For Mobb Deep's Havoc, love for Queensbridge is 'Infinite' The last album by one of hip-hop's great duos requires no asterisk, and the group embodies the spirit of its hood more than ever. The rapper-producer explains why the music is so imbued with a sense of place

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"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.

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"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.