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I think it's more accurate to say that while you can listen to a lot of commercial rap and not hear the word "faggot", Busta Rhymes sadly isn't unique in using the term. (This cross-posted with toksik - would be interested to hear more about these "racist five percenter politics" as that's news to me.)
Moving on... Well, he's had a chequered career, hasn't he? Emerged sounding like nobody else, first three albums were each better than the one before, culminating in Extinction Level Event: The Final World Front, an insane apocalyptic concept album which seemed to cram a career's worth of good songs and from which he's never really recovered. (The crazy thing is at the time ELE seemed like a really long, possibly overstuffed album, but looking at the tracklisting now it seems pretty tight - I'm not one for "hip hop has got worse OH NOES", but the length of albums has definitely got out of control in many cases.) Right at the point of that album, Busta seemed like he knew exactly how to balance the demands of commercial radio and the tastes of yr more 'hardcore' hip hop fans - time was when he was one of the people it was still 'okay' for even snotty Jeru fans (like me, then) to like (back when Flipmode Squad seemed a really exciting prospect, thanks largely to one Rah Digga).
Since then, Busta strikes me as someone who keeps falling between stools... He can do the odd decent slow jam - weird that that's now what he's better at given the nature of his flow - but he's become one of those people whose every album is hailed as a "return to form" (how many have there been since ELE - just three now?), whereas in fact a cursory listen has been enough in each case to make me decide to spend my money on something else. I sort of miss the guy who was a bit thinner and had more hair. |
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