"What It's Like" is a song by American musician Everlast. It was released in July 1998 as the lead single from his second studio album, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues (1998). The song is typical of the style Everlast embraced after leaving hip hop trio House of Pain, which combines rock, hip-hop and blues while incorporating characterization and empathy towards impoverished protagonists. The song peaked at number one on the US Billboard Mainstream Rock chart for one week and on the Modern Rock Tracks chart for nine weeks. It also reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the singer's only solo top-40 hit on the US chart. Outside the United States, the song reached number four in Iceland, number six in Canada, and the top 40 in Australia, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Song structure Structurally, the song consists of three verses, a chorus, and a bridge. The last line of the chorus varies according to the particular situation faced by the character in the preceding verse. Each character is sympathetically presented as a victim of circumstance and as being an object of derision. Each verse ends with the line God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in his/her shoes (in the third verse, "...you ever had to wake up to hear the news") and Cause then you really might know what it's like to, with the action varying depending on what the character has to do ("sing the blues," "have to choose," and "have to lose," respectively). The characters are: A beggar (We’ve all seen the man at the liquor store beggin’ for your change/The hair on his face is dirty, dreadlocked and full of mange); when asking for change from a man, he is rudely rejected (He asks the man for what he could spare with shame in his eyes/"Get a job, you fuckin' slob" is all he replies) Mary, a pregnant girl who decides to have an abortion (Mary got pregnant from a kid named Tom who said he was in love); when she goes through the door of the clinic, she is labeled a "killer," a "sinner," and a "whore." A drug dealer named Max, a man with violent friends and an alcohol problem (I knew this kid named Max, he used to get fat stacks out on the corner with drugs/He liked to hang out late, he