Pitchfork

When it quietly showed up on YouTube last November, the darkly surreal video for Prodigy's "Mac 10 Handle" felt like a glorious fluke. More than a decade ago, a teenage Prodigy-- half of the existential Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep-- had been one of the fiercest and murkiest rappers in New York. But that dark star faded quickly in 2001, when Jay-Z, onstage at Hot 97's Summer Jam, sneeringly displayed a picture of a young Prodigy wearing a dance-class uniform: "You was a ballerina/ I got the pictures, I seen ya." That blow seemed to send Mobb Deep into freefall. The next few years saw the group making a series of ill-advised moves, collaborating with the silky r&b quartet 112 and the braying producer Lil Jon on tracks that defanged the Mobb's nihilist magnetism. Later still, the apparent final nail: Mobb Deep signed with G-Unit and released the dismal Blood Money, an album that tried to replace their gritty expressionism with vindicated new-money gloating. It failed colossally.

But six months later, there was Prodigy on YouTube, muttering hazy death threats over the nervous percussion-ripples and eerie bass-burbles of Edwin Starr's "Easin' In". With its harsh, grainy film-stock, the "Mac 10 Handle" video seemed miles removed from anything on the Sucka Free Countdown mixtape. It was the image of a once-great rapper tossing away his commercial ambitions and digging instead into what we loved him for in the first place. Prodigy maintains that grizzled intensity through the entirety of Return of the Mac, a stronger comeback than anyone would ever have guessed.

Return of the Mac is just 10 songs and four interludes, and it's over in 40 minutes, barely half the length of the average major-label event-rap album. The beats all come from the New York-based producer and frequent Mobb collaborator Alchemist, whose intuitive chemistry with Prodigy makes for one of the most fruitful rapper-producer pairings in a while. Here, Alchemist creates a warm, organic bedrock for Prodigy's cold, weary monotone; in the producer's hands, the rapper's weathered crackle of a voice feels like a natural outgrowth of the landscape. Alchemist heavily samples the lush psychedelic soul of early-70s blaxploitation film soundtracks, wringing those weeping strings and disembodied moans for maximum pathos. Over those tracks, Prodigy's violent threats don't sound gratuitous; they become the commonsense warnings of a tired old gunslinger.

Over and over on Return of the Mac, Prodigy laments his own desensitization, constantly muttering variations on one theme: "New York made me this way." Success was never a great fit for P; a sufferer of sickle cell anemia, he always had a joyless bluntness in his voice even when he was celebrating his wealth, like the money in his pocket couldn't ease the pain in his bones. So the patient hardness he displays on this LP feels much more natural. Half the time, he doesn't even bother to rhyme, but his images still resonate: "Have different colors leaking out you/ Like red, yellow, and white/ Got some stomach on your Nikes."

Lyrically and musically, Return of the Mac feels like an immersion into a pre-Giulinani New York that may never have actually existed. Slowly, a lyrical picture emerges of the old, hard New York, a place where hopelessness leads to bad faith and violence. But as at home as he might be in the squalor, Prodigy never delights in it, lamenting instead: "Niggas bodied JMJ right there in Queens/ Goes to show there's no respect for the OGs." Alchemist's invocation of that era is entirely theoretical. The producer, after all, grew up white and privileged in Beverly Hills, first coming to prominence with the Whooliganz, the rap duo he formed as a teenager with James Caan's son Scott. But even if Alchemist's New York is a fantasy dystopia learned from old movies and rap records, it meshes perfectly with Prodigy's battered memories.

Return of the Mac isn't a rehabilitation move for Prodigy; he neither flaunts nor denounces his G-Unit affiliation, and only makes occasional passing references to 50 Cent. What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him. Amazingly, P originally conceived this piece of work-- the best thing he's done in well over a decade-- as a promotional mixtape, a quick move to build anticipation for H.N.I.C. 2, his official second solo album. "This the mixtape; imagine how the album sound," he says on "Stop Fronting". But if the presumably more commercially aware H.N.I.C. 2 is anywhere near as powerful as Return of the Mac, I'll be amazed. Again.