep’s second project The Infamous is on par with Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket in its fiendishness. It is bleak and so devoid of all light that it sits at the soft of your neck, cutting into your airflow. More so because for many shorties embroiled in NYC’s mid 90s decrepitude the lyrics felt all too true. “There’s a war going on outside no man is safe from,” they said. And you couldn’t help but wonder what was happening up there in that concrete jungle spilling into the summer streets and out through bubble coats filled with goose feathers. But if you were at the corner of Nostrand and Flatbush on a summer day in ’95 you knew. The air smelled of rancor, and for every nub of truth or peace there was a whirlwind of activity. Hoods everywhere are always, if nothing else, active.
But they’re wrong. The best duo of all-time, like any other all-time list, is highly debatable. Then there are the other duos to consider who were active either just before or at the same time as Mobb. Gang Starr, EPMD, Eric B and Rakim, Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, and that’s just the folks from NY. There’s super group OutKast, which is probably in fact the best duo of the Golden era, out of ATL and UGK out of Texas as well as 8Ball & MJG out of Memphis. Of course, there was also Tha Dogg Pound out of L.A., and Luniz just to name a few. Despite all this competition, what would make Mobb Deep consider themselves the best of the best?
That’s where New York Hip Hop culture comes in. That towering bravado is sewn into the gravel, sand and asphalt of New York herself. Yes, the situation was and is suffocating stifling and brute, but it is not insurmountable. There’s a reason why Mobb feels so strongly. And that’s because it is indisputable that The Infamous is one of the best, hardest albums of all-time. It takes on this designation because of its grit but also because of its sadness. “Survival Of The Fittest” may be one of the most melancholy, rigid Hip Hop songs of all-time. And an album that great deserves to raise a group into a certain pantheon of artists, no matter what else they’ve done. That’s not to disrespect their 90s catalog at all, however. Both Murda Muzik and Hell On Earth were fantastic pieces of work, often overshadowed by their sophomore album masterpiece. In fact, I’d have an easier time saying Mobb Deep is the greatest 90s New York Hip Hop duo of all-time.
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But it also says so much about the duo dynamic, itself. Havoc and P have gone through their fair share of trials and tribulations, but so have so many other duos whose dynamics while tied to greatness were incendiary. From Gang Starr to EPMD and even ‘Kast, two members on a team is a highly unstable combo. But when it’s good, it’s spectacular, as all these amazing duos have proven. Still, it begs the question, if Mobb didn’t suffer all of their ups and downs could they have had an OutKast like run of classic records? And if they did would we have an easier time granting them the distinction of the best duo of all-time. I guess we’ll never know. And that’s another symptom of 90s Hip Hop duos: missed opportunities. For how many of them have we looked up into the sky and thought, “Yo, what if they’d stayed together?”
Andre Grant is an NYC native turned L.A. transplant that has contributed to a few different properties on the web and is now the Features Editor for HipHopDX. He’s also trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. Follow him on Twitter @drejones.
