“Run To The Roc” sees Young Chris and Omilio Sparks bitterly recounting their lives after the Roc’s breakup, while “Sicker Than Your Average” sees him Freeway spitting razor sharp bars. Even songs without organized structure, such as “Ready For War”, work with their scattered verses and dead air between them. Half of the album places him rhyming alongside the likes of Young Chris, Freeway or Omilio Sparks, and their group dynamic works just as well as it always did: each member maximizes the others’ impact without anyone getting outshined. But one of the more alluring aspects of Broad Street Bully isn’t even Beanie himself, but instead, the abundance of State Property tracks.
Aside from exceptions like the gem of a imagery that is “The Ghetto,” the disc lives up to its namesake by giving Beans a forum to showcase his brawny mic presence and brass-knuckled rhymes. And neither should the outcome of said album, Broad Street Bully: a project that shows the essence of who Beanie Sigel is, but lacking the direction and polish one would hope to see from The Ignorance, which he says is his next major release.īeans introduces Broad Street Bully as “ the lost files of some real street shit,” and for the most part, that formula works very well. So the news of him following the steps of his SP brethren Freeway by dropping an indie release out of thin air shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
He was part of a record label and a crew- Roc-A-Fella and State Property, respectively-that dissolved out of nowhere, and despite a few hit records, he has always seemed too rough around the edges to ever properly assimilate to the big business side of music. Not necessarily because of his prolificacy, but because of his artistic nature and his career. When one stops to think about it, Beanie Sigel seems like the primary specimen for an “unreleased music” compilation.