Features | Awards

The 3rd Annual Beanie Sigel Award for Mainstream Rap Shit that Only I (and Maybe Clay) Truly Understand

By Colin McGowan | 10 December 2010

Rick Ross
“B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)”
(Maybach Music Group/Slip-n-Slide Records/Def Jam; 2010)







We all get our day in the sun, Rick Ross. Somehow you’ve managed to spend a half-decade in it, beads of sweat caked on your belly like a salty hillock of ink. I initially understood it. “Hustlin’” was thunderously large and “RAWSE!” is an admittedly fun thing to yell. Plus, you were sort of lovable, what with your goofy swagger inadequately concealing your self-doubt like a meager XL over your rotund midriff. But it seems to me you have remained viable since due to a great ear for beats and by aligning yourself with better, more charismatic rappers than yourself. Seriously dude, your albums are smooth R&B hooks, gorgeous production, and a hot Jay-Z verse. That they are persistently listenable seems barely a product of your doing.

But enough of this disparagement. You’ve fulfilled potential I never knew you had, Ricky. “B.M.F.” is your masterpiece, your Eva Mendes-in-_Bad Lieutenant_ moment, if you will. Over its plodding sonorousness, you do a line off a Cuban model’s tits and transform into Godzilla for three minutes. For this brief spell, you, the pathetic little guy behind the curtain, actually get sucked through the machine and become the Wizard of Oz. Those stupid trinkets that adorn your bulging frame begin to shimmer like sunlight off a limestone pyramid. You are Big Meech, Larry Hoover, fucking King Ramses II. Even Styles P’s ridiculous line about “guns from Red Dead Redemption” cannot obscure your opus’s opulence.

And more importantly, you’ve given us another thing to yell. That is how history will measure your career, William Roberts, upon how many of your jubilant catchphrases we can expel from the bottom of our lungs after so much whiskey. In honor of this year’s Beanie Sigel recipient, I implore all readers to shout along: “I think I’m Big Meech! / Larry Hoover! / Whippin’ work! / Hallelujah!”