Beanie Sigel ^Featured

Even more than other hip-hop musicians who have spent time in prison, Philadelphia's Beanie Sigel made music that, for all its gangster bravado, sometimes seemed haunted by the jailhouse and the prospect of going there. Rapping about prison became prophetic for Sigel, who began serving a one-year sentence in a New Jersey federal prison after pleading guilty to a charge of unlawful possession of a firearm in early 2005. Sigel's album The B.Coming was released while he was still incarcerated in March of 2005, and the rapper's life story became part of journalistic and music industry discussions about what effect imprisonment might have on his career and those of other jailed artists. Prior to that, writer Bret Love of All Music Guide had called Sigel 'arguably the hottest thing to come outta Philly since (hip-hop group) the Roots.'

Beanie Sigel was born Dwight Grant in Philadelphia on March 6, 1974. Sigel was a name he took from that of a street in his tough south Philadelphia neighborhood; "Beanie" was a nickname his grandmother gave him. Sigel ran afoul of the law and notched the first of an eventual eight arrests when he was only 14. "I'm from the streets, straight off the block," Sigel told the Philadelphia Tribune. Among his more legitimate activities when he was young were selling Coach leather goods and working as a "squeegee man"---cleaning the windows of cars stuck at busy city intersections and then collecting money from their drivers.

Like many other young people in musically rich Philadelphia, Sigel tried out his hip-hop wordsmith skills, appearing on a mixtape assembled by producer DJ Clue and contributing a verse to the Roots' "Adrenaline." In the fall of 1998 he caught the attention of the duo Philly's Most Wanted, later famed for their album Get Down or Lay Down, who were at the time little known beyond Philadelphia. The duo persuaded Sigel to join them at a meeting with the heads of the Roc-a-Fella label, rapper Jay-Z and entrepreneur Damon Dash, who were then well on their way to becoming the most consistent hitmakers in hip-hop music. At the meeting, Sigel impressed both Jay-Z and Dash with his rhymes. He wasn't a virtuoso poet, but his material was straightforward and vivid, filled with detail about the violent life on Philadelphia's streets.

Three days after the meeting, Sigel was in the studio recording "Reservoir Dogs," a track to be included on Jay-Z's Vol. II ... Hard Knock Life album. "Everything was new to me," Sigel told the Tribune. "I had never been in the studio. I never knew how to construct songs. Jay had to teach me how to count music and how to construct a hook." Jay-Z's album spent five weeks atop Billboard magazine's album sales chart, and a buzz began to build around the hip-hop kingpin's new find.