Beanie Sigel approached every bar like a 400-pound deadlift, but he never let you forget how easy it came to him. “I gotta laugh ‘cause y’all work hard at this shit/ Think about it yo, I just started this shit/ Imagine if I put my heart in this shit,” he boomed on 1999’s “Pop 4 Roc,” the latest in a series of Jay-Z album tracks where he murdered his boss on his own shit. I’ve long suspected that “compared to Beans, you wack” hit harder than the Eminem line from “Ether,” but this being Jay-Z, he would not lose. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship, as the Broad Street Bully allowed Roc-a-Fella to keep one foot in the gutter during the increasingly flossy In My Lifetime trilogy and gave Jay-Z a more compelling foil than, say, Memphis Bleek or Amil — an in-house Scarface that could hold his own against the genuine article, a rapper of profound gravity that commanded love, fear, and, above all, respect.
