Busta Rhymes says he feels there’s something missing in Rap today.
“I just feel like balance is always necessary and I think that’s part of the reason why a lot of the way the climate shift happens,” Busta says in an interview with XXL. “I think there’s balance that is needed. If we had a little more balance, the way the shit would feel overall would be a lot different. For me, I come from a time when balance was primary in the 1990s. I’m not trying to live in the past ’cause I’m not about that. It just seems to me that the past was a lot more forward-thinking. Everybody is trying to make it a primary respective law to not copy each other’s shit and not try to sound like each other’s shit. Everybody put time into thinking what is the next new way you do things so you stand alone and you stand out. That’s the way the balance was maintained, upheld and upkept. Everybody had their own lane and everybody stayed in it. And if you tried to evolve, you evolved in your own way and in your own lane of doing you. Today, when you go in the club, eight different motherfuckers’ shit sound like one long record to me.”
Recently, Busta Rhymes released “Calm Down,” a song that features Eminem. During this XXL interview, Busta confirmed Eminem also mixed the record.
“Em ended up mixing the record and he did an incredible job ’cause I like my shit to hit hard and I like to push the levels all the way up to the red so that it’s right before distortion, but not distorted,” he says. “He just brought that real gritty, boom-bap slap out of the record by doing the incredible job with the mixing. Of course, you can’t do that with a record unless you got the tools to do it with. My man Scoop DeVille, he made a helluva slapper with the production of the beat.”
Earlier this month, Busta Rhymes spoke about “Calm Down.”
“We just kept going back and forth, just competitive,” he said. “It started to really feel like we battling each other. It started to feel like a three minute and eight second song. After we kept sending it back and forth, it ended up being six minutes. We was like, ‘Yo, listen, it’s one thing to say ‘F the rules, but it’s another thing to say we O.D.in’.’ But it’s a beautiful piece of art…You’re probably never gonna experience a moment like this before. It’s our first time going in this crazy on a record unlike we’ve ever done on our own records before and probably unlike what we’ll do on any other record again. It’s special.”
