On paper, Mobb Deep's decision to sign to G-Unit wasn't all that insane. For one thing, it's not like they had anything else going on; the Queens duo peaked years ago, they hadn't been taken seriously since Jay-Z bashed them, and they were getting clumsier and more desperate every year. For another, the duo's stark, nihilistic early work was a pretty clear influence on fellow Queens native 50 Cent, whose Get Rich or Die Tryin' was the bleakest, most violent big-selling rap album since DMX debuted. The big difference between the two camps was always in surliness. For all his gun-talk, 50 Cent is an optimist at heart, and his good-natured sing-songy hooks have a goofy, self-satisfied warmth. Mobb Deep have never been warm or optimistic, and their wispily claustrophobic mid-90s output set new standards for bloody paranoia. For this to work, they'd have to find some happy medium between two fundamentally opposed dispositions.
Mobb Deep only pull off that balance once, on "Pearly Gates", a sunny track by Exile. Over a gorgeously lilting gospel sample, 50 Cent stays happy and congenial even when he's rapping about how everyone wants him in prison and then delivering a perfect little chorus: "Got a gift, I'm special with the flow, I'm good/ Shit, I done talked my way up out the hood." Havoc has a nice verse about redemption and Prodigy, the Mobb's craggily hoarse frontman, changes everything with one about how he hates God; it's stunning in its vicious rage ("For leaving us out to dry in straight poverty/ For not showing me no signs they watching over me"). It's a great moment, but you wouldn't know it from Blood Money's commercial release. Some Interscope bean-counter decided the song was too volatile and blurred out all the fuck-God stuff, rendering a potentially powerful song toothless.
The rest of the time, Prodigy sabotages himself, leaving behind his harsh gutter-speak for clubbed-up money-talk. That's not a bad thing in itself, but Mobb Deep can't pull off triumphant, and so their boasts sound empty and joyless, and their misogyny is mechanistic-- just as boring as it is objectionable. Worse, Havoc and Prodigy can barely ride their own beats anymore; they sound beaten-down and defeated.
Blood Money works when the two look back to times when G-Unit money wasn't on the table, remembering themselves as poor Queens kids longing for dirtbikes on "Daydreamin'", talking about getting their first guns on "The Infamous". Musically, some of the tracks are breathtaking; on "Click Click" and "Its Alright", Havoc takes G-Unit club-rap and makes it harsh and queasy, signifiers of smoothness rubbing up against each other just wrong. And Prodigy can still be truly menacing when he offers chilling specificity: "Gunpowder resi on the sleeve of my Pelle." But too much of Blood Money represents something sad and fascinating-- two demons domesticated, two artists who have willfully transformed themselves into hucksters.
