Prodigy And The America That Raised Him
Mobb Deep's unapologetic poetry rose from the blacked-out hallways of this nation's ongoing nightmare, Kevin Powell writes.
"I wanna go home not sing this song
but I'm forced to perform speech napalm"
—PRODIGY, "Genesis"
To be a black man in America is to be under a constant state of enormous pressure, stress and danger, from outside, from within. From outside there is the ruthless reality of racism, jabbing and stabbing at you from every angle, in the mass media culture, at school with textbooks that forever omit you, with those police encounters that put your soul on trial even if a simple traffic stop, from individual meetings with those who view you as dangerous, immoral, aggressive, violent, whether you've demonstrated any such behavior or not. And then if you are me or the late Prodigy of the rap duo Mobb Deep, and happen to hail from one
