🎼 Prolific Prison Songs 🎵 Beanie Sigel 🎙 “What Ya Life Like” 🎙
Prolific Prison Songs is a blog dedicated to the most powerful prison songs recorded in history. It's only right that I began where it all started for me, and that's What Ya Life Like by Beanie Sigel. 🎙
Curated & Written by BL Shirelle.
What Ya Life Like
The year was '99 / we was 11-12 / stuffing them 12/12's / we shared a .38 / we had like 12 shells… (IYKYK) I had to lol.
Really, this was the beginning of the Roc-A-Fella reign and Beanie Sigel was my favorite rapper at the time (still in my top five). He was from Philly and his grit, hunger, and wordplay was overwhelming every rapper he featured with. Every radio freestyle was dominant. With Beans you felt like every word was real, so it was fitting that his debut album was called The Truth.
I skipped school to go to Tower Records to get it. I even remember what I was wearing. That's an indicator of this album's greatness. I had on a white and Carolina blue oversized Titans Steve McNair jersey (R.I.P.), matching hat, pencil pocket shiny blue, baggy Guess jeans and white and blue low top Air Force Ones.
I went to my basement where I had a 6-disk stereo, speakers hanging on the walls… everytime I listened to an album for the first time I listened down there with all the lights out. The only light illuminating was the light from the radio. By track 11… I was utterly TERRIFIED…. 😳
A fan video of the song, unofficial.
What gets lost in the powerful words of this track is the tailor made, cinematic production. Produced by Robert "Shim" Kirkland, the instrumental starts with jail bars slamming and a menacing, growling, orchestral crescendo of strings where Beans sighs, takes a deep breath and abandons all hope… "SHIT!!!" 🥺
Creepy keys enter as the bass of what sounds like a dungeon door slamming keeps the tempo going with a sparse high hat and bare rimshot. A somber, haunting horn plays a sad yet strong melody that you can imagine hearing at an honorable old gangsta’s funeral who lived by every code. As good as it sounds, the horn becomes a sample chop of itself as Beans paints a masterfully vivid picture of prison.
In my opinion What Ya Life Like is not only the most visceral song composed about prison, it also covers the most ground. It touches topics that only a lived experience can tap. He lets you know from the opening line this is NOT about rhyming. "Niggas wanna know if Beanie Sigel life is real / nigga, TWENTY FIVE TO LIFE IS REAL!!!"
He paints the picture of the conditions of solitary, "What you know about 23-1?/locked down all day underground never seeing the sun/ visits stripped from you never seeing ya son… you gotta wash out ya draws same water you shit/ brush, gargle and spit same water you piss…"
The fact still remains till this day – that your clothes are cleaner being hand washed in the toilet than being sent off to laundry. Think about that….
Some of the more interesting bars are on the topic of prison politics; realizing this is a place where criminals of all backgrounds and interconnections are forced to coexist together. Secret enemies are among you and you can't tell who's who inside the belly. "You down with this nigga… and you done killed his brother / but dog, don't think he don’t know it / damn… he a sucka cause he won't show it / paybacks a mothafucka and he won't blow it!" His voice is so commanding and threatening as he speaks about the violence of prison and weapons of choice. You realize how deep you're in when he talks about assaulting people with "logs" and a "push rod toilet sword." I'm actually glad we didn't have google back then. My imagination worked just fine lol.
I imagine Beans' hometown of Philly played a part in his positioning on this record. He was speaking from the perspective of a lifer, and here in Pennsylvania LIFE is just that; the rest of your natural living days. In my experience lifers tend to try to take it one day at a time, as the brain has a hard time processing a lifetime of incarceration. Even the people who enforce the sentences do not fully understand or grasp the concept of LIFE in prison. One person lives so many lives in one span; when you sentence a young person to LIFE; it's really multiple lives being confined. The realization is so scary, as Beans actually reaches the point of clarity:
"What you know about your towel on your cell when you alone at night?/ Or a jailhouse hunger strike? / Or you sittin' in your cell and just zone one night / And you think damn, I'm neva comin' home one night! / You got 5 years in, neva been flown a kite."
It's unimaginable …people serving LIFE who wouldn't know their own children if they walked by them. When you leave prison they're asking you to look up their kids and grandchildren and send them pictures because they haven't seen them in 35 years. You reach out to their families and the family has no desire to reopen a wound that has never healed in the first place. Beans really delves into this loneliness in just a few words. I could go on and on (I haven't even touched my favorite parts of this record) but I won't because I don't want to spoil it if you have never heard it and plan to give it a listen.
I'll just say What Ya Life Like was like Scared Straight on a beat. I've never felt so small, so insignificant, so unprepared for prison, the streets and all it came with. It's a classic record documenting the horrors of prison and the consequences of criminality. It wasn't intellectual nothingness, talking in circles while not saying a damn thing; it's what waxing poetic should be. What's most genius and devastating about it is it could have been recorded today. Literally every word. It’s no out of date slang or references to that era. My son knows it verbatim. It's a tipped over hourglass laying on the light side of the justice scale. A classic timepiece. "You listening to the realest nigga / Close ya eyes mothafucka, tell me you don't feel this nigga, the illest nigga" 💯
SIGNED AND SEALED,
