Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Beanie Sigel :: "All The Above"From The Solution (Roc-A-Fella; 2007)
Wherein Beanie "Beans" Sigel reemerges from a bid and drops a burly banger. I fucking love it. The drums, at once big and clipped, ricochet around the emcee, who sounds eerily at home in this cacophony. None of the hunger we'd associate with a newly freed man presents itself here, and I mean this as a compliment: his flow retains a cocky disaffection even when he puffs, "I ain't never been no snitch / Never been no brat / Never shot a n!gga in his back / .Got my case, did my time / Now I'm back!" The music is a club-ready confection, and Beans' flow feels as defiantly out-of-place as his toady ass would seem at the type of club that might let this cut burn. But some cord stretches the abyss between R. Kelly's big highkick chorus and Beanie's lived-in leer on the verse, and the track functions as an emceeing showpiece (ably biting Public Enemy, even) and a big dumb club anthem (Kelly crooning the line, "Still limp through the club like I'm holding a cane," even), and those of us who still think Beanie Sigel's unheard 2005 stunner The B.Coming was damn near a masterpiece are left with some excited head scratching to do. Especially considering how wack the new Wu single is.
Clayton Purdom :: 1 October 2007 |
⊙ :: Comments are turned off for this article.
