Doin’ time with Busta Rhymes

Busta Rhymes has been to the movies. “You see the movie Da Vinci Code?” he asks, almost apoplectic, his face contorting.

“They don’t even want people to know that Jesus has relatives. They’re scared that if someone like me or you is connected to Jesus it totally destroys their ability to control. Totally!”
This is the familiar world of one of the world’s biggest hip-hop stars. Conspiracy, apocalypse, paranoia — all have been staples of Busta Rhymes’s career, and they haven’t stopped him selling 15 million albums. A triptych of albums around the turn of the millennium — When Disaster Strikes, E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event) and Anarchy — saw him fit major hit singles alongside predictions of millennial apocalypse and ruminations on conspiracy theories. In 1997 he was convinced the millennium bug would send Western civilisation back to the stone age.
“I didn’t mean these things in a literal sense; I’m not Gandhi,” he says, a little confusingly. “I’m not here to predict the future, I’m just here to show people certain things.”
Though he remains convinced that an unnamed “They” are out to get us all, much else has changed. We are speaking a few days before his seventh solo album, The Big Bang, enters the US pop charts at No 1. In the preceding months he had moved to a new label, Aftermath, run by hip-hop’s Midas-touch producer, Dr Dre. He had finally settled a custody suit against the mother of his three children, who had marked the ending of the action by appearing on a New York radio talk show to accuse Rhymes of habitually beating her (he denies it). His father underwent life-saving surgery. Then, in February, his friend and employee Israel Ramirez was shot dead during the making of the video for a single. But things are on the up, says Rhymes.
“Signing to Aftermath was a great thing for me,” he says. “Last November, I won the custody of my three boys after being in court with their mother for eight or nine years, which meant I could see my children every day. My father had a double bypass heart surgery, and now he’s much more active than he was at any other time of his life. So after I saw all this good new stuff happening, I decided to make some changes. I got in shape, went to the gym, cut my hair, started to look at myself as a new individual.”
Then came Ramirez’s murder, and the ugly public fallout from Rhymes’s refusal to co-operate with the police inquiry. While Ramirez’s family are reputedly understanding of that, his decision not to talk has been heavily criticised. “I don’t really care about what anybody has to say,” he shrugs, departing from an apparent vow of silence over the incident that led to him appearing on the cover of the June edition of US urban culture magazine Vibe with his mouth taped shut. “You don’t really know who was the source of the problem, all you know is a handful of people [were] arguing with each other. We was inside shooting a video, and on the way outside, that’s when everything happened, so I was told to stay inside. I really didn’t get a chance to see what went down. When we went outside, that’s when we saw my friend laying on the ground, dying slowly.”
Does he feel any sense of responsibility? “If I didn’t ask him to come to work, he’d have been at home with his family. That’s the only guilt I live with, but still in that sense I don’t have any guilt, because that was the way we made money together. He always came to work and got home safely, because I don’t condone that kind of activity and I’m not a person that has a reputation of violence in my life.”
Rhymes is one of a relatively small number of major-league rap stars whose recordings have avoided street hustler myth-making. But now, oddly, The Big Bang sees him addressing the subject of his teenage drug-dealing for the first time. It would be easy to see this as him trying to keep pace in a young man’s game, or to detect the knowingly commercial hand of Dre gently pushing Rhymes in the direction of gangsta rap’s lucre. But this is not an abandonment of the responsible ethos that has helped him sell 15 million albums worldwide. Been Through the Storm, which features Stevie Wonder, is a careful rumination on the sacrifices Rhymes’s immigrant parents made, and is strongly critical of his own youthful impatience for fast money; Cocaina contrasts musings over cocaine’s effects on the body with the drug trade’s impact on communities; Goldmine deals cinematically with crime and retribution.
“A lot of the time, certain rappers don’t have those real-life experiences,” he says. “They use [stories of crime] to be credible, and they end up encountering danger from an environment they were never involved with in the first place just because they wanted to be cool. And I think that’s the stupidest thing in the world. It’s always better to tell your own story than someone else’s, and in Been Through the Storm I’m telling my story. I went out and tried to get more of what I wanted, but realised that every route I took was a dead-end street. Then I had an opportunity to do music, and I left that other stuff alone because the option to do music was a better one, a safer one and a smarter one.”
Rhymes is one of the rare rap pioneers who has found a way to build a lasting career in hip-hop’s neophile world. He belongs to a select band of rappers — the generation that followed Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim and those of the genre’s late-1980s “golden age” — who have managed not only to stay solvent and artistically relevant, but to keep selling records in the sort of quantities that pop’s most profitable genre demands of its brand leaders. Unlike his few peers — Snoop Dogg, who acts more than he raps these days; Ice Cube, whose Hollywood career pushed music into second place more than half a decade ago; Jay-Z, who has given up recording completely to run a record label — he has maintained his fame without straying too far from his music-making roots.
Nearly 20 years ago, when Rhymes was still Trevor Smith, a rap- obsessed teen in Long Island, it was Public Enemy’s leader, Chuck D, who took the young man under his wing. He gave Smith his “nom de rap” and mentored his band, Leaders of the New School, and encouraged him to take creative risks.
The Big Bang’s final track, Legends of the Fall Off, recalls some of his early fire-and-brimstone writing. Instead of a snare drum, it has the sampled sound of dirt being shovelled on to a coffin lid, while Rhymes sermonises about rap stars who ruin their reputations by carrying on beyond their sell-by date. Given his unprecedented stint at the top, how sure is he that he will recognise the time he becomes irrelevant before it arrives?
“The signs,” he says, prophet-of-doom style, “will present themselves. I have no problem accepting reality for what it is. And the sooner reality tells me, the sooner I’ll make the adjustment.”
And what will he do after making that adjustment? “I signed my first record deal when I was 17, and I’ll be 34 this year,” he says, his face crumpling with incomprehension. “My life has been completely consumed by being a recording artist, so I haven’t made time to figure out doing anything else. I wouldn’t trade this for the world. If anything, the only thing I’m willing to trade this for is retirement. And I’m a long way away from that.”