Sidebar: Beans and X should get the Biggie treatment. The obstacles in life can stop you from doing a lot of trivial things, like being a GOAT rapper. These dudes have managers, lawyers, cowriters, producers, maids, butlers and a whole team of handlers to help them maintain their career. No one in anyone's given top 5 got a scratch on their face, let alone their record. Beans and X had to survive jail, drug addiction, near death, family death, crippling financial debt, etc. In the moment tho, them niggas were unstoppable. We already know what time it was with X... numbers don't lie. Your favorite rapper would kill their mama for 2 #1s in a year.
As far as Beans goes, you had to be there. You know how ppl fake rock with Griselda tho they don't sell that much? Beans was everyone on that label put together. Bars, conviction, background, relatability... he had it all. If you wanted to front on his verse in Reservoir Dogz, his verse on Do It Again definitely shook the world... and that was light. Before Nelly put a whole region on his back when everyone thought rap was NY, LA and "the south", Beans was repping Philly on every record. He introduced the world to that Philly lingo and flow. He's the reason Jay Z upped his pen game and stopped fucking up his album budget on Timbo beats. He's the reason we rock with Meek and these niggas now. He's the reason why you have to be believable to talk that street shit. To paraphrase Jay, the only thing missing was mass appeal to a wider audience. Beans was too stuck in the streets, but that was him. I feel like his real downfall was trusting Jay and Dame too much... both of them did him dirty. All that Jay pocket holding he was doing on that Solution album almost made me write him off as a rapper. 99-05 Beans can go toe to toe with any GOAT tho.
This was the last shred of the real Beans, around the time he got out of jail and was working on The Solution. I swear he would've been GOAT status if he kept at this trajectory and left Jay alone.
