It’s been 15 years since Busta Rhymes unleashed his Grammy-nominated single “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” and the track is still one of the Brooklyn emcee’s most heralded and talked about songs. Now, in a recent interview with MTV, Bussa Bus recalls how Q-Tip and Diddy inspired his unusual delivery on the cut.
Busta explained that he decided to change up his flow and vocal intonations after Q-Tip and Diddy critiqued how he screamed his lyrics on many of his previous songs. He continued on to say that he actually based his delivery off many West Indian and Trinidadian immigrants in his native Brooklyn, who would pepper the word “yo” into every sentence as an attempt to better adopt the local dialect.
“[Diddy and Q-Tip] were in [the studio] talking to me about why I’m ‘screaming’ on every record,” he recalled. “My man at that time brought the beat to them, it was produced by Shamello and Epitome of Scratch Grand Cut and Buddah…that was the beat that felt like the right beat to experiment with that calm vocal tone.”
He continued, “When I did the record, I actually did the record with the idea in mind of emulating this guy that used to be on the corner in East Flatbush, Brooklyn…he was a homeless dude and he used to sit on the corner and I think he was from Trinidad…a lot of the dudes that might’ve been hustling at that time that was West Indian, to try to camouflage the fact that they were West Indian, they would say ‘Yo’ in everything at the end of every sentence to try to seem like they had an American accent…so this Trinidadian dude at the corner at the end of the block, he would see us…and he’d be like, ‘Yo Busta let me hold $5 yo, what’s up yo, you chillin’ yo, everything good, yo,’ so I took that and I went to the studio and combined that with the calm flow.”
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Check out the full interview below.
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