Philadelphia Weekly

Oh, you didn't know? Beanie Sigel traffics in fantasy. All the tracks in his catalog filled with misogyny and violence? Does them only 'cause that's what the fans want. He doesn't really mean any of it. Consider them his version of a Sopranos teleplay put to music--one fat slice of fable, a long line of tougher-than-leather mythmaking strewn together for affect.

Call it Sigel gone Hollywood.

Scarface. The Godfather. People love that stuff. More important, they're able to process it as fiction. Why, Sigel wants to know, can't his music be looked at through the same prism?

It's an interesting position, one taken by many a hip-hop artist over the years when faced with the all-too-common criticism that their ultra-violent lyrics may actually glorify violence. Especially, you know, when the rapper being criticized happens to have a fair share of legal woes brought on by participating in the violence his ultra-violent lyrics glorifying violence are about.

In the past Sean "Diddy" Combs has sung a couple bars from this familiar refrain. Ditto Busta Rhymes. Cam'ron too. On a recent episode of the phenomenal and thought-provoking BET series Hip-Hop vs. America, Nelly and T.I. wondered why no one gives Arnold Schwarzenegger grief for playing a bloodthirsty, cold-hearted cyborg assassin from the future in Terminator, but everyone heaps tons on them for peddling their own brand of fiction.

These guys believe this stuff, and it was pretty impressive to watch those two in particular as they tried emphatically to convince an audience to see the argument for what they thought it was--the mother of all double- standards, an Everest-sized splinter in the eye of all that is fair in the world.

Purveyors of common sense might note that the Governator isn't, like T.I., a convicted drug felon recently arrested on federal gun charges. They might also make the case that hip-hop is a city built on the banks of a river filled with keepin' it real, a troubling concept that's strangled the type of creative license Sigel and other rappers want so desperately to hang their lyrical hats on.

No genre of music since '80s hardcore has ever been so obsessed with the authenticity of those who make a living performing it, and because of this, even rappers who do play it straight and narrow are tainted by its reputation.

But say for the sake of argument you were able to roll with this conceit, that the entire history of gangsta rap is just an extended Saturday Night Live skit in which the players involved aren't really invested, but are merely, like Jon Lovitz as Master Thespian, "Acting!"

Bor-ring!

And it's no easy task. Especially with Sigel, Philly's favorite roughneck and Roc-A-Fella Records' most wily and convincing thug--their short-fused pit bull who's earned his reputation as a fire-spitting menace.

And now: an exercise. Try approaching Sigel's new album The Solution (out last week) with a clean slate, a mind bleached of all Sigel's past transgressions. See how long you last without being reminded of them.

On The Solution's opener "All the Above," Sigel, the self-proclaimed "Broad Street Bully," announces his return with a triumphant "Mr. Beat the Case is back!"--a line made much more effective when you consider Sigel has, in fact, beaten a real-life case (for attempted murder, no less). And just like that, our experiment is over. Yay, us. We lasted one verse!

"Above" is The Solution's first single, and its video sees Sigel arriving in Chicago for a visit with R. Kelly for help with two things: 1) a hit record, and 2) a scratch for an itch he can't reach.

That "itch," as you may have guessed, is code for an unfortunate someone Sigel needs whacked. By video's end, it's scratched.

"Acting!"

"Gangsters aren't sworn in--they're born in," Sigel himself writes for BET's Hip-Hop vs. America companion blog. He uses the pithy phrase as an exclamation point on a paragraph explaining that, now more than ever, it's imperative that a rapper walk the walk because kids "will Google you" to make certain you are what you say you are, even using the high school you went to and grades you got there against you. This comes out of left field just a few short paragraphs after Sigel again rehashes his lyrics-as-fictional-Hollywood-screenplay theory.

And speaking of Hollywood (and things that come out of left field), there's a scene in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket wherein Matthew Modine's character Pvt. Joker invokes the ire of a colonel for writing "Born to Kill" while wearing an oddly chosen accessory on his fatigues: a peace button.