The B. Coming Turns 20

Beanie Sigel approached every bar like a 400-pound deadlift, but he never let you forget how easy it came to him. "I gotta laugh ‘cause y'all work hard at this shit/ Think about it yo, I just started this shit/ Imagine if I put my heart in this shit," he boomed on 1999's "Pop 4 Roc," the latest in a series of Jay-Z album tracks where he murdered his boss on his own shit. I've long suspected that "compared to Beans, you wack" hit harder than the Eminem line from "Ether," but this being Jay-Z, he would not lose. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship, as the Broad Street Bully allowed Roc-a-Fella to keep one foot in the gutter during the increasingly flossy In My Lifetime trilogy and gave Jay-Z a more compelling foil than, say, Memphis Bleek or Amil — an in-house Scarface that could hold his own against the genuine article, a rapper of profound gravity that commanded love, fear, and, above all, respect.

But Beanie overreached when he bragged on the same track, "I'm the reason Jay feel comfortable retiring"; that eventually came true, but it was four years later and had nothing at all to do with Beanie Sigel's commercial fortunes. The things you have to do to become a reliable, bankable rap star, those did not come easily for Beanie Sigel. For example, Beans reputedly wanted "Die," one of the grimmest tracks on his debut The Truth, to be the album's lead single and pulled a gun on Lyor Cohen when the Def Jam co-president tried to talk sense into him. Jay-Z never said he was "one hit away"; rather, he was someone who needed some guidance to avoid having his rap career derailed by petty street shit. Both Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel failed in their respective roles, and the result was a minor masterpiece.

Part The Fix, part 25th Hour, The B. Coming — released 20 years ago this Saturday — is a state-of-the-art, guest-heavy event album for a guy who really shouldn't have to do those things, and a mesmerizing meditation of a criminal whose past is finally catching up to him. The man born Dwight Equan Grant recorded The B. Coming in a state of legal limbo — in between being found guilty of a federal gun charge and serving a sentence that would last one year and a day. From the first seconds, he ensures you feel the walls closing in. There's no intro skit, no warm-up bars, no crossover attempt, just one of rap's most potent expressions of paranoia since "Mind Playing Tricks On Me," which Beans interpolates on the second verse of "Feel It In The Air." The Neptunes and Just Blaze beats would have to wait; instead, The B. Coming begins at a slow simmer with mournful saxophone wails and barely-there drums getting Beanie's "spidey senses tinglin'," the sort of thing you could hear billy woods or Roc Marciano rapping over in 2025. Shockingly, it's produced by Heavy D, who I'd known up to that point for rap songs that got played at Bar Mitzvahs and his role in "Guns ‘n' Roses," the absolutely ridiculous Lenny Kravitz feature from Blueprint 2.

An entire album in this mode could've been Beanie's The Blueprint, ditching focus-grouped pop concessions for I'm focused, man, elevated by the tragic circumstances surrounding its release. But The B. Coming doesn't stay in its four-cornered room for long, nor does it dwell on the specifics of what got him here. "With no union/ And no benefits, no dental plan/ I can't eat off no hundred grand," Beanie snarls at the top of the ensuing four-minute stress headache "I Can't Go On This Way," which plays out like more fatalistic sequel to "What We Do." In most years that aren't 2005, swapping Jay-Z for Young Chris would probably be a downgrade, but the latter was far more in tune with what Hov described a decade prior as "hustling out of a sense of hopelessness." There's no triumph to be had here, none of Jay-Z's nonchalance, no video with cameos from The Wire.

The B. Coming toggles between these two modes throughout. Beanie's struggles with women and substances are mostly set to slow and soulful tracks where unheralded R&B singers are brought in to do their best Mary J. Blige impression. On the stunning "Purple Rain," which has thankfully returned to streaming services, Beanie and Bun B recall their first experience sipping lean. For the latter, it's remembered like a baptism in a styrofoam cup, an initiation into Houston's thriving hip-hop scene "when Screw still had his gate up." While Bun saw entire new worlds opening up for him, Beanie sees himself in a long line of addicts trying to escape reality altogether. The closest Beanie gets to a glimmer of hope is the possibility of martyrdom on "Lord Have Mercy" — "I do dirt so my kids see heaven on earth."

The B. Coming might not have been Beanie Sigel's true make-or-break album, but it was for Dame Dash Music Group, an imprint created by its namesake in the wake of Jay-Z becoming president of Def Jam. I don't imagine it would've turned out much different had it dropped on Roc-A-Fella on its original release date in October 2004, though the two bonus tracks treat Beanie Sigel like the subject of a custody battle. First comes the hookless, endlessly quotable shit-talk summit with Jay-Z ("You couldn't break up the towers with Tomjanovich/ Or Osama bombin' shit" has been lodged in my brain for 20 years), followed by the Bon Jovi flip of "Wanted (On The Run)" which featured Cam'ron, a guy who loudly sided with Dame Dash from the very moment he signed to the Roc.

In the parlance of Hollywood, Beanie still wasn't considered someone who could "open a movie." This was most egregiously exemplified on The Truth, which should have ended with the most harrowing scared-straight track in rap history, but was followed by Jay-Z's long-forgotten "Hard Knock Life" flop sequel "Anything." Before that, The Truth was burdened by a gimmicky "A Gangsta's Fairytale"-style lead single and chintzy pop-raps, all of which presumably were meant to show Beanie's versatility but mostly diluted the potency of the tracks that actually worked. To be fair, he wasn't the only one still trying to find his voice on The Truth; the opening duo of "The Truth" and "Who Want What" feature the first Kanye West and Just Blaze productions on a Roc-A-Fella album, and they're virtually unrecognizable (in fact, Just Blaze was basically doing "we have Swizz Beatz at home"). The Reason was pretty much the same, only with the bouncier, vaguely West Coast beats that Jay-Z had already moved on from after Roc La Familia.

The B. Coming isn't without similar hedge-betting. There's a track with the Neptunes and Snoop Dogg that would have you believe that Beanie needed a "Change Clothes," and it's a miracle how little it fucks up the flow. Beanie has sounded at home on club tracks before, so long as he got to sound like the last guy you wanted to see at the club. Yet, uptempo Spanglish club bangers seem to bring out a more party-positive side of Beans; note how the video for "Flipside" is maybe the one time I've seen him smile for more than five seconds. Twista is the stylistic opposite of Beanie Sigel - flurries of jabs compared to devastating body blows. Yet they sound incredible together on "Gotta Have It," as Beanie shows off a more technical side — his percussive jolts on "Get off the block/ Before SWATs surround the spot/ We be locked in a box three hots and a cot" would bang just as hard as an a cappella. That's really about it for star power; no album with Redman and Sadat X could be accused of being A&R'd to death in 2005.

The B. Coming peaked higher on Billboard than The Truth and The Reason, both of which debuted at #5. At the #3 spot, it trailed new releases from 50 Cent and Beck, while topping other notable debuts in the Top 10 from Will Smith and Larry The Cable Guy. The B. Coming moved about 130,000 copies in its first week, comparable to the equivalent units sold by the most recent 21 Savage album, We Still Don't Trust You and Vultures 1, all of which debuted at #1 in 2024. In 2005, those were the type of numbers that got The B. Coming labeled as a "bomb" in Dan Charnas' indispensable rap biz history The Big Payback, proof of Dame Dash's executive incompetence commensurate with his failed PRO-Keds relaunch and the posthumous signing of Ol' Dirty Bastard.

Yet, another lane was presumably opening up for Beanie. You're gonna read a lot in this series about how 2005 was a seismic year for hip-hop in critical circles, about the pearl-clutching that accompanied a new wave of Blogspots and alt-weeklies treating The Documentary and Thug Motivation 101 with as much gravity as not just "artsier" rap blockbusters like Kanye or OutKast albums, but also the White Stripes or Queens Of The Stone Age. This had a trickle-down effect to the lower reaches of Billboard as well; a year prior, we were still in the "if skills sold, truth be told" mindset where the flagging fortunes of, say, Electric Circus or Phrenology or The Grind Date were proof of a collective failure, an ungrateful culture that still only wanted money, cash, hoes. In fact, Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine was basically a concept album about the injustice of Cee-Lo Green not selling more records.

Perhaps it's not entirely due to Kanye obliterating the Benz/Backpack Barrier, but a new kind of underdog would emerge, veteran East Coast hardheads on major labels tackling tried-and-true street shit with inventive linguistic flair that rivaled anything on Def Jux or Doomtree, wowing rap nerds while generally tanking at the box office — "A Trenchant Analysis of 'S.A.N.T.A.N.A.,'" the genesis of Das Racist and Genius, things of that nature. Beanie Sigel somehow now fit into that world; like Killer Mike, he first emerged as an enforcer for his popstar benefactors, and like Clipse, he constantly radiated an air of haughty malevolence. He could get all emotive over soul beats like Ghostface and, similar to Dipset, he just loved to rhyme the same word with itself over and over again.

Yet, Beanie Sigel never quite scanned as an eccentric like the aforementioned; I couldn't envision him going the path of Freeway and doing collab albums with Girl Talk or signing with Rhymesayers. Beanie did a freestyle acapella to nearly 20,000 people on his first tour, yet I just never could picture him playing SXSW showcases with indie rock bands or a 5 p.m. slot at Pitchfork Music Festival. You never know, but Beanie never made it easy for himself. Multiple reputable websites have "Beanie Sigel's Legal Troubles"-type slideshows, and frankly, it's a bit difficult for me to clock when he was in jail and and when he wasn't over the past 20 years.

Beanie re-signed with Roc-A-Fella for 2007's The Solution, but whatever momentum or goodwill he generated with The B. Coming was gone; rap had moved on, Beanie was now relegated to December release dates and no-budget Rik Cordero videos, and the only things I really remember are an atrocious R. Kelly feature and Beanie single-handedly trying to keep "no homo" in the lexicon to air out his grievances against skinny jeans. His next two albums were released, respectively, on something called "siccness.net" and, in a twist of fate, the relaunched Philly label Ruffhouse. As far as I can tell, Ruffhouse has done nothing but Fugees and Cypress Hill reissues in the time since. Throughout that period, Beanie desperately snuck out a series of Roc-A-Fella diss tracks, and if you've never heard them, you've probably heard Jay-Z respond on "Monster" and Drake's "Pound Cake/Paris Morton Music"; Beanie was "in his feelings," a fitting half a bar for coming at the king with drunken voicemails.

It's been a mostly sad state of affairs for Beanie Sigel in the past 20 years, but try as I might, I just can't conjure an alternate history where The B. Coming went platinum, rather than being a cult classic amongst my circle of 40-something rap nerds who still laugh about "My life in shape like I run about a mile a day." That line, which has tortured me to find the opposite of "humblebrag," comes from "Look At Me Now," the uplifting outlier of mogul talk on The B. Coming, where Beanie touts the State Property media empire. In 2005, this consisted of the following: Paper Soldiers, which in the realm of straight-to-DVD rapper movies from its era, is probably of higher quality than, say, Killa Season. It is also nowhere near as memorable. But hey, it's the cinematic debut of Kevin Hart! Meanwhile, the State Property clothing line distinguished itself, according to a press release, "with hidden pockets and gun holsters." I'd always been mystified by his claims of a State Property cartoon, and honestly, the hours I spent writing and researching this piece was worth it to find out that it was real.

Still, there's no reason that he couldn't have carved out a Jadakiss or Styles P-type career as a guy who puts out reasonably enjoyable albums every three or so years and randomly pops up on, say, ScHoolboy Q or Rick Ross or Kendrick Lamar albums to provide a jolt of old-head authority. I saw that vision on Beanie's guest verse on Conway The Machine's "Lock / Load," which served a reminder of his lyrical menace but also that he had a lung removed after a drive-by shooting in 2015. A few months ago, Beanie revealed he was using AI to restore his "old voice" as he worked on a new album. Imagine if he put his heart in this shit.