UFO, Illuminati and 42: Prodigy Dies

Prodigy (born Albert Johnson) died June 20, 2017. A source tied to the death has now informed Digital Music News that an autopsy will mark the cause of death as "accidental asphyxiation," referring to an object lodged into Prodigy’s windpipe - not sickle cell complications.

Note the "Jesus Christ Pose," similar to Chris Cornell, 

who also died from asphyxiation, due to hanging.

Conspiracy theories about the Illuminati are being heard, as Prodigy was due to write a musical on the topic.

Music journalist Kathy Iandoli said that Albert Johnson had been working on a musical about the Illuminati. He was in the middle of writing it, but it was yet to be released.
Kathy Iandoli co-authored Prodigy’s 2016 book, Commissary Kitchen, and stepped in to assist with the musical. (The cookbook shares easy-to-follow recipes to stay healthy while in prison. Iandoli, a critically-acclaimed music journalist had a close friendship with Johnson.)

In an interview with Complex, Iandoli said that the rapper and her had planned to complete a musical about the Illuminati.

The one thing we were planning on doing was a musical about the Illuminati and how the obsession with the Illuminati infiltrated people’s opinions of hip-hop. We were initially going to do an interactive type of musical with a company that runs The Illuminati Ball, but then we decided to take our idea to an off-Broadway situation. Tell a story with a very specific beginning, middle, and end. But [the story] began with prison; it was semi-autobiographical.

During his musical career, Prodigy prominently mentioned the Illuminati multiple times. Speaking to Genius about the alleged secret society, the rapper said,

This dude named Adam Weishaupt started this group of powerful, rich people that basically shape popular opinion and the way the world is gonna move forward.

Explaining Johnson’s fascination with the secret society, Iandoli told Complex,

[Prodigy was interested in] how people absorb information and what they do with that information. The thing about the Illuminati, as it pertains to hip-hop, is that many people view it as being this key to abundant wealth. And of course we don’t even know if it exists, but what P would really speak about was the idea of people using it as a meal ticket.

Mobb Deep: Prodigy (below) and Havoc. Courtest Prodigy.

Rapper Prodigy, one half of the influential hip hop duo Mobb Deep has died, according to a co-author on one of his books, Kathy Iandoli.
He was 42.
A cause of death has not been released, but the rapper had been hospitalized for complications caused by sickle cell anemia prior to his death, Iandoli told CNN.
Prodigy had been in Las Vegas for a Mobb Deep performance.
Born Albert Johnson, the rapper's family had a storied history.
His great-great-great-grandfather, William Jefferson White, founded Georgia's Morehouse College in the basement of his Baptist church.
His grandfather, Albert "Budd" Johnson, was a saxophonist and clarinetist for Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Benny Goodman.
Johnson met fellow Queens, New York native Kejuan Muchita when they were both freshman at Manhattan's High School of Art and Design.
The pair bonded over their shared love of hip hop and formed Mobb Deep. Johnson took the moniker Prodigy, while Muchita chose the performance name Havoc.
They scored a record deal as teens and released the album "Juvenile Hell" in 1993.
The project didn't generate much buzz, but the duo found more success with their sophomore album "The Infamous."

Johnson had some legal troubles. In 2007, he was sentenced to three years in prison for illegal possession of a firearm.
He detailed that incident and more in his memoir My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep's Prodigy.
"There were too many other adventures to squeeze in: his family's rich historical and musical legacy; his lifelong battle with sickle cell anemia; UFO sightings; episodes with Lindsay Lohan, Mary J. Blige, and Lil' Kim; and his contributions to the golden era of hip-hop," Johnson's memoir co-author, Laura Checkoway, wrote in a 2011 piece for the Village Voice.
In 2016, the rapper published Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook with Iandoli, which contained recipes and stories about the food he experienced while in prison.
Johnson was mourned on social media Tuesday by many fellow artists, including rapper Nas, who was the first to post about Johnson's death. Source.

My Infamous Life, was published April 19, 2011.

There were too many other adventures to squeeze in: his family’s rich historical and musical legacy; his lifelong battle with sickle-cell anemia; UFO sightings; episodes with Lindsay Lohan, Mary J. Blige, and Lil’ Kim; and his contributions to the golden era of hip-hop. In the mid-’90s, he and his rhyme partner Havoc, who met as freshmen at Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, broke ground with the gun-riddled version of hip-hop they dubbed “reality rap,” spawning instant classics like “Shook Ones Pt. II” and “Quiet Storm.” At 36, Prodigy, trying his hand at being an author, is exposing the backstories behind rap battles, robberies, deaths, brawls, and beefs with Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Nas, Jay-Z, Keith Murray, Capone-Noreaga, Ja Rule, and Saigon. - Laura Checkoway, Source.

My Infamous Life, published by Simon & Schuster, 2011, contains this passage:

pg 209-210
Suddenly, all the power went out. I looked out the window and saw that the whole block was blacked out, so I decided to go to bed. As I lay down next to KiKi, a bright white ight beamed into the bedroom window. It looked like a police helicopter's searchlight, except it was silent. Oh shyt, are the police looking for somebody over here?

"Kiki, get up!" I reached over to wake KiKi. "Look at this shyt!" The bright white beam began changing colors-red, yellow, green, blue, orange-repeating randomly. "Do you see this shyt?" I asked.

"What the fukk is that?" Kiki said. "Do you see this shyt?" "Yes, go look out the window and see what that is!" she said. "I'm not going near that window."

I knew what it was. A UFO was hovering over our crib, shining light beams into our bedroom.

page 211

The UFO came to my house to show me the light, as if to say, "Wake up, nikka! Snap out of it! We are real and you are important to us! Okay, we gotta go for now, hope you're ready when we come back!"

Joan Jett and the Jesus Christ Pose

As I mentioned earlier (see here), Soundgarden's Chris Cornell (July 20, 1964 – May 18, 2017) explained the term "Jesus Christ Pose" and his song of the same name, thusly:

You just see it a lot with really beautiful people, or famous people, exploiting that symbol as to imply that they're either a deity or persecuted somehow by their public. So it's pretty much a song that is nonreligious but expressing being irritated by seeing that. It's not that I would ever be offended by what someone would do with that symbol.

In looking into the deaths of prominent figures in the Grunge community, I came across the story of Mia Zapata (August 25, 1965 – July 7, 1993), who was the singer of the Seattle indie band The Gits, formed in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1986.

After Mia Zapata's move to the West Coast, she became very successful and a surprise spokesperson for women's music in Seattle.

But the flame burned out quickly. In Seattle on July 7, 1993, Zapata was tragically raped and murdered.

How the body was left seemed highly symbolic.

A woman discovered Zapata's body in the street near the Comet Tavern, at around 3:30 a.m., near the intersection of 24th Avenue South and South Washington Street in Seattle's Central District.

Zapata’s body was found with her arms out and her legs crossed, and she was placed between two Roman Catholic buildings on either side of the street. Zapata’s body was found, as Unsolved Mysteries noted, "lying face up in an almost Christ-like pose."

"A Christ-like pose"?

In the aftermath of Zapata's murder, friends created a self-defense group, Home Alive, which organized benefit concerts and released albums with the participation of many of Seattle's music elite, including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Heart, and the Presidents of the United States of America. Joan Jett also recorded an album with the surviving members of the Gits called Evil Stig ("Gits Live" backwards).

Joan Jett and Kathleen Hanna (pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement) wrote a song called "Go Home" that was later released on Jett's 1994 album, Pure and Simple.

Jett also recorded a single, "Bob," whose earnings were contributed to the investigation of Zapata's murder. To this end, the band Gits and Jett appeared on the television show America's Most Wanted, appealing to the public for information. The case was solved in 2004, when Zapata's murderer, Jesus Mezquia, was brought to trial and convicted. (Yes, his name is Jesus.)

Intriguingly, on July 13, 2008, Joan Jett guest-starred in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. The episode was named "Reunion," and Jett played a fading rock musician named "Sylvia Rhodes." 

"Rhodes" ends up dead on her apartment floor.

Lost on the 2008 audience, of course, was that the pose Jett took on the television drama appeared to mirror how Zapata was found in 1993.

Looking closer at the promotional photograph from the episode, the positioning also duplicates a side view of the Thoth Tarot card of The Hanged Man.

The Thoth Tarot is a divinatory tarot deck painted by Lady Frieda Harris according to instructions from Aleister Crowley. Crowley referred to this deck as The Book of Thoth. Lady Harris was invited to meet Crowley on June 9, 1937, and on May 11, 1938, Lady Harris became Crowley's disciple and also became a member of Ordo Temple Orientis.

And, I must observe, Chris Cornell went from the Jesus Chris Pose to The Hanged Man.