An Interview with Busta Rhymes
CA&E: Tell me about your drive coming up from Florida. What were you doing down there?
BUSTA: We was down there to promote my album. It’s coming out November 27th and it’s called "Genesis".
CA&E: So when I saw you in L.A. you told me you had been into reading Car Audio magazine when you were growing up.
BUSTA: Yeah, I used to see stuff in that book that I used to wish one day that things I saw in that book would belong to me. It’s kind of crazy that I’m in a time frame in my life years later, so many years later, where I’m getting a shot at being one of the guys that owns something that I can finally put in the magazine and have people coming up and see my stuff and be like, "I wish I could own [stuff] like Busta Rhymes got in the book." Just like I was doing when I was seeing other people in [Car Audio]. It’s just crazy how the world works sometimes. You get something that just happens in life for you that are the real wishes you lived by as a shorty that eventually comes through at some point or another. This is definitely one of those for me, man.
CA&E: Why is it important to have the kind of system you have in the car. How do you use your system aside from bangin’ on the street.
BUSTA: I never bang it on the street, first of all, because I don’t want to bait my vehicles for people who want to steal it. It’s primarily for me and my listening pleasure. Y’know, you’re in the studio, making these albums, these songs and you get a certain quality in the studio that you never get once you leave it. The closest thing you’re probably going to have to a studio is your car. That’s my extended studio. When you can go in the car and turn it down real low and hear all the distinct quality, the high hats piercing at the proper level, the bottom with the bass kick still thumping—even when it’s not that loud—and you hear that distinct "cleanliness" in the system, then you know what you did in the studio was balanced right.
CA&E: Tell me about the engineers you work with.
BUSTA: That’s Pat and Vinny. Tower Audio Recording. They’re an independent engineering team. I’ve been working with them since the Leaders of the New School. I have a chemistry with them, a vibe, a comfort zone with the cats. They know what the sound is that I always love to have. So I can come into the studio when they start a mix and they’ll tell me, like, if the session starts at six, they’ll tell me not to show up at the studio until ten o’clock, because they know all the levels and the EQ that I want. As far as mixing is concerned they just understand so thoroughly about what I need, what I want, how I gotta’ have it, what’s going to make me happy, what’s going to make me comfortable. So I don’t have to sit in the studio for three or four hours while they’re tweaking and getting the levels. I come in when they pretty much get it at that point and I’ll just say the background levels are too low, tell ‘em to raise it here, turn it down there, and the mix is pretty much done.
CA&E: They know your style.
BUSTA: They know it so thoroughly they could mix whole albums for me without me having to be there.
CA&E: Where are they from. East Coast, West?
BUSTA: No, Pat is from Long Island. Vinny is from Brooklyn. I worked with Vinny first and Vinny brought in Pat years later.
CA&E: Now what have you been doing out in L.A.?
BUSTA: In L.A. I was [working] with Dre, Michaelangelo, Jellyroll, Battlecat, and rhyming with Timbaland here and there.
CA&E: So all the stuff you do with those guys is going to Pat and Vinny -
BUSTA: Well, nah, Dre, he is uncompromising. You don’t have to tell Dre anything about how he wants his finished product. Same thing with all the rest of them. But I have a preference with my own sound that I want balanced with the rest of the album, so everybody’s mix but Dre’s was done by Vinny and Pat.
CA&E: So does Dre record all digital and work with ProTools and—
BUSTA: He still records to two-inch. He loves the analog sound. And I think that has a lot to do with the warmth in his finished product. The only thing he’ll do is mix to DAT, but it’s still coming straight from analog. And y’know, that’s the school that I come from. Ten years ago doing digital wasn’t an option on the level it is now. Basically I’m stubborn. If digital is going to take away somewhat from the analog I’m not going there. I use digital for its benefits, but as far as recording goes I’m stuck with the two-inch tape.
CA&E: Tell me about the new album. Why did you title it "Genesis"?
BUSTA: It’s the new time frame for my whole—my career, my label, my growth as a man, my creative approaches, new money, everything. I felt like with the sequence of my albums, the way it played out after "Anarchy", "Extinction Level Event", "When Disaster Strikes" and "The Coming"—y’know the whole mass ruckus had been brought about, so the only area left to go at this point was to go and bring about a new beginning, a new direction.
CA&E: You were one of the first cats we listened to that was talking about the new world order—some of the intros were real tight.
BUSTA: Thanks. I was fortunate enough to be blessed and exposed by other great musicians that were into that. They talked about it in their music too but just in a much more….subliminal way.
CA&E: You brought it out, put it right in their face.
BUSTA: I was intrigued by it. I’m sitting and….people talking about aliens that have been living here since 1951, naval intelligence briefing team members—like William Cooper and his Behold the Pale Horse book. That was intriguing to me. Even if it ain’t real—the possibility of it—
CA&E: The government has it’s hand in something we don’t know about.
BUSTA: Everything can’t be a lie. I know even on a school level we don’t get to learn. It just seems like a programming, conditioning, but whatever the sources of information that we are exposed to are controlled by the powers that be. But we have to be careful about how we talk about all of that.
CA&E: Because we need to use those means for our own selves.
BUSTA: At the end of the day, it is what it is.
CA&E: You gotta’ live with it.
BUSTA: You gotta’ live with it, and you have to try to live around it. You have to figure out the ways to beat them at the game or tap into the core element of those sources of information so that we can expose it. That’s what I’m about. I want to learn how to deal with it, get around it, understand it and be able to address the issues accordingly so that my kids can grow up with the truth or get as close to the truth as they possibly can. Anyway, "Genesis" is bringing about the new life of Busta Rhymes in every respect. That’s pretty much it.
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