Hey, I'm Ellen from Jacksonville, Florida. Hey, I'm Cody from Emmanage, Alberta. I'm Eric from Nashville.

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It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorn. You know, a lot of performers can point to a moment that was their break into the business.

The guys in Mob Deep definitely have one. They're a rap duo. They go by their names Prodigy and Havoc.

In the early 90s, they were just high school kids with a dream. One day, the way Prodigy tells it,

they waited outside the offices of deaf jam records with their demo tape and a pair of headphones.

They waited there begging anyone walking inside to stop put on a headset and listen. And eventually, someone dead.

And he was like, all right, I'll give y'all a listen. He put the headphones on and he listened to the music.

And then he took it off. And he was like, you know what? I like you guys. And he's like, we are from, we say we're from Queens.

So he was from Queens, too. So he was like, all right, look, I'm going to bring y'all inside the office. I'm going to introduce y'all to some people.

You know, I'm going to try to help y'all. That was a major turning point for us. We had a connection. He brought us and made us inside us now.

That's how we felt.

The guy who stopped to listen, it was Q-tip from a tribe called Quest. It's Bullseye.

Coming up, my conversation with the rapper Prodigy, who's half of the seminal hip hop duo, Maude.

They'll talk about the group's big break, growing up with sickle cell anemia and the challenge of an aggressive sometimes abusive father.

We expected him to always be tough.

My father was a karate sensei. He would always push me and make me fight people. You know what I mean?

He would go, go fight that kid and take a knife with you, too. And that's what I do.

Quest, LA Times book critic Carolyn Kellogg, shares some of her all-time favorites.

And I'll tell you why you've been paying way too little attention to Randy Newman all these years.

That's coming up on Bullseye. Don't you miss it? Let's go.

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