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. 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. "I'm from the streets, straight off the block," Sigel told the Philadelphia Tribune.
Sigel ran afoul of the law and notched the first of an eventual eight arrests when he was only 14. 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.
Prior to that, writer Bret Love of All Music Guide had called Sigel "arguably the hottest thing to come outta Philly since the Roots."īeanie Sigel was born Dwight Grant in Philadelphia on March 6, 1974. 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. 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. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
