It's going to be impossible to talk about The Kush, the first solo album from Mobb Deep rapper/producer Havoc, without comparing it to its unofficial companion-piece: Return of the Mac, the solo album that Prodigy, the duo's other half, released earlier in the year. And that's the biggest problem with The Kush: whatever its merits, it can't hold a candle to Return of the Mac. Both albums come on the heels of 2006's Blood Money, the first album that Mobb Deep released under the umbrella of 50 Cent's G-Unit empire. Blood Money was a critical and commercial disaster, a headlong dive into a flashy aesthetic that didn't fit these two scrappy nihilists at all. Prodigy responded to that failure by hooking up with the producer Alchemist and crafting some of the best work of his life: a murky and downtrodden record steeped in ornamental 1970s soul and hallucinatory paranoia. Return of the Mac sounded completely at odds with rap's current commercial climate, but it brought Prodigy back to the sneering charisma that we loved him for in the first place. If Return of the Mac sounded like an artist reconnecting with his roots, The Kush sounds like an artist spending a few bored afternoons in the studio, waiting for his label to take him off the shelf.
As a rapper, Havoc has never been as compelling as his partner; his clipped, low-key verses always worked best as a foil to Prodigy's weathered threats. Over the years, both of them have become clumsier in their delivery, but Prodigy can still rely on his old-gunslinger magnetism, whereas Havoc just sounds like a big empty space. On The Kush, virtually all his lyrics consist of limp talk about what a badass he is, deviating only to talk about how he loves a woman ("Be There") and how he absolutely under no circumstances loves a woman ("I'm the Boss"), a long with a somewhat confusing moment on "Get Off My Dick" where he actually brags about the first-week sales of Blood Money. Hav's threats barely merit quoting. If you've spent enough time listening to New York rap, you've heard the exact same sentiments delivered in about a million different ways, and Havoc doesn't have enough assurance or style in his vocal to distinguish him from the hundreds of mixtape rappers who have come up in the years since Mobb Deep first hit the scene. Sometimes, Hav can be almost laughably awkward. On "Balling Out": "I'm right where I'm 'posed to be like feng shui/ Got 'em nervous like a kid in school on his first day." And on "NY 4 Life": "I got an icebox where my heart used to be"; if you're borrowing your badass quotes from Omarion, it's time to take a long look in the mirror. But those clunkers are rare; most of the time, Havoc's voice merely drifts by, resisting attention.
Havoc was always better-known as a producer than as a rapper; his drizzly, melancholy mid-90s beats had an eerie menace only matched by the RZA. In more recent years, though, he's ironed most of the idiosyncrasies out of his tracks, concentrating instead on the leaden, synthetic beats that pad out so many commercial rap records these days. At this point, Havoc is neck-and-neck with Jake One for the dubious honor of being called the most dependable producer on the G-Unit assembly line. And The Kush is full of the sorts of beats he's been doing on consignment lately; spacey heartbeat drums and woozy synth-textures abound. But there's a sort of pleasing consistency to his tracks on this album; they all blur together into a long, comfortable background thump. "Balling Out" marries nicely tense drum-rattles to urgent organ-bleats. "What's Poppin' Tonite" is weirdly pretty, its gasping ethereal synth-tones sustaining for as long as possible. And with its quiet horn-loop and muted snares, "Be There" is quietly gorgeous, a welcome reminder that this guy used to find beauty in menace regularly. On headphones, this stuff melts together into a comfortably cohesive unit.
The album's scope is slight; Havoc never leaves his comfort zone lyrically or musically, and it's over in less than 40 minutes. About half the songs come with decent but indistinct guest-spots from random mixtape-rapper types with names like 40 Glocc and Nyce. It's tough to hate the album, but it's just as tough to come up with any sort of emotional response at all. As pleasantly unified as the album might sound, there's just no apparent reason for it to exist. And that brings us to Prodigy's one brief guest-appareance on "Set Me Free". P sounds tired and on autopilot, repeating the word "don" over and over again until he's exhausted its potential and then still going with it. As flat as he might sound, though, it always feels like something powerful might happen when Prodigy's on the track. It's the only moment on The Kush where that's even a possibility.
Last week, Prodigy pleaded guilty to gun possession and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. For the foreseeable future, Havoc is going to be upholding the Mobb name all by himself. If The Kush is any indication, he's not up to the challenge.
