Why busta rhymes

His Tommy Hilfiger game was crazy. And he used to come to school with the big Gucci length chain that Kane wore on the Long Live the Kane album. Hov had one of them shits in school. Hov was smart, he did his thing with class but when he was walking through the hallways you know he just seemed like he was on his boss, cool shit.

You never saw Hov perspire. Yeah, that's the truth. I was pretty much just getting my feet wet with it. And he had the edge that day. And it actually was a good experience for me because I'm so competitive that it turned me into the speed rap God that I am now. We blew tree in school, and Big definitely moved with the goons in school. I didn't see Big rhyme until he was done with high school.

I thought wow, finally the bro found his way. He was going there to get a check, as was I, and he needed a ride back to Brooklyn. I was with my man and the car was so small there wasn't any real space in the back seat.

Big ended up getting in the back seat. And it was the funniest thing to look at with him back there. New York City streets were super screwed up so we hitting all type of potholes.

When Big got in his crib he told me to come pull up. So I come in the crib and see Ms. And this is right before Ready to Die came out. And Biggie had a double cassette deck, a JVC boombox, and he was dubbing his cassette, his whole album on Memorexes. He had this line, just like a drug spot, waiting to get copies of his album. And I was looking at him. This is during the era when the bootleg n-ggas was around and we used to try to beat them up, and Big was the first person that I ever saw do this.

He was giving his album away for free. I was completely confused by this. And why you doing this? And he said, "Yo Bus, look. If every n-gga in the hood is playing my shit and I gave it to them? First of all, they gonna want to bang my shit because they got it from me personally. So they gonna be that much more enthused. Now Imma have the whole hood playing my shit and the n-gga that's gone look crazy is the one that's not playing it.

And turn the perception of how big my stuff is, into the stuff that makes everyone feel like something wrong with them if they don't got it. That was one of the most genius marketing and promotion campaign mindsets that I've ever seen and have ever seen in my life to this day in the whole history of this culture. Big was a forward thinking muthafucka. I can't even imagine what he would've been. Because if he was on that plane of energy back then, bro? When none of us was with that like even right now?

Even right now. Giving away my album to the distributor is one of the hardest things for me to have to do. Big and Jay were making gangster rap records. You were also in the street, you could've made gangster rap records. But you had the courage to make a different kind of record with Leaders Of The New School and wear bright colors, and smile in a video. But then at the same time still have the respect of everybody? Imma be honest with you, a lot of it was circumstance. And the first circumstance was where I was coming from and the dudes that I was involved with, they were still doing a lot of things that I wasn't allowed to talk about because I was liable to get people in trouble.

I actually tried to go that route initially, but I had to always go and play songs for the bros to get it sanctioned for me to be able to release those records. You aint supposed to talk about what we doing in these streets.

Find some other shit to talk about. The beautiful thing that gave me the opportunity to create something else to talk about was actually moving to Long Island. There was dudes hustling, but they weren't doing it at the level of the dudes that I really respected and was involved with in Brooklyn.

We felt like we wanna mix our truth and make sure it includes the conceptual value of how Public Enemy was doing their albums. Chuck always said, "When you have all of those areas of your career mastered down to the science of each one of those elements separately, you become even more dangerous when you know how to incorporate that collectively.

That's when you got a clamp on your career, that's when you got a clamp on your legacy, that's when you got a clamp on securing the win. That has never failed me. I teach it to everything and everyone that is under my tutelage.

Quad is the studio where Tupac got shot on the night that Junior M. Absolutely, and was friends with both of them. Obviously I knew Big before I knew Pac.

So I was closer with him than I was with Pac. It was very fucked up having to watch how the situation played out, because there was just a lot of frustration that never really truly got addressed. The seed of all of that could have probably been resolved if they had a conversation about it, and Pac had been able to express what his real frustrations with Biggie were directly and honestly. What do you think it was? I think it's exactly what you said. I don't think Big sonned it off though.

I knew Pac didn't feel that Big acknowledged him as much as he wanted for the role that he might have played in giving Big jewels, or being there for Big at times when Big really needed a mentor or a brother in the game.

I think we can all agree that if you play a role in someone's life and you don't feel that they're acknowledging you the way that you deserve, it fucks with you. I definitely think that all of that contributed significantly.

Big wanted to talk, Big wanted to connect with him. And Pac just wasn't letting it happen. And it got fueled even more when he got next to Suge. At the point when they got to their level of frustration, I wasn't seeing Pac as often. Leaders [of the New School] was when me and Pac used to see each other a lot, and during the filming of Higher Learning.

At that point was Pac just too far gone, or did you just run into each other and talk and smoke? What's happening in terms of those conversations?

Believe it or not, in his personal space he wasn't like that. It was a lot when he was around his homies that he advocated that stuff. But he really wasn't like that in his personal space. Pac was really high on respect, and respecting his peers, and I told this story before, but he had a beef with Q-Tip. This was when at the Source Awards , Tupac actually started performing in the middle of Tribe's Best Group of the Year acceptance speech.

Maybe it looked like he was disrespecting them because Pac had already had his reputation of being a loose cannon. But the truth is, the stage production manager wasn't communicating with the talent coordinator that was downstage. So while Tribe was doing their acceptance speech, the stage production manager pressed play on Tupac's DAT tape. Pac ain't hearing the acceptance speech clearly, he's backstage focusing on his performance.

They press play, he goes out there, and it just looked like he was dissing Tribe in front of an audience full of people—celebrities, executives, fans, so it looked like flagrant Tribe disrespect. Pac gets off the stage and Tribe was in there heavy with Zulu Nation and they put the pressure on Pac. Fortunately it didn't lead to no blows, but they didn't walk away from that situation really resolving anything.

And he told me to pull up on him. Mad weed on the table, he just steaming L's and he ended up writing three to four songs, an insane sample.

I never saw that before. I write one song to a beat, I'm turning the beat off and then I'm getting to a different beat. He's writing three, four different songs to the same beat. That was interesting to me. After sitting around and smoking and joking a little bit, I got him and Tip on the phone, and they spoke.

And they wanted to do a public truce and it never happened. This is also not too far from around the timeframe when Pac had fully restored a '67 Impala or something.

He was super paranoid. He definitely thought the cops were going to have some cops from LA come and get him or whatever. So, he started to get his gun game right and he just was always pacing and smoking and writing a million songs, and constantly looking out his window because of his paranoia. He beat the case, I think that started to turn him into a little bit of that Bishop shit.

Because obviously, ain't no black man shooting no white cop, as a rapper with records out, and beating the charge. That has never been done before? And it'll never happen after. And it turned Pac kind of into a superhero. Although it wasn't official until the very last Tribe record, you were also a member of A Tribe Called Quest. Yes, absolutely!

I actually always wanted to be a member of Tribe. It was almost like how we did our parents when we wanted to go outside.

Every Tribe record I ended up on, and I just love the fact that they held me in this high regard. That was always one of my favorite stories , and it's a tragic story about this guy that had one of the best moments in the history of hip-hop, and he was just gone right after. Immediately after! He didn't stay alive long enough to hear the record mixed, that's how soon he died.

It is crazy, bro. And what's even crazier was, he was being set up in position to possibly be one of the most incredible milestones in rap, because his first look was such a huge moment. And he was homeless. Hood was living in the street, for real for real.

And Tip didn't even really know him like that. He was talking some real dangerous and gangster shit with his verse. He was the only one talking that. And that was a beautiful thing Tip did.

Yeah, I don't think people really realize how much of us came through Q-Tip. Tribe and countless others. Q-Tip, if he would've signed everybody, he would've been the East Coast Dr.

That's the second time we broke up. First time we broke up, it was either before the first Leaders album came out. So when I got kicked out of the group the first time I started working on the solo album then. We did the show. We ripped it down. He was at Tommy Boy but he was leaving Tommy Boy. Took him about months to finalize his negotiation before he went to Elektra.

By the time we got to Elektra, I was kicked out of the group. The deal, from what I understand, wasn't happening without me being there thanks to Dante. And I said I need to have these two records on the album that I recorded on my own because I love them. You guys were like Sam and Dave — you were already breaking up while you were together. That's a fact. So then the second time we broke up, it was definitely on Yo!

And when they got to C Brown, he just said his name and he said he represents himself. On camera. We all looking at him like what are you doing homie? You crazy? And we stepped to Brown right there. And he was on some real ghoul shit that day and he wasn't budging. So it was very challenging for me to wrap my head around and I still love them dudes, even in the midst of me being kicked out the group and being shitted on at the time.

But I was too determined to see this success and claim the divine that I knew I warranted. Especially having this new young life that I was responsible for, that I created, failure just wasn't an option. It was a bittersweet moment because I never wanted it to end with Leaders, but it was the sweetest joy to be able to venture off on my own and find my true self with the support of all of the relationships with my peers that were really genuine, like Diddy and Q-Tip, and particularly Large Professor.

Pete Rock. Brand Nubian. Big Daddy Kane. Chuck D still stuck with me. It's blowing me away because I never really thought of it like that, but you're absolutely right. It was like, we don't even care if you rhyme, we just want you to say some shit.

It was a lot of kinetic energy all happening at the same time and it turned me into becoming the one to really set this new standard as far as artists setting themselves up for their moment. This new record is really fascinating to me, because it's not an old man's record. It's got a young spirit, but at the same time, this record could've dropped in '98 and been just as hot back then.

Do you feel a certain responsibility? Do you feel like you ought to be like Moses coming down from the mountain with the tablets saying, "This is what hip-hop is. Your drugs are different, your vibe is different, and I'm just trying to understand what you're doing.

I'm more embracing than trying to understand. There's certain things that I'm not gonna be able to understand and there's certain things that I'm not trying to understand.

I can never understand the drug use thing. Because even when we was young, and there was all type of drug options, we was raised in a way where it was forbidden to mess with anything outside of weed and a little bit of liquor, and a cigarette. There was no experimental drug part of our culture. I'm not saying that it wasn't happening at all, you know. Del the Funky Homosapien used to take shrooms and acid.

He was really a direct descendant of the era when Hendrix and the hippies and all of that was moving. And he was from the Bay, so that was a part of their culture. To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why? We were able to reconcile a few months before he passed away five years ago. What or who is the greatest love of your life? If you could go back in time, where would you go?

Back in history, and make sure that every slave master and every person involved with the disproportionate injustice done to black and brown people felt that same thing firsthand. How do you relax? I love to sleep. What keeps you awake at night? When everyone goes to bed and then you have six or seven hours to create peacefully.

Where would you most like to be right now? The rapper on his love for his mother, working out and staying up all night. What makes you unhappy?

Disappointing my family. There are moments when Busta plays doomsday oracle, yelling about the end of the world like a street-corner zealot. He prophesizes the next four years of his career and the end of the world. Peers were falling off or were about to and pre-millennium tension was on the rise, but Busta was prepared to execute his plans until the digits in every computer system hit double zero and all the elevators stalled, planes fell from the sky, and credit cards failed.

The closer you listen, though, the more you realize The Coming was less concerned with global collapse than where Busta was headed. It was raw, supremely confident rap made to carve his name into the pantheon. Even in the evolution of [the culture], we still have a duty to represent it the right way. In the years leading up to The Coming , however, Busta was worried about his responsibility to and the future of his family, unsure whether he was capable of making a debut that would serve as the foundation of his solo career.

Ross saw the end of L. When group member Charlie Brown entered Elektra HQ in to discuss a deal, Busta had already been kicked out of the group. Busta also did the beatbox. It was just ill. He was controlling the mic and certainly the star of the show. He was completely amazing. Discerning rap fans heard what Ross witnessed at Payday on L.

Then Tip unleashes the dungeon dragon for a three-alarm blaze of punch lines, varied cadences, and James Brown—esque grunts. The loss of his temporal and emotional investments cut deeply, but Busta had little time to dwell.

He was the father of a newborn son, one whose central source of income vanished that afternoon when the MTV cameras rolled on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Though he needed the money, Busta was hesitant about accepting the Elektra solo deal brokered by Ross and Chris Lighty, the famed record executive who died in Guest features existed before Busta Rhymes, but he set a new precedent between the end of L. To get comfortable, Busta also flew two hours to Atlanta.

Dallas Austin Recording Projects. Busta absorbed game from Austin, who helped him land a production deal and create the logo for his nascent label, Flipmode Entertainment. It was a surreal thing for me. He gave me a lot of jewels that I walk with to this day. When Busta was back in New York, though, he still felt trepidation about his new beginnings. The initial recording sessions began in late in Los Angeles, where Busta was wrapping his scenes for Higher Learning.

After he sourced beats, he wrote solely in the studio, afraid to lose lines or ideas for flows. Everything was on paper. Arrangements, concepts, choruses, and verses. There were no half-mumbled takes. Cadences, intonations, ad-libs, cartoonish vocal quirks—he had them in his head before entering the booth.