In the early 90’s Busta Rhymes emerged onto the rap scene with his groundbreaking hit “Woo Hah (Got You All in Check)”. Busta brought outstanding energy and excitement to hip hop and maintained the momentum throughout his career specializing in party friendly music. Many LP’s later, Busta tries add more of an edge to his content with his Aftermath debut The Big Bang. Despite branding himself the “Godfather of the Club Banger”, Busta switched his style up a bit to break away from the “animated” stereotype he was receiving and balancing both club songs and street music. His eighth album Back on My B.S. (cleverly abbreviated as BOMBS) is Bussa Bus’ attempt to revert back to his charismatic style of music and have less of the street feel that The Big Bang provided.

3/5 – StinkBomb

The album begins with Busta’s rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony singing the album title along with the classical strings. Eventually the music changes to the opening track “Wheel of Fortune” produced by long time collaborator DJ Scratch. The song begins with an ill soul sample, but the beat is then changed to a typical Busta Rhymes sounding track, but can be considered as a throw away. Following the opening track is “Give Em What They Askin For”; Busta’s usual club offering. Busta raps over the 808’s and claps of the Ron Browz produced track. A great contribution to the albums decent opening is the third single “Respect My Conglomerate” which features Jadakiss and an impressive verse from Lil Wayne.
Other enjoyable tracks include the galactic “To the Moon” and the Ragga inspired “Kill Dem” featuring Pharrell. The most innovation found on this album is on “Imma Go & Get My” where DJ Scratch flips the scene from “All about the Benjamin’s” with Mike Epps playing the lottery. The sample plays the numbers game by using the lotto numbers as the quantity of what Busta will bring.
In today’s hip hop scene fans often complain about the gratuitous use of the Auto Tune. Back on My Bullshit lets the Auto tune use persists on the lackluster “Arab Money”, the bland, cliché single “Hustler’s Anthem ‘09”, and the unnecessary appearance by Ron Browz on “We Want In”. The T.I. and Akon assisted “Don’t Believe Em” doesn’t fit well with the album and the southern style track sounds like a leftover from T.I.’s latest project Paper Trail.
After a thorough listen to Back on My B.S., you fail to have that full length album feel. The un-formatted track listing gives off more of a mixtape vibe than it does an album. Songs like “Sugar” and “We Miss You” are just plain subpar, while some of the better tracks like the feature heavy “Decision” still don’t top much of Busta’s older material. As a Busta Rhymes fan this is easily his worst album to date. BOMBS had potential to be far better than what it is, but it feels like a project that was thrown together.