In the past five years, Mobb Deep's Prodigy has gone from legend to prisoner to meme to author. Now, after being released from jail just over a year ago, he's taking on a predictable, and yet maybe impossible, task: regaining relevance in a kid's game. H.N.I.C. 3 is P's latest and most high-profile attempt at finding his footing in A$AP Rocky's New York, and though the elements of what made him one of the city's greats are still readily present, the tape is disappointingly scattershot and unfocused. Much of it flies in the face of Return of the Mac, the cohesive 40-minute solo album released in 2007 that distilled his genius into a startlingly good record.
H.N.I.C. 3 clocks in at 26 tracks, and unless you're Biggie or Tupac, that's too many tracks. What's worse is that most of the songs that make up the album's second half are no longer than a minute or two. In theory that should blunt the blow of the tracklist just a bit, but in reality it challenges your interest in the record by making you openly question Prodigy's level of investment. Unlike, say, Gunplay's recent Bogota Rich, a mixtape that more or less deployed the same strategy, the succession of one-hitters here leaves you much less eager to hear what the artist may still be holding onto and more wondering why all this stuff wasn't either left on a hard drive or worked into actual songs. Maybe the most obvious example of the carelessness is the innocuous inclusion of "The Type", Prodigy's collaboration with Curren$y, released last year on the latter's Covert Coupe. 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.
It may actually be best to just pretend that H.N.I.C. 3 ends after the 10th song, because up to that point it's a pretty good, if slightly uninspiring, mixtape. 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. 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. 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. 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.
H.N.I.C 3 has found little buzz, and it's not hard to understand why. But 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. He is respected and his music is still anticipated, and when his next project comes out, it will still be met with open ears and high hopes. But attention spans are short, and if whatever P has in store isn't more focused and coherent, he may have to revert back to all-caps blog posts that reassure us, and himself, of his importance.
