What's good y'all you're listening to Coatswitch, I'm Gene Demby,

Jareena's out this week.

So late last year on the podcast, during one of the songs giving us life segments, we

remember the life of Prodigy from Mob Deep.

And for those of you who don't know, Mob Deep was a big ass day in the 1990s.

They had this bleak, gritty sound that, and a lot of ways would come to define East Coast

hip hop for years to come.

This very dope instrumental you listen to right now, that's from their song Quiet Stone.

So it's the late summer of 2017, and Prodigy is performing at this concert in Vegas, and

he's not feeling too well so they rush him to the hospital.

But he never comes out.

At the age of 42, Prodigy of Mob Deep was dead.

And we should say, Prodigy was no stranger to hospitals.

He spent a lot of time on them growing up because he was often in excruciating chronic

pain.

Here's a disease that a lot of folks might know colloquially, a sickle cell.

But the medical name is Sickle Cell Anemia.

It's an inherited disease, and there are hundreds of thousands of people in the US who have it.

Most of them are black, although there are lots of people of South Asian descent and

Arab descent who have it too.

And as it happens, September is Sickle Cell Awareness Month.

That's why we're bringing you an episode of this podcast that we really dig from WNYC.

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