Review Summary: Me love you long time
Music comes and goes nowadays, few albums make any real impression on us. There are songs that we like, that we might just mentally despose of the very next day, and it seems like it never really came into our minds in the first place. There are some albums of music that come into your memory and stick around, sort of like a brain hermit. Unfortunately for Busta Rhymes, The Coming is definitely NOT that album.
The Coming is, however, one of the most highly entertaining rap albums ever written. Never one to be considered a social or even all that clever a thinker, Busta Rhymes instead uses his rhyme tactics to make us laugh, whether it’s with his erratic delivery and flow or his injection of humor that at times borders on the ridicolous and just plain silly. Right from off-kilter beat of “Do My Thing”, Busta Rhymes pretty much states how much better and how awesome he is in a way that is pretty damn creative and funny. “When I step in the place you should keep your mouth closed/Take your fat finger out your nose/You should just pay attention, and watch how I wild on records/Make you sing, ‘The Lord is my shepherd!’”.
As an rapper and king of his group the Flipmode Squad, Busta Rhymes also proves he works incredibly well with his respective collaborators. “Abandon Ship” is a trade-off between Busta’s excited caffine- accented flow and Rampage’s calmer, and yet more intimidating rambling about his n-wordz. It’s so good that Rampage almost sounds like a really good MC who’s spent his entire life, as opposed to just being, you know, Busta’s cousin. Q-Tip provides a calm, jazzy background with “Ill Vibe” for Q-Tip and Bussa Bussa to bounce off each others uniquely crafted flows, despite their stories not meshing in the slightest (Bussa tells the story of a crazy girl trying to steal from him, whereas Tip sounds more like a giving tips about the streets.)
Throughout this record, Busta Rhymes seems to have made it his point to introduce us to an MC with legitmate skills and a great round-about of collaborators, But no doubt there are low points on the album that make this album not one we remember years and years into the future. Occasionally Busta feels the after affect of coffee, and that’s what happens on the feet dragging feel of “Hot Fudge” and the dull ‘soulful’ conclusion “Finish Line”. The worst of all is when he tries to make a club banger and fails. “Woo Hah! I Got Ya All In Check” puts all of the albums highlights into a single track, in an accessible way, but “IT’s A Party” is horridly boring, with an uncomfortable Busta Rhymes trying to sound like he actually wants to do this song.
But these album don’t take away from the albums absolute best moments, which come in the form of Lord Have Mercy’s and Redman’s performances on “Flipmode Squad meets Def Squad”. Lord Have Mercy’s unique, similie-raided rhymes are some of the wittiest on the album, (“You're splits two times, for intruders, for these losers/My maneuvers, drop like lugers/Illegal, maybe Lethal, like Gibson's/Splittin blessings, with three Weapons/Lay in the cut like C-Sections, infestin the nine-six/For you mindless, niggaz I smack spineless/Or lay back like recliners “) and Redman just brings what he brought back in the nine-six, and fans will just be glad to hear one of the better rappers of the nineties rapping on yet another track (“Who the *** I be I, you cannot see I/Flabbergasted, blasted, my Magnum P.I./Oops I lie, I got a cannon bout the size of Grand Canyon/I'm prime time, giving MC's Knots Landing”).
And even with these guest appearances, Busta Rhymes isn’t completely outshined, his verse on “Flipmode Squad meets Def Squad” is exactly what our new expectations would be for Busta Rhymes. Throughout The Coming, Busta Rhymes takes the average production output of some admittedly good producers (J Dilla, Q-Tip, Easy Moe Bee), and turns most of it into some pretty damn entertaining hip hop, which is more than anyone could ask. In that sense, The Coming is more like an amusement park than it is a long lasting form of entertainment. It won’t stay in your memory for a long time, but its great nonetheless.
