How a near-death shooting damaged Beanie Sigel’s vocal chords forever
By the mid-2010s, it seemed like Beanie Sigel’s rap career was over forever. His voice was no longer what it once was, and it seemed like there would be no conceivable way back.
Beanie’s voice was in such a bad way because of a terrible incident in 2014, when his home was caught up in a drive-by shooting, and he ended up being hit. It was later reported that he hadn’t even been the intended target, meaning this was an especially bleak instance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Beanie took bullets in the back, with his stomach and lungs being injured, too. He was seriously harmed by the shooting, and he urgently required surgery, with later reports stating that he’d had a lung removed as a result of his injuries.
As serious a procedure as this clearly was, it wasn’t directly the reason why his voice ended up being different than it had been before. That, as he explained during an appearance on VladTV, was because of what happened while he was waking up from his coma.
As he was coming to, Beanie could feel that there was a breathing tube running down his throat. He didn’t know what it was, so he “yanked it” to try and get it out, which in turn caused a horrible injury.
Not only did the action cause Beanie to tear up his throat, but it also led to the staples that had been implanted in his stomach to “bust”, and thereafter, his vocals would never be the same again.
He claimed that pulling out the tube had damaged him so badly that, initially, he couldn’t talk at all. He could “do the actions”, which is to say, mouth the words, but no sound would come out. It took him months to regain even the ability to speak, never mind rap.
Beanie’s rap career seemed to be over, but over the years, he started to dip his toes back into the rap game. His efforts culminated in late 2025 with his feature on the Porsche Truck Ruk song ‘Can’t Leave Streets Alone’, his voice sounding much the same as it once did.
All wasn’t as it seemed here, as Beanie’s voice hadn’t fully returned to its original state, but he had utilised AI to help approximate it on the song. He understandably felt extremely positive about the opportunities AI presented him with, as it meant he could get back in the studio to rap again.