He writes with hard economy about his two great subjects: poverty and desperation, pointing out to listeners the 'teddy bears where niggas got took out' on his streets, letting his gaze fall on the old heads 'sitting on crates, taking 40s to the face.' He once memorably told listeners that he 'ate sleep for dinner' most nights, and he has always written about scarcity with the vividness of someone who recalls that hunger still: 'He can't hear what they teaching him in school, 'cause his stomach too loud, screaming, 'I need food,'' he raps on 'Bang Bang Youth'.įor a rapper who has always let us into his darkest, innermost thoughts, however, from the harrowing scared-straight prison classic 'What Ya Life Like' through 'Feel It in the Air', This Time is disappointingly skimpy on personal details. Beanie raps with bruising force and sneakily creative cadences, and his verses are things of beauty on paper as well.

It's a rushed affair from start to finish, and it mostly serves to demonstrate the degree to which this great rapper has isolated himself.Īnd yet, his voice cuts through all of this static. He has always quoted Biggie liberally, but some of these raps are more Biggie quote than Beanie verse. The production surrounding him on This Time isn't just cheap-sounding, it's unimaginative, rote and generic, like Beanie prepared his verses ahead of time and then spent an afternoon matching them to random instrumentals sitting on his hard drive.

You got to have some kind of communication.For his longtime fans, then, This Time is poignant, not least of all because Beanie still sounds like himself: one of the hardest-hitting, soulful, and eloquent rappers of the last 15 years. Like, ‘Where was you at?’ There was a lot that weighed on me. “We ain’t never had that conversation,” he said. I was uncontrollable.”ĭespite being on better terms these days, notably reuniting onstage at a Tidal-hosted concert in 2015, Sigel remarked that he regrets not having a conversation about that particular moment in their friendship. “I believe at that time, Jay was thinking that I was unpredictable,” he added.

Like, that’s big bro.” Thankfully the two have been able patch up their issues since, and in hindsight he doesn’t blame Jay for doing what he did. That took away a lot of shit that I thought we had. “I never been crushed like that ever in my life,” Sigel explained.

In a new episode of Drink Champs, Sigel opened up about how he felt when Jay vouched for him in court when he faced attempted murder and federal weapons charges in 2003, but said he wouldn’t be responsible for keeping Sigel out of trouble. While Beanie Sigel and Jay-Z are on friendly terms these days, the two former Roc-A-Fella artists have had their fair share of issues in the past.īefore Beanie released a diss track directed at Jay in 2009, the two had a falling out around the time of the infamous Roc-A-Fella split and Sigel’s then-ongoing legal issues.

Youtube beanie sigel