It's like the tumult of his life has him so distracted and beat down that his words naturally come out all punch-drunk and half-hearted. And there's something deeply poignant in the way he uses it on this album. But there's still something absolutely magnetic about that voice: a weathered, craggy under-the-breath rasp. Nearly half the time, his words don't even come close to rhyming, and we get a lot of couplets like this: "Don't be mad at me, be mad at yourself/ For being so garbage you need to be killed." Most of his lyrics are either violent threats or conspiracy theories, but the threats have lost the vivid specificity of the vintage Infamous-era Mobb days and the theories usually straight-up don't make sense: "They lit the Pentagon on fire/ That's lighting a pentagram on fire." He contradicts himself all the time, saying on the first song that money and jewelry don't matter and then threatening to break your cheekbone with his platinum rings one track later. He mutters out of the side of his mouth, barely noticing the beat. As a rapper, P's never sounded more detached. 2 finds Prodigy tangled in confusion, sounding like he's rapping through a haze of self-prescribed medication. The B.Coming was a bitter lament, a recording of someone taking stock of his life and dwelling on his mistakes. 2* isn't like Beanie Sigel's The B.Coming, another album made by a rapper about to start a prison term. (From his list of trends that he started: "#5 HOW I FOLD MY BANDANA," "#9 SAMPLING MUSIC FROM THE MOVIE SCARFACE,NOBODY DID IT BEFORE ME.NOT THE MUSIC"). Before Prodigy began serving his time, though, he reportedly recorded scratchy YouTube videos for every song on the album, signed a record deal with the translation-tech startup Voxonic, and started writing cryptically self-aggrandizing and weirdly addictive all-caps blog entries. By the time he got around to recording that sequel, though, Prodigy was staring down a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for gun possession, a term he's since started. 2, P's long-awaited sequel to his 2000 solo debut. Return of the Mac was originally intended as a mixtape teaser for H.N.I.C. It'd be great to say that Return of the Mac triggered a creative revitalization in Prodigy, but the past year has seen the man's life devolve into chaos, which positively bleeds through H.N.I.C.
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