ZestSync

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 8, 2000; Page C01 "I ain't even chased this dream," boasts Beanie Sigel on his debut album, "The Truth," and he's not fibbing. Other rappers have spent years selling demo tapes from the trunks of their cars, but Sigel all but snared a record deal at Roc-A-Fella Records, one of hip-hop's hottest labels, after just two brief impromptu auditions.

So "The Truth" arrives freighted with expectations, even by the standards of the hype-fixated world of rap. Before Sigel's album had hit stores last week, Blaze magazine put the 25-year-old Philadelphia native on its cover, tagged as "rap's next big thing" and hailed as a prodigy whose rhymes are as effortless as they are powerful. That kind of billing can be a burden; only Samsonite outlet stores open with this much baggage.

Sigel, alas, can't shoulder the weight. "The Truth" is merely a reasonably good start, with some brief moments of musical inventiveness and the occasional, highly refreshing flash of humor. But it swaggers around territory already commandeered by others, and Sigel had nothing to do with the album's knockout number, "Anything," a Jay-Z tune that, it is safe to say, will stand as one of hip-hop's finest, most heartfelt moments of the year.

Despite his name, Sigel is not of the Judaic-Hebraic persuasion, a fact that will disappoint Jewish fans longing for their very own hip-hop emissary, a guy who can rap and kvetch. Born Dwight Grant, Sigel took the name of a street he grew up near in South Philadelphia (and Beanie is a nickname courtesy of his grandmother). His biography, both he and Roc-A-Fella report, includes scrapes with the law and stints peddling Coach bags and cleaning car windows with a squeegee.

"The Truth" borrows heavily from Jay-Z's playbook by featuring spare, grind-worthy beats stacked around brief, repeating hooks often sampled from songs that have nothing hip-hop about them. (Aging folkie Graham Nash and '70s keyboard-rocker Todd Rundgren make two of the more improbable cameos here.) In time-tested rap fashion, Sigel is obsessed with demonstrating his street credibility, a feat he seeks to achieve, in equally time-tested style, by denouncing other African Americans--although he favors a cruder noun--as daft and cowardly.

Sigel's rhymes sometimes surprise, as when he fires off a witty reference to the married strivers in the '70s sitcom "Movin' On Up." ("Welfare and white man, Lord, life ain't easy/ only ones movin' up was George and Weezy.") But the album too often skips humor to overplay its thug hand. "What Ya Life Like" and "Mack and Brad" plow hackneyed ground, all bravado and profane bluster. On "Stop, Chill," Sigel actually offers a list of hints for the aspiring drug dealer: "Stop putting drugs in your sock/ you're making it easy for the cops to catch you," and so on.

Why, thanks for the tip, Beanie.

"Mac Man" shines by using the sounds of the video game "Pac-Man" for a backing track while Sigel spins the chase-or-be-chased gestalt of that arcade favorite into a metaphor about Philadelphia street life. "Remember Them Days" is a rueful and relieved look back at growing up, with a whimsically poignant chorus by Roc-A-Fella label mate Eve: "Remember them days, all of us under the covers/ Remember them days, heating up the house with the oven."

All of this is overshadowed, however, by "Anything," a song already planted on the nation's hip-hop radio playlists. The tune samples, of all things, a snippet from the hit musical "Oliver!"

Jay-Z pulled off a similar stunt with "Hard Knock Life," a song that lifted a chorus of Broadway orphans in "Annie" ("Instead of kisses, we get kicks!") and juxtaposed it against a pitiless depiction of an adolescence on the streets. The combination was irresistible, in part because it was startlingly novel and because it brought melody to a rap song without compromising a bit of muscle.

"Anything" seems at first like the same gambit revisited, but it's more than that. The song is a hug in three verses, the first sung to a friend, the second to Jay-Z's mother and the last to a nephew. "When the rent was due," he tells his mother, "you would hustle like a pimp would do/ that wasn't a life meant for you/ you're a queen, you deserve the cream/ everything that gleams, everything that shines, everything that's mine." The lyrics are interrupted at intervals by a pipsqueak voice from the "Oliver!" soundtrack, singing, "Yes, I'd do anything, anything for you."

It works, movingly. And for rap, which is typically too macho-focused to betray feelings beyond rage and gratification, "Anything" is pathfinding, a study in how to broaden the genre's narrow emotional bandwidth.

If Sigel is wise, he'll take note of this lesson, taught right on his debut album, and learn from it.

(To hear a free Sound Bite from this album, call Post-Haste at 202-334-9000 and press 8171.)

© Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company

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