One of the cornerstones of the New York hardcore movement, The Infamous is Mobb Deep's masterpiece, a relentlessly bleak song cycle that's been hailed by hardcore rap fans as one of the most realistic gangsta albums ever recorded. Given Mobb Deep's youthful age and art-school background, it's highly unlikely that The Infamous is drawn strictly from real-life experience, yet it's utterly convincing, because it has all the foreboding atmosphere and thematic sweep of an epic crime drama. That's partly because of the cinematic vision behind the duo's detailed narratives, but it's also a tribute to how well the raw, grimy production evokes the world that Mobb Deep is depicting. The group produced the vast majority of the album itself, with help on a few tracks from the Abstract (better known as Q-Tip), and establishes a spare, throbbing, no-frills style indebted to the Wu-Tang Clan. This is hard, underground hip-hop that demands to be met on its own terms, with few melodic hooks to draw the listener in. Similarly, there's little pleasure or relief offered in the picture of the streets Mobb Deep paints here: They inhabit a war zone where crime and paranoia hang constantly in the air. Gangs are bound together by a code of fierce loyalty, relying wholly on one another for survival in a hopeless environment. Hostile forces -- cops, rivals, neighborhood snitches -- are potentially everywhere, and one slip around the wrong person can mean prison or death. There's hardly any mention of women, and the violence is grim, serious business, never hedonistic. Pretty much everything on the album contributes to this picture, but standouts among the consistency include "Survival of the Fittest," "Eye for a Eye," "Temperature's Rising," "Cradle to the Grave," and the classic "Shook Ones, Pt. 2." The product of an uncommon artistic vision, The Infamous stands as an all-time gangsta/hardcore classic.© Steve Huey /TiVo

A relentlessly bleak cornerstone of mid-'90s hip-hop, the Queens duo's second album has all the foreboding atmosphere and thematic sweep of an epic crime drama.© TiVo

Providing a fairly even-handed representation of each album pre-Blood Money, this 17-track anthology is more like a sampler than a proper "best of." Three tracks are taken from both The Infamous and Hell on Earth -- Mobb Deep's pair of must-own mid-'90s classics -- as well as lesser works like Infamy and Amerikaz Nightmare. Other albums, including Prodigy's H.N.I.C., are represented once or twice, and a pair of previously unreleased cuts -- middling G-Unit-era productions from Havoc -- are added to bait the hardcore fans. Those same fans could argue about the track selection until the end of time (a true best-of might be as much as 70 percent reliant on the first two albums), but the disc is a fine way to get yourself acquainted with one of the most excellent East Coast hardcore duos, and it'll only reinforce the compulsory nature of The Infamous and Hell on Earth. [Eight years after this 2006 set came out, Legacy released Playlist: The Very Best of Mobb Deep, which consisted of the same tracks.]© Andy Kellman /TiVo

Throughout their 15-year-plus career, Mobb Deep has seen their share of ups and downs. After their sophomore effort, the now-classic the Infamous set the bar for unflinching, reality-based East Coast thug rap, and their follow-up, Hell on Earth, upped the ante for bloody, gunplay-driven imagery to almost cartoonish proportions, the duo fell into a cut-and-paste routine delivering a handful of more-of-the-same efforts (see "Murda Musik," "Infamy"). Then came the notorious 2001 Summer Jam festival when the Mobb's street cred suffered a blow thanks to Jay-Z's revelation of a certain photograph that likened Prodigy to the African-American equivalent of Billy Elliot. For finicky hardcore rap fans whose concept of respect almost always corresponds to "realness," Prodigy's (and Havoc's, by extension) thug image was called into question. Despite the duo's consistently murky and ever-more violent output since then, the Mobb Deep brand never fully recover from Jigga's suckerpunch, even after a short-lived affiliation with 50 Cent and G-Unit -- arguably the East Coast outfit which most projects uncontested "realness." Their eighth full-length effort, The Safe Is Cracked, represents a symbolic return to Mobb Deep's underground roots. Released on West Coast indie label Siccness (best known for putting out the ultraviolent, horrorcore of Brotha Lynch Hung) with nearly zero promotional support behind it, The Safe Is Cracked is a collection of grimy, street-level cuts, heavy on lyrical nihilism and spine-tingling production-- the sort that earned Mobb Deep the respect of hardcore hip-hop heads way back when-- and bookended by two audio excerpts from a DJ Envy telephone interview with an incarcerated Prodigy (just to add an extra touch of "realness"). Still, it's not an official studio LP; the tracks included stretch back as far as 2004, a few sound like they were intended for the Blood Money track list (the piano plink beat of "Yea Yea Yea," for instance, feels like it was tailor-made for 50's flow) but, in contrast to that mediocre Interscope release, there's nothing here that could be considered radio-friendly. Always known for antagonistic lyrics, Prodigy pushes his screw-faced skulking even further, explaining why he refuses to be cheerful on the haunting album-opener "Heat"-- "I don't even tease myself no more/Or put smiles on my face, man that shit is all wrong." Havoc and Prodigy then move into downright silly territory on "Watch Ya Self" as they rock over a shlocky Count Dracula organ loop, warning their enemies, "Watch yourself/Your life could end up like a horror flick" without a hint of self-irony. Elsewhere, paranoia and mistrust abound with Prodigy musing, "They wanna put us in boxes, them coffins and them jail cells/They wanna catch us on tape snitchin' on ourselves" on "Can't Win 4 Losin'," and spitting over the rowdy, electric-guitar-driven beat of "Get Out Our Way" with authority, "Y'all die coward's deaths/We go down in infamy/They shook of us/They wanna do us like 'Pac, Biggie." The most compelling songs here-- "M.O.B.," "Position" and "You Wanna See Me Fall" -- are built on vintage soul samples, in which Havoc composes melodic beatscapes which nicely offset his and Prodigy's hard-edged vocals and brutal subject matter. All things considered, The Safe Is Cracked is far from a classic but it proves that one of QB's finest acts still has plenty of fire. © Matt Rinaldi /TiVo