Busy Signal, D.O.B.
Featured Album
The former gun-hit wonder becomes the best kind of conscious rapper
There's really no Northern pop equivalent to Busy Signal, the Jamaican dancehall sensation who sings and raps better than Drake and does both in combination better than any human being on earth. You'd think he wants to be his own Northern pop equivalent, judging by his association with M.I.A., and by this third album's irresistible one-drop covers of Phil Collins's "One More Night" and the Commodores' "Nightshift" — two '80s hits redeemed. Yet crossover reggae means something different to Busy than it did to, say, Beenie Man in 2000, who forsook emergent reggaeton for R&B. Now the bristling dembow of "Picante" and piano-happy merengue of "Busy Latino" aim squarely at the Latin dancehall audience, the latter track making a riddim of Elvis Crespo's "Suavemente" — and Busy keeps the R&B anyway.
The peak here is "My Money (Money Tree)," its beat a more minimalist version of the ska chant from Chalie Boy's "I Look Good," with Busy providing all the melody necessary in what sounds like five voices, in and out of the Auto-Tune he doesn't appear to need. The song fantasizes about not just off-shore accounts but computers for inner-city schools, its hustle jam slipping subtly into social commentary. The former gun-hit wonder has become the best kind of conscious rapper: a lover man of the people weary of everything in dancehall but the form he zestfully invigorates.
