1/7/2023 0 Comments Prodigy hnic album coverBut the good news for both Prodigy and listeners is that his place in the canon is cemented and, more importantly, his last great album isn't decades in the rearview. H.N.I.C 3 has found little buzz, and it's not hard to understand why. The combination of French's sleazy hook singing, P's gruff growling, and producer Harry Fraud's warm, relaxed funk on "Lay Low" is the closest we get to the heights Prodigy hit in his brief pre-jail resurgence. Although French's main influence is Dipset's skewed radio rap and Waka's is classic Atlanta crunk, both follow in Prodigy's footsteps as compelling rappers who prioritize things like aura, emotion, and grittiness over more traditional elements such as rhyming. As far as the latter goes, it's no surprise that collaborations with French Montana and Waka Flocka Flame result in the tape's best tracks. In that small batch of tracks, P reunites with Mobb Deep partner Havoc for the type of thing they've been doing for decades, while also seamlessly integrating himself into a certain slice of contemporary rap. 3 ends after the 10th song, because up to that point it's a pretty good, if slightly uninspiring, mixtape. It may actually be best to just pretend that H.N.I.C. This sort of double dipping is by no means unusual in the rap world, but when slotted as track 23 and sandwiched between two songs that are less than 90 seconds long, it perfectly encapsulates the project's lack of direction. Maybe the most obvious example of the carelessness is the innocuous inclusion of "The Type", Prodigy's collaboration with Curren$y, released last year on the latter's Covert Coupe. Unlike, say, Gunplay's recent Bogota Rich, a mixtape that more or less deployed the same strategy, the succession of one-hitters here leaves you much less eager to hear what the artist may still be holding onto and more wondering why all this stuff wasn't either left on a hard drive or worked into actual songs. In theory that should blunt the blow of the tracklist just a bit, but in reality it challenges your interest in the record by making you openly question Prodigy's level of investment. What's worse is that most of the songs that make up the album's second half are no longer than a minute or two. 3 clocks in at 26 tracks, and unless you're Biggie or Tupac, that's too many tracks.
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