I've been a fan of Busta's since his early days, and in addition to the seminal L.O.N.S. joints "A Future Without A Past" and "T.I.M.E.", I also own most of his early solo albums, such as "The Coming" and "When Disaster Strikes". When I saw the tracklisting on this disc, I thought that such a compilation would enable me to catch up on some of Bussa-Buss' excellent post-millenial work without spending a ton of cash. Of course, as the listing indicates, all of the important numbers are indeed here, like the clever yet menacing grooves of "Call the Ambulance" and "Betta Stay in Your House" (the latter with a scorching cameo by Rah Digga), the Neptunes produced bangers "Pass The Courvoisier", "Light Your Ass on Fire", and "What It Is" (the last of these featuring a lovably eccentric and spot on Kelis), and the dancehall influenced "Make It Clap". Any true hip hop head should be happy to have this album in their collection, right? Unfortunately, no, because the producers of this disc inexplicably felt the need to ruin their little anthology by offering the edited-for-content, so-called "clean", versions of these songs, compromising Busta's original artistic vision. Gaps of silence perforate each track like so much Swiss cheese as Busta drops N and F bombs left and right, only to find them blanked out by some puritanical puke of an audio engineer. It's more than any grown man or woman, who considers themselves a fan of this necessarily coarse genre of music, can bear. Frankly, I don't know who the producers of this album were trying to sell it to. Little kids who chase after "explicit content" stickers like so much candy? No. The parents of such children who wouldn't buy them a Busta Rhymes album no matter how watered down it was? No. Real hip hop fans who don't mind a curse word or two if that's a part of the emcee's original vision for his or her work? Emphatically, NO!!! again. So I guess their target audience was....nobody?
What a shame. Because it's Busta, and because of what this album could've been with the same track listing sans editing, I'm going to give this little collection two stars instead of one, but in good conscience, I can't go any higher than that. If they're going to call this series of discs the "Artist Collection" (others in the series include Luther Vandross and Hall & Oates...I bet they haven't mucked with the music on those...), then they should respect the integrity of the artist involved, and release his or her music in an unaltered state.
