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Organized Confusion
07/10/2000 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Billy Johnson Jr
Things are a bit more in order for Busta Rhymes than the title of his fourth CD implies.
The title's definition is sprawled across the album's artwork:
"An´ar·chy 1. the absence of government 2. political disorder and violence 3. disorder; confusion..."
All three definitions aptly describe Busta's music. From the opening thumps of the album's first track, "Salute Da Gods!!" (which revamps Norman Connors's "Betcha By Golly Wow"), layers of pounding piano and muffled bass back up his typically wild, screeching narration. Then the album really takes off, twisting together musical styles into unpredictable party records that perfectly complement Busta's sophisticated braggadocio rapping. Toss in collabs with the Flipmode Squad, Jay-Z, DMX, M.O.P., Lenny Kravitz, Raekwon, and Ghostface Killah, and only a true Busta connoisseur could make sense of this collision of myriad musical elements.
Busta's left-field formula has been working for him since his days in the early-'90s rhyme quartet Leaders Of The New School, but the first single off Anarchy, "Get Out!!," is much more straight-and-narrow than the rest of the album, and certainly more so than Busta fans have come to expect. Remember how cool it was when Jay-Z sampled Annie's "It's The Hard-Knock Life" in 1998, and how uncool it was when he tried the same a year later for "Anything"? Well, Busta's two years behind this trend with "Get Out!!," which also employs a choir of cute kids and lifts the chorus from yet another children's song, this time Richard Wolfe's "The Ugly Duckling." It's an already-proven formula that poses less of a risk as a first-single choice. And sure enough, Anarchy debuted on the Billboard album charts in the top 5, just days after Busta graced the silver screen in the John Singleton-directed, new-millennium remake of the classic '70s blaxploitation flick Shaft.
Coincidence? Maybe not.
"This is my biggest film opportunity," Busta says during a press junket for Shaft. "I just felt blessed to be a part of it, like the greats Sam[uel] Jackson, Vanessa Williams, and the original Shaft, Richard Roundtree. I just felt like ultimately, I couldn't ask for a better opportunity in terms to pursuing my acting career as a young, new, aspiring actor. This definitely was the catapult I needed to launch my career in this area."
In the new version of Shaft, Busta plays Rasaan, a West Indian cab driver and Shaft's streetwise friend. Pulling off the character wasn't much of a stretch for Busta, since his parents are Jamaican, his manager is Haitian, his hype man Spliff Star is from Trinidad, and his DJ hails from Belize. "It was nothing to relate, to identify with everything about Rasaan," Busta explains. "In addition to all of that, being the kind of dude who goes through thick and thin and goes down in the trenches with his friend and holds down his boy, regardless of what the situation is."
Busta's theatrical résumé--which includes appearances in Who's The Man?, Strapped, and Higher Learning, as well as a voiceover part as Reptar Wagon in the Rugrats movie--continues to grow. He recently completed a role in Finding Forester, a film starring Sean Connery. Busta learned a lot about acting from the original James Bond while filming the movie, which chronicles the life of a black kid from the inner city who attends a predominately white prep school on an athletic scholarship. Connery showed Busta that good acting has to do with a lot more than just dialogue.
"You don't always have to have dialogue to show that you're a good actor," Busta says, obviously enlightened, "and that the energy you give off can be so compelling, that the statements you make as an actor without dialogue can be greater than the one with the most dialogue. I definitely learned that from being around Sean Connery."
Busta says that acting is helping him expand his overall artistry, even though he sometimes finds it a more confining art form than music. "There's just a lot more things you can do with an album, which is much less watered-down and diluted and less tampered with, because it's just your thing--without question," he explains. "With a film, it's like you have to pretty much make sure that, from top to bottom, the one picture you paint is so thoroughly painted."
There's nothing wrong with slapping on a couple extra coats of paint.
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