The Infamous

Havoc and Prodigy were both around twenty, coming off a debut that flopped, when they recorded this in 1995. It is a winter album about the Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing project in the country: lookouts, retaliation, cheap liquor, no way out and no interest in pretending otherwise. Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest helped shape the production under a different name, which surprises people, because nothing here is warm. Shook Ones, Pt. II became the anthem, with a piano sting nobody could trace for years.