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Concert Wed Nov 14 2007
Hop on the Bus
Busdriver, nee Regan Farquhar, comes from authentic hip-hop stock.
Back in the day, his father wrote Krush Groove, the seminal eighties’ hip-hop, Def Jam movie, an opportunity that allowed Busdriver a look into his future career.
“Getting to meet LL Cool J, Run-DMC and The Fat Boys as a preteen led me to believe I had some insight into rapper ethos,” he says. “I remember that [Def Jam] basically paid LL Cool J in shoes — eighteen or twenty-five pairs of Adidas.”
The impression made upon the young Busdriver was extensive. He began rapping when he was nine and recorded his first album, with the forgettable group 4/29, at age thirteen. But it wasn’t all smooth, and the ladies didn’t necessarily love cool Regan. In his usual self-effacing style, he describes 4/29’s sound as “a bad Kris Kross, minus the Jermaine Dupri coaching and expansive teeny-bopper fan base. It took me years to be actually competent as a rhymer. The formative years were incredibly rough.”
Luckily for listeners, Busdriver’s lyrical style has improved exponentially since those baggy backward-jeans days. His flow, a fast-talking staccato that revels in jazzy diatribes, offbeat in topic as well as tempo. His lyrics are wordy, intellectual and extremely literate. He’ll throw down a word like “troglodyte” as if it were the most normal rap epithet since “wack.”
His latest album — his first on the Anti-/Epitaph label — is RoadKillOvercoat, and it finds Busdriver exploring thicker, weirder beats and rants but with a decidedly pop edge. His producers, Boom Bip and Nobody, effectively manage to keep up with Busdriver’s eclectic tastes, laying down beats alternately hard and dreamy.
See him in action when he performs this Friday, Nov. 16, at the Empty Bottle with Daedelus and Antimc.