Prodigy On 2Pac Beef

Mobb Deep's Prodigy revisited the turbulent mid-90s and his feud with 2Pac. In a recent interview, the rapper discussed just how the beef began and how deep their contempt for each other ran. 2Pac dissed Mobb Deep in several rhymes and Mobb Deep fired words at Pac in their 1996 song "Drop A Gem On 'Em."

"He had his Thug Life sh*t going on," Prodigy said in an interview, "When we made our Infamous album, we had a song called 'Survival of the Fittest,' and on that song, in the beginning, one of my mans that just came home from jail doing a 15 years [bid], his name is Ferg. That's Havoc's cousin, actually. Ferg is on that album and in the beginning of the song, he says, 'The Thug Life, we still living it.' ... 2Pac, you know, is the one most known for saying that. I think that pissed 2Pac off a little bit. He took that as disrespect, like, 'Oh, these n*ggas trying to say Thug Life da-da-da-da-da. That's our sh*t.' He didn't really come out and say nothing about it though until Snoop [Dogg] and Dogg Pound made a song, ['New York, New York'] we did the ['LA, LA'] sh*t. So when they made that, we were looking at it like, 'What? These n*ggas are kicking over our buildings in the video, stomping through the city.' It was real disrespectful sh*t."

"They knew that was disrespectful. So we went back at them n*ggas. And we made our version, 'LA, LA.' ... This is when 2Pac first signed to Death Row so I guess when he seen that, he was like, 'Aight, I'm going at these n*ggas. Hard body. He went at us.' So that's what that was about. [Any ill feelings?] Oh yeah, I wanted to kill that n*gga. Yeah, h*ll yeah. I wanted to f*ck that n*gga up, jump him, cut hm, shoot him, all that sh*t. It was beef. They were sh*tting on n*ggas and we were sh*tting on them and it was going to be a problem if we ever saw each other. I might have got killed, I might have got beat up, either way it was going to go down. ... Thankfully it never went down but it's bad that he had to die through all that petty beef bullsh*t. It was corny."