Prodigy

Albert Johnson was born on 2 November 1974 in Hempstead, on Long Island, New York, into a family already rich in music. His grandfather was the acclaimed jazz saxophonist Budd Johnson, a figure of the big-band and bebop eras; his mother, Fatima Frances (Collins) Johnson, sang with the 1960s vocal group The Crystals, and his father, Budd Johnson Jr., performed with the doo-wop group The Chanters. From this lineage he inherited both a gift and an inheritance of struggle: he lived from birth with sickle-cell anemia, a disease that shadowed him with recurring bouts of severe pain.

As a teenager at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, he met Kejuan Muchita — Havoc — and together they formed the duo that would become Mobb Deep. Taking the name Prodigy, Johnson emerged in the early 1990s as one of the defining voices of East Coast hardcore hip-hop, standing in the same firmament as the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas.

Mobb Deep's 1995 album The Infamous became a cornerstone of the era, its bleak, unflinching portraits of Queensbridge life certified gold and widely regarded as a classic. Across the group's catalogue and his own solo records, Prodigy wrote with a stark, vivid candor, and he later turned that same honesty toward his life with sickle cell, speaking openly of pain he had long carried in private.

He died on 20 June 2017 in Las Vegas, at the age of 42. His verses remain etched into the foundation of hip-hop — the testimony of a life lived with unflinching truth. May his voice be honored, and his memory kept.