Busta Rhymes Reveals New Album Title ‘Vengeance,’ Reflects on His Leaders of the New School Relationships Ahead of Walk of Fame Honor

Ahead of receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, hip hop icon Busta Rhymes announced the title of his brand new album.

via: Variety

Before a year or two ago, rapper and actor Busta Rhymes never imagined that a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was an honor for which he’d even be eligible.

Yet it quickly became “a necessary bucket list item that needed to be checked off” after the future recipient began to recognize its singularity among the many kudos he’s received over his 35-year career. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” says the man known offstage as Trevor Smith.

“It’s different from the Grammys. It’s different from MTV, different from BET Awards. You could win multiple ones of those. You only get one of these.”

Other than his 1998 track of the same name featuring R&B singer Erykah Badu, “one” is not a number that Busta encounters terribly often: his eleven studio albums, eight mixtapes and 109 singles (including 57 as a featured artist) have sold a reported 10 million records and earned him a Billboard R&B/ Hip-Hop Award, 12 Grammy nominations and 16 MTV Video Music Award nominations. His accomplishments first began under the tutelage of Public Enemy’s production team the Bomb Squad and especially its frontman Chuck D, who gave him his enduring stage moniker, the name of his first group, Leaders of the New School, and the philosophy that still guides him today.

“He gave us the concept of having a good ‘CLAMP’ on your career,” he remembers. “CLAMP was the acronym for Concept, Lyrics, Attitude/Appearance, Music and Performance. Chuck always said that if you could master these five areas, you should be in a good space for a very long time — and I never deviated from that.”

In the mid-1990s, Busta confessed to Grand Royal Magazine that the pugnacious 1970s spoken-word artist and sometime actor Dolemite was one of the big influences on his repetitive, quick-tongued flow on the microphone. “I took a lot from him — from how he dressed to how he would speak in general, because he rhymed when he just spoke regular. When I’m just chopping it up with my folks, even in conversation, I like to rhyme. It’s just good mental exercise.” Yet as the son of Jamaican immigrants, he says he drew further inspiration from the music and culture of his family heritage.

“A lot of my influence came from dancehall artists because their entire verses primarily would rhyme with the same words, similar syllables, similar vowels, the whole shit, he observes. “It was something that I thought not only was dope, but something that I was exposed to in my home.”

Though they were frequently associated with Native Tongues artists A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, he stresses that L.O.N.S. was never a part of the hip-hop collective. Nevertheless, his group’s music, which focused with insight and humor on the experiences of young people of color, bridged a gap between its Afrocentric members and the more politically-charged music of their Public Enemy mentors.

“At that time, it was cool to be fucking smart, and it was cool to be self-empowering, and it was cool to empower your community and your people and your peers and your loved ones. That was the environment,” Busta says. “It wasn’t just Chuck D giving it to us, it was Tribe. It was De La. It was Queen Latifah. It was a lot of them giving that social empowerment perspective in their music, and that frequency is what we aligned with.”

That affinity with Tribe in particular led to “Scenario,” one of the greatest posse cuts in rap music history featuring an explosive verse from Busta. “That moment solidified a lot of the shit that happened for me after that, because I became the guy that pretty much pioneered the feature,” he reflects. “Collabs was happening, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t happening in the way that it was with me.” He acknowledges he seized on the opportunity more as a matter of personal necessity than professional strategy.

“I turned ‘Scenario’ into a moment of capitalizing — by default, because I was kicked out of Leaders of the New School a year later,” Busta says. “In ’93, I was the first, and the youngest in the group to have child. So I needed to find a means to provide for my son, and I wasn’t able to get no money with Leaders of the New School no more. Jumping on everybody’s record while I was hot and everybody wanted that ‘dungeon dragon’ shit from ‘Scenario,’ that shit led to me becoming the go-to guy for features before any other MC in that way.”

Despite insisting that he’s a team player, a reputation earned by bringing up artists like Rampage, Rah Digga and the members of his own collective, the Flipmode Squad, Busta admits that he’s predisposed to try and steal attention on a track — even from its lead artist. “I’m gung-ho about being competitive,” he says. “When I’m collab-ing with other artists, the goal for me is to make sure that I’m never the weakest link. I like to make sure that I’m securing the win — and then I’m going to bust everybody’s ass.”

That said, he’s learned over the years how best to adapt his lyricism to complement his collaborators, whether he’s fighting for the microphone on a club banger or complementing an R&B artist for a bedroom jam. “It’s about the normal progression of anything in life: to a girl that you’re attracted to, you are obviously going to appeal to this woman in a way that’s going to allow her to feel comfortable.”

“If I’m not on ‘Scenario,’ I’m never going to talk like that to a woman, like, ‘Raah, raah!,’” he says with a laugh. “If I’m trying to take her on a date and I’m talking to her like that, she’d probably run and call the police!”

It was that rapid succession of guest verses (including another all-timer, on Craig Mack’s star-studded remix of “Flava in Ya Ear”) that soon earned him a solo contract from Elektra Records. Even while leveraging the cartoonish, mischievous persona that he introduced to the world on “Scenario,” Busta held tightly onto the socially-conscious influence of early collaborators like Chuck D when conceiving his first albums. “The impression that they made was everlasting on me,” he says. “‘The Coming’ and ‘When Disaster Strikes…’ are direct spin-offs of Public Enemy conceptually.

“When I made ‘Extinction Level Event’ and we had that album artwork in 1998 and then to see New York City look like that when the Twin Towers fell, I just felt like I’m onto something… each album was a different chapter, like in the Bible or the Quran.” Even so, he always leavened that gravitas with whimsicality. “The one thing I know that motherfuckers need all the time is to laugh,” he says. “So making sure motherfuckers could experience the joy of some good humor, but still understand that the credibility and the skill set that’s going to be displayed is never going to be compromised in the slightest way, that’s a balance I’ve found great comfort giving to the people.”

His run of hits between 1996’s “The Coming” and 2006’s “The Big Bang” — including 50 singles in those ten years alone — was frequently complemented by unforgettable music videos, many directed by Hype Williams. “Film and television has always been a significant part of what I’ve done because it’s me still displaying my performance skill set,” he says. “I like to do visuals that are spin-offs of movies that I either wish that I was in or that I was a super fan of. ‘Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,’ it’s ‘Coming to America.’ The Janet video [‘What It’s Gonna Be?!’], that’s ‘Terminator 2.’ ‘Dangerous’ with Bill Duke and myself, ‘Lethal Weapon’ and ‘The Last Dragon’ as well.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Busta finds it tough to narrow a list of his favorite tracks to just one or two. “‘Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See’ was significant because it made sure that people understood I got this as a solo artist and I ain’t going nowhere,” he says. “It shifted everything that was happening in music sonically and what we was doing with the visuals, because me and Hype Williams was doing bat-shit crazy shit at that time.

“The Janet record [‘What It’s Gonna Be?!’] was another one of those moments. The Mariah record [‘Give It To Me’]. ‘Touch It’ was another one… there were different milestone moments that was very necessary for the overall success of what was going on with me at the time.”

To echo a refrain Busta frequently makes on social media, the blessings haven’t stopped since then. Not only has he released four more albums (the most recent, “Blockbusta,” in 2023) and eight mixtapes, but he’s acted in dozens of TV and film roles while raising — and now, working with — his three sons and three daughters. “I’m actually probably enjoying and living my best life throughout my whole career within the last three to four years,” he says. “To be able to raise six beautiful children and now to get money doing what we love and be in business with my kids doing what we love, there’s nothing fucking better than that feeling to me.”

Still, even with too many benchmarks to easily count after three and a half decades, he admits there are a few he still hopes to cross. “I want to be the first MC to release an incredible collab with the illustrious, iconic, incredible Sade,” he confesses. “I also would love to do the same with the incredible Adele. The mystique with them is so powerful that their absence obviously makes the heart grow fonder.” Though he’d love to reunite with his former colleagues from Leaders of the New School, Busta says he’s less optimistic about the possibility of a reconciliation anytime soon. “I started to initiate a new Leaders project around 2014, but there’s a lot of wounds that I don’t know if can actually ever be fixed.”

“I don’t rule out the possibility of anything, because I’m not the one that’s still holding onto those energies,” he hastens to explain. “But sometimes when other people got to process things in their own way, that means that the divine timing ain’t there yet.”

While he waits for that moment to pass, he says more music as a solo artist is coming soon, following the release of an EP earlier in 2025. “The name of the new album is ‘Vengeance,’ and the goal is to put it out sometime early in September.” Busta also contributed to the soundtracks of two upcoming films, “The Naked Gun” and “The Bad Guys 2,” both of which open in theaters on the same day. His star on the Walk of Fame ceremony on Aug. 1 further commemorates this fruitful moment in his life and career — one that’s been a long time coming, but one accompanied by the perspective to be able to fully appreciate it. “Receiving this accolade in a time where I’m not only at my best and the happiest I’ve ever been in life overall, I just feel like I am amongst an incredible group of people from all walks of the entertainment industry. It’s a very prestigious acknowledgement, and I’m super grateful.

“At 25, 30 years in our career, we are just now starting to become the Mr. Miyagis of this shit,” Busta says. “We ain’t Daniel-sans no more. We’re starting to master this shit — because we’re doing it, and doing it with grace, and we’re having a ball.”