"Flipping in the ghetto on a dirty mattress."
Long before Lauryn Hill spit those lyrics, depicting the mixed bag of injustice and ingenuity that comes with inner-city living, Kejuan Muchita, the rapper/producer, best known to the world as Havoc, was experiencing it firsthand. He was just six when he moved to Queensbridge with his family around 1981. This was pre-drugs and dope beats. Before crack upended the nation's largest housing project. Before rap became its most bankable export. The environmental hazards still felt like child's play back then. And young Kejuan was all in from jump – especially when the neighborhood kids magically converted a discarded mattress into a hood trampoline.
"Yeah, it's disgusting now to think about it, but we were jumping up and down on some pissy mattress in front of the building," Havoc reminisces with a laugh. "Those are my earliest memories of QB."
The end of innocence came quick, though. Reaganomics trickled down a plague of plastic crack vials. Whether or not you smoked it or sold it, you were sure to be disproportionately suspected of it. Just as surviving the systemic ills came to define life in Queensbridge, turning all that trash into sonic treasure became the neighborhood's illest rite of passage. While a neighborhood legend named Nasir would go on to illustrate the danger beyond his project window, Havoc and his partner-in-rhyme Prodigy totally personified the war going on outside as the duo Mobb Deep. Detractors of grimey '90s realism may have denounced it as ghetto pathology, but what they failed to see was the nurturing spirit of a wholly creative community rising from the concrete.
It's been 30 years since the Mobb's Infamous 1995 LP afforded Havoc the ability to outrun poverty and vamp from the projects for good. He's been gone now twice as long as he lived there. Yet, "I do still consider it home," he tells me on a long-distance call from L.A. "It's always going to hold a place in my heart, because it's where I grew up. It made me who I am today." That DNA runs through an unmatched discography — from their initially-overlooked debut, 1993's Juvenile Hell, through their seventh studio album, 2014's The Infamous Mobb Deep. With Havoc handling the bulk of the production while trading verses with Prodigy, the duo always trafficked in street vulnerability – whether suss'ing it out or stripping themselves of it. They turned violins into violence, a Sade sample into a survivor's confessional, in such a way that even their death threats were heartfelt. For that, they always had QB to thank. And blame.
With the October release of Infinite, their eighth studio LP, it's clear that home base is still the battery in Havoc's back. Even though he insists on calling it Mobb Deep's "final chapter" — making it the duo's first and last studio LP since Prodigy's passing in 2017 — the new album requires no asterisk. Unlike most posthumous rap releases, it's not stitched together or Frankensteined from previously used parts. Prodigy feels present on every track, with never-before-heard rhymes unearthed fresh from the vault of longtime-collaborator the Alchemist, who co-produced the album with Havoc. The chemistry between Havoc and P feels seamless, too. It's a testament, in part, to the sonic consistency the duo's maintained over three decades of hip-hop's constant churn. And everything about their dark and ominous signature sound they owe to Queensbridge.
"The influence can't be matched," he confirms. "If it wasn't for Queensbridge, I wouldn't be able to make this album today. And if I did make an album, it wouldn't sound like this." His sonic lineage runs deep. He still counts himself among the progeny of the original QB place-makers who laid the blueprint for boom-bap and waged rap's earliest lyrical wars on wax. He still pin-drops the location in his rhymes. ("It's QB / we always gon' rise to the occasion," as he spits on the new album's swan song, "We The Real Thing.") And, increasingly, Havoc finds himself advocating for its future — not just in the rap world, where its monumental impact is impossible to erase — but in the real world where its permanence in NYC's evolving landscape grows more precarious by the year.
For 15 years, Havoc clocked the seasons by the leaves falling from his favorite tree in Queensbridge. Just outside his building it stood. And something about the cyclical nature of it — especially in an environment where survival wasn't certain — fascinated him. "A year later that same tree would be there," he told me. "And it's still there to this day."
The thought of one day leaving Queensbridge never crossed Havoc's mind as a kid. "Growing up in QB, I remember I couldn't imagine not living there. I've evolved, of course, now. But that person that I was then was like, 'I don't ever want to leave this place.' That's how much love I have for the place."
He loved his hood and harbored no love for the elements that tore at the fabric of it. "Because some of the negative things that went on there, I just kind of hated. I hated to see my friend's parents strung out on drugs. I hated to hear about a friend's brother being shot and killed. I hated the poverty that was around me, you know what I mean. But then I loved the sense of community. I almost knew somebody from every block out there. Six blocks. We all knew each other. This is a time when kids would go outside. We did not have internet. No portable video games. No cell phones. So to go outside was everything."
He remembers having "a front-row seat" to Marley Marl's magic. Being a young protégé of Tragedy Khadafi, then the junior member of the Juice Crew, meant he often got to tag along as history was laid. Directly across from his building lived Marley Marl's sister, where the producer kept a DIY studio. "And one day, I got a chance to actually go into the apartment, which was even crazier, because I'm like, 'Yo, this is where he made "Check Out My Melody," and this is where he made 'The Bridge.' "
But inspiration wasn't limited to the musicians in his orbit; he was also catching a vibe from the homies around the way. "The music that my friends liked the most was the elements that I used to keep in mind when I was crafting my own beats. Because I knew if they liked those kinds of beats, then I could try to make something that sounded a little bit similar, but just with a Queensbridge edge."
He defines that edge as only Havoc can: "Oh man, you got to sound dark. You got to sound grimey, because nothing is bright and shiny in QB, you know what I'm saying. Everything is dark. So you want to make it sound like you're walking up the stairs at 3 a.m. in the morning, and making sure nobody's up on that next flight. You want to make the beat sound like that."
Every Mobb Deep album is an ode to Queensbridge. The love. The pain. The legacy. Havoc produced much of The Infamous in his childhood bedroom with an MPC-60, an Ensoniq keyboard and records borrowed from his father's collection. It's part of a time-honored tradition that spawned three generations of rap — from the Golden era (Marley Marl, MC Shan, Roxanne Shante, Craig G, Tragedy et al.) to his era (Nas, Mobb Deep, Cormega, Nature, Capone et al.) and beyond (Screwball, Big Noyd and others).
But you won't find Queensbridge Houses listed among the National Register of Historic Places. No honorary placards or street signs denoting its landmark status. No official markers declaring the site as the most famous public housing project in hip-hop history. Writer Thomas Golianopoulus questioned whether Queensbridge's rap legacy could be "endangered" when he wrote for Complex in 2014 about the failure of a new generation of MCs to emerge. To call Havoc the last of a dying breed almost hits too close to home.
In recent years, the calls to raze his former home have become louder as luxury high-rises close in on the housing project. A neighboring development under construction called The Orchard will be the tallest building in Queens — boasting such amenities as "a fitness center, a basketball court, swimming pools, theater rooms, fire pits, a dog park, a golf simulator, steam rooms, a podcast room, an arcade room and, of course, an orchard," according to The New York Times — when it opens in 2026. Last year, Long Island City, where QB stands, and neighboring Hunter's Point added 1,859 units of housing, according to the Department of Planning. While some of it falls under the city's definition of affordable housing, projected rental rates will range far beyond what most public housing residents are required to pay monthly.
The encroaching development is something Havoc has been watching play out for decades. "For twenty years I've been hearing that Donald Trump was going to buy the projects and throw everyone out," he told Vulture in 2014, when Mobb Deep performed a homecoming concert in Queensbridge. "I never paid much attention to it. But now, it's like the tip has come. You got all that land right there on the river, so close to Manhattan. Subway stops. Waterfront views. The park. It's worth more than Williamsburg. It can't last."
More than protecting its status as a hip-hop landmark, Havoc worries about preserving a space for people increasingly priced out. "QB is a stepping stone, but at the same time it's a community. These people have dignity," he says. "And I believe that a certain part of it needs to be preserved. You can't just try to erase the memory. There still has to be a place amongst the luxury to help the less fortunate for a time being."
If Infinite truly is Mobb Deep's last testament, may it forever stand as a sonic landmark to an era that will likely be reduced to rubble one day. If and when that day does come, and all 96, six-story, brown-brick buildings that comprise Queensbridge are turned to tombstone, it would behoove us to remember that this was not just some failed, government-defunded, public housing project gone wrong. It's a community, a cultural incubator, a hub of creative innovation. Against all odds.
Ultimately, its value may be denied, but Havoc is a living witness to its worth.
"Look, ain't nobody trying to, like, give struggle as a recipe. Because not everybody can handle the struggle, and not everybody deserves to go through it if they don't have to," Havoc adds. "[But] we know that this place breeds greatness. Just for that alone, this neighborhood needs to be invested into. And neighborhoods [like it] across the United States need to be invested into. And until we start advocating for that, we're just going to be having the same conversation."
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