What It's Like

"What It's Like": Everlast's Walk on the Margins

Late 1998 was an interesting moment in American popular music. The charts were crowded with polished pop product, boy band harmonics, and club-ready R&B. Into that landscape arrived a bearded, gravelly solo act who had previously fronted a hip-hop group, carrying an acoustic guitar, a blues harmonica, and three verses about people the mainstream preferred not to think about. The song was "What It's Like." It became one of the more unexpected hits of the decade.

From House of Pain to Solo Territory

Everlast, born Erik Schrody, had first reached commercial notice as the frontman of House of Pain, the Boston-area rap group whose "Jump Around" became one of the more inescapable hooks of 1992. House of Pain disbanded in the mid-1990s, and Schrody's solo career began against a backdrop of serious personal health challenges. He had suffered a heart attack in 1998, an event that by most accounts reshaped both his outlook and his artistic priorities. The resulting album, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues, reflected a more acoustic, introspective direction that blended hip-hop flow with folk-blues texture in ways that had few obvious precedents in the commercial mainstream.

Three Stories, One Argument

The song works through three separate narratives, each one presenting a person in a situation of desperation or precarity: a man begging on the street, a young woman facing an unwanted pregnancy, a drug dealer who meets a violent end. In each case, the song asks the listener to consider whether they have stopped to think about the circumstances that brought that person to that moment. The production underneath is deliberately unhurried, built on acoustic guitar and a blues-influenced groove that keeps the track from feeling like a lecture. Schrody's delivery draws on both hip-hop cadence and folk storytelling, a combination that gave the track crossover appeal it would not have had in a purer form of either genre.

One of the Longest Hot 100 Runs of 1999

The song's chart trajectory was remarkable for its patience and endurance. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on December 19, 1998, at position 83, beginning a slow climb that would last through the entire spring and into early summer. By May 15, 1999, "What It's Like" had reached its peak of number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, a top-twenty placement that few observers would have predicted for a song with this subject matter and this production approach. More impressively, it spent 33 weeks on the chart in total, one of the longer runs of that chart year, reflecting the kind of sustained listener loyalty that radio rotation alone cannot manufacture.

The Rock and Alternative Crossover

The song's success cut across format lines in ways that were unusual for the era. Alternative rock radio, which had been the primary home of more confrontational lyrical content through the early and mid-1990s, embraced it. Mainstream rock added it. The Hot 100 reach reflected genuine pop audience engagement. The acoustic blues-meets-rap sound found listeners in demographics that did not often overlap on the same record, which was both a tribute to the song's craftsmanship and a function of the period's relative openness to genre hybridity. Radio in 1999 was not yet fully siloed in the way that streaming-era algorithmic playlists would later make commonplace.

A Song That Found Its Audience

Everlast did not sustain the commercial trajectory that "What It's Like" suggested might be coming. But the song itself became a landmark of its era, a track that people remember with the clarity reserved for music that surprised them into feeling something they had not anticipated. The song has accumulated over 32 million YouTube views, meaningful for a track from an act without a sustained commercial following. Put it on with some patience and a willingness to sit with the discomfort the subject matter asks of you, and it delivers exactly what it always promised.

"What It's Like" — Everlast's singular moment on the 1990s charts.