remember when duns were young

You might not’ve been able to tell it here, but “Tick Tock” was my jam for all of second-half ’04. Perhaps the last classic Prodigy verse, wherein Our Top Dun turns to the streets of his memory and spits how he spits best – “i was like, 12. they was like, blood, listen. keep your mouth closed and yr eyes and yr ears wide open. gangsta. i soaked it all in. my first hammer was a one-shot deuce-deuce. had my pockets full of bullets i was real loose.” — telling stories, how Prodigy got where he got, one of his most evocative moments – “little badasses. my nigga rap sat my down like this: he said, ‘p, you gon’ wind up dead. you an hav’ real good with that music shit. you need to stick to it, dun, get your mind off the street.'”
and a fine Nas verse, a bloody moment painted, and a melancholy, sweaty Nas-sung chorus, a Queensbidge summer in the ’90s, prolly, unpredictable and thick. Alchemist on the beat – deep groove bass sample, thrown back to ’70s soul.
And it’s just like, I hear “It’s Alright” on Blood Money, same beat different verses, Mary singing in complete sentences over five tracks of herself, the oral history of “Tick Tock” replaced by 50’s template for babes-n-verse. Prodigy now rapping rather disjointedly about a lady, minks, a whip, sugar daddyism, etc. Mary wants us to believe she’s going to put away her fears and learn to trust via Mobb Deep, like she forgot that one rap about a lady’s stomach as cum bucket. 50 brands the intro with as much rote CEO formality as Puff Daddy in the Puff Daddy days–say my name, say my name, like it’s not so canny that the track after that one borrows the same sample as “Hypnotize” (Herb Alpert’s “Rise”)– and I’m like, whatever, P and Hav, I’m out like Greg Tate.