If you're looking to counter the oddly antiseptic aftertaste left by Jay-Z's ostensibly warlike hit "Run This Town," there's this new video from Jay's old Philadelphia recruit, Beanie Sigel. Sit through the corny Vincent-Price-from-"Thriller" voice-over in the beginning, settle in to the swaying organ line and the tinkling piano and, um, brace yourself.

"Ain't nothin' worse on the ears than a crying mother," Beanie says, sounding like he just left her at the wake. "Seeing her baby dying, stretched in a ghetto gutter."

The guns on the screen aren't shiny. The little girl with her arm in a cast doesn't look like an actress. And the guys smoking wet cigarettes appear to have smoked ones like that before. (You get the feeling that if Chris Martin from Coldplay walked up to someone around here and asked for directions, he might be told, "Don't approach me and don't address me.")

It is, yes: kinda serious! But what comes across most clearly is that Beanie means every word of every rhyme he says.