Maybe I haven’t given Mobb Deep enough love for how often they still get played in the house, in the car, on the headphones, etc. I’ve tried, and there are posts you can read here. But I didn’t quite see this post coming until I had a DJ Jazzy Jeff live stream on while we were cleaning the other weekend and had to stop to shazam this new song from Tiana Major9:

She made it a love song. It was, in Mobb Deep’s hands, a fake-thug warning made into an anthem. The spirit of the original, which - was in itself a “part II” but I can’t walk you through all the lore, was a statement to not pretend, and if you do, watch out for those who don’t. And in that same message, writing it out, it’s so obvious why it could be a problematic love song, too.

Who has courage? Why? And, does it even make sense?

Are you pulling the trigger? Just a critic? Are you not and are you running in the other direction?

We live, we die, we love and that’s humanity. Oh, and we write songs about it. Sometimes we re-write songs about it.

Part of the magic of the original (err, part II, again) is “I’m only 19 but my mind is old.” It’s the divvying of mature feeling across relatively immature life. It’s the stakes that come in it. It’s the same reason I love John Green and am always curios to listen to whatever teenagers are making even when it makes zero sense to me (where was laptop twee in my cheap cassette four track days… argh).

The human behaviors and emotions aren’t new. How we process them evolves. It’s exciting when somebody flips a familiar idea and turns it into a new piece of art, which I agree with Jazzy Jeff on this one, Tiana Major9 pulled it off.

It probably doesn’t hurt that Erykah Badu did her take on one not long ago, for the album she did with The Alchemist. In all the same ways, it’s juvenile, or maybe adolescent. Badu turned it into wanting to take walks after school and the flood of emotions that you can’t quite process.

Mobb Deep’s mature beyond years lyrics were harrowing in 1995. And their beats, they had so much musicality, as haunting and haunted as they were, that their sparseness left tons of room for melody. Plus they had the same weight. I am so here for these new takes because they’re exploring that space. I almost wish Mary J had done it first in the same era, but I’m also kind of thrilled to watch them be re-interpreted and re-celebrated, especially after Prodigy’s passing.

If nothing else, I’m going to figure out who’s doing what any time I hear one of these beats being flipped because they send me straight back to the old songs. Call me nostalgic, but I love it. And I genuinely think they nailed something timeless in these tracks.

To all the killers and the hundred dollar billers…

ps. if you ever need to get my wife hyped up for anything, this is (one of many, but relevant here) musical secrets: