Review Summary: considered utter trash by the critics, considered another classic by Busta's conglomerate, but in reality The Big Bang is somewhere in the middle.
Following a duo of mediocre releases that were absolutely drooled on by critics, The Big Bang comes out, and critics shout out and cry and scream bloody murder because of the supposed death of one of hip hop’s biggest personalities. It maybe the fact that The Big Bang is an incredible guilty pleasure of mine, or the fact that Dr. Dre executively produces it, but either way, The Big Bang is easily one of Busta Rhymes most consistent albums yet.
Although I highly approve of The Big Bang, Busta Rhymes isn’t the number one reason for this. The Coming and E.L.E. are completely off-the-wall, are full of exciting flows, and Busta Rhymes’ extremely loud and booming voice. This isn’t so much the case on The Big Bang, but there are moments where Busta Rhymes starts to intrigue once again. On “New York ***”, Busta already has the advantage of sounding a million times better than Swizz Beatz (which isn’t a compliment), but here, Busta is also absolutely killer here, doing a nice job of reping NY. The effect-ridden techno of the lead single “Touch It” allows Busta to spazz out and give fans the switch off of loud and quiet vocals.
And like “Touch It”, the rest of the album is full of detailed, enticing beats, which shouldn’t be too suprising considering that Dr. Dre co-executively produces the album (Busta does too, but lets not talk about that). Sha Money XL of the 50 cent camp drops off a soulful piano beat for Stevie Wonder and Busta Rhymes to sound oddly comfortable with each other, meshing together to create one of the albums most accessible and easy-to-listen-to tracks. “Into the Ghetto” has a funk-able groove, and it should, considering how much the track relies on Rick James (it even samples Chapelle’s over-used “I’m Rick James BITCH” joke in the outro). And throughout the album, the album sounds incredibly concise, smooth, accessible, grooving, chilling, all of the above.
The Big Bang isn’t the most consistent album song-wise, but it really wasn’t supposed to be. In a way, the album really is a show-off Aftermath affliated producers skills, and Dr. Dre only picks the ripest of these beats. However, there is some trash that scraps the bottom, like the embarassing Missy Elliott collaboration “How We Do It Over Here”, and the uninspired collaboration with will.i.am and Mrs. Nasir Jones on “I Love My Bitch”), but some tracks, although not on the top of either side of the albums aspects, could be considered some of the best tracks that Busta has ever recorded because of the blend between the two, examples of this includes the beginning song “Got You Some” strikes gold with a Q-Tip lead chorus and a furious storm of Busta’s most energetic verses in a while, while the closer “Legend of the Fall Offs” closes off the album with a funeral-like pianos and Busta’s eerie burying of the dead careers of other MC’s.
Sadly enough, I think Busta was burying his OWN career with “Legend of the Fall Offs”.
