Review by Noah Goodbaum | Photography by Philip Litevsky

Here’s how you know you’re in the presence of a rap star: he only has to perform ten-second snippets of his songs to have hundreds of people losing their shit. Busta Rhymes hit the Phoenix and it was one of the most amazing rap shows Toronto’s seen in ages. Your correspondent, for his part, was FLOORED. Never seen a party so packed get so crunk so fast. Real talk. It was extraordinary.

In defiance of the rap-show norm, Bus came out right on schedule, with the regal bearing of an emperor come to bask in the adulation of the masses. It was fitting. Along with the bellowing voice, the lightning-fast flow and the world-conquering charisma that instantly cemented his place in rap history right from his dungeon dragon moment in 1991, he also has better instincts about what makes a hit than almost anyone in the industry, and he’s been firing them out at us and killing the dance floor, the street-corner cipher and the strip club for almost 20 years. He kicked out an hour’s worth of jams, from a knockin’ “Make It Clap” and a smooth “What It Is Right Now” to a rowdy “Scenario” and a blazing “Break Ya Neck”, and had the near-capacity crowd eating out of his hands the whole way through,

He’s also acquired the easy professionalism of a seasoned showman, regaling us with stories of visiting his Aunt Pat in Mississauga and working the nostalgia angle for the true-school heads eager to hear “Woo-Ha! Got You All In Check”. He did what any entertainer worth his salt knows to do: he charmed the audience into making us believe he really cared, and showed us the best time he possibly could. He proclaimed his love for our city, and promised to be back with a sincerity he claimed was real and we were happy to accept.

The less thrilling aspects of his persona and career were on display too: he opened the show with a long medley of joints from his (to be honest) wack-ass new record, he got a little too angry at an overenthusiastic male fan, which reminded everyone of the homophobia he seems to be working just a little too hard to try to mask; and as charming as it was to see his love and support for his hype-man Spliff Starr, it’s still Spliff Starr, and he really didn’t need to give so much stage time to Spliff Starr. But what Busta managed to accomplish is to give us a sense of himself as a complete entertainer, a lion of rap music, whose occasional unsavoury decisions shrink down to nothing compared to the incredible magnitude of what he’s achieved. The wack shit was still there in the background, but he turned up the volume on the love, the chops, and the hits. And for that, he deserved every chant, every scream, every roar of delight I heard from the crowd that night.

Bong bong!