Bee Kind, Rewind

That grinding sound in your ears is the gears of nostalgia down-shifting into a golden backspin. Forty may be the new 30, but 2007 is not the new and improved 1977, our Twin Towers still intact. This Scared New World has us anxiously coveting the lost continent known as Before. Before the echo of a modern Pleistocene Epoch—the New Ice Age—sent peals of Bling! Bling! ricocheting around the world; before Jay-Z became not only Jigganational but hip-hop's Magna Carter; before 9-7-96 and 3-9-97 bodied the innocence of "Rapper's Delight"; before nine bullets and a hot mix tape parlayed itself into a blue-chip stock portfolio at Goldman Sachs. Before all that, there was the Boogie Down, there was the Black Door, the Furious Five, the Cold Crush, the L Brothers, the Mercedes Ladies, the Zulu Nation. There was Herc, Flash, Bam, Theodore, and Caz. There was Lee and Phase II turning the subway yard into a third-railed Sistine Chapel. There was the Alps Hotel. There was 123 Park. There was two turntables.

And there was Busy Bee, among the stars of Charlie Ahearn's landmark 1982 film Wild Style. Now honored with a 25th-anniversary DVD re-release, it's the movie that really established hip-hop not only in the mainstream, but around the world. But Busy still remembers where it started. "I lived across the street from those abandoned buildings that you see in Wild Style," he told me one afternoon as we sat in the Starbucks in Pikesville, a suburb of his adopted hometown of Baltimore. "I grew up on Holmes Street. I fell in love with hip-hop from the time I used to see Kool Herc rocking the community center on Sedgwick Avenue around 1975." Busy grew up the oldest of four children, to two hardworking parents. "I had a solid family life, but I also knew all of the scramblin' guys in the streets, the dudes who were getting money," he recalls. "I wanted to be fly, too—dress nice, get the girls, drink champagne-—and I felt hip-hop could be the avenue to those things."

Busy's true epiphany came when he watched Grandmaster Flash perform one day with his three MCs, pre–Furious Five. "It was Kid Creole, Melle Mel, and Keith Cowboy. They gave me inspiration. Flash used to play this jam called 'Seven Minutes of Funk,' and Melle Mel and Kid Creole had a routine to that song that was amazing. Watching them, I was like, 'Yo, that's what I want to do!' " From there, Busy hooked up with a DJ by the name of Disco King Mario, who helped the rapper develop his unique, booming, singsong voice. "Disco King Mario had the system to understand my voice," Busy says. "He used to tell me, 'Yo, Busy Bee, I'm-a make you a star! You'll sound so vee-shus! You'll sound so vee-shus!' That was my man."

MCs—from Grandmaster Caz to the Cold Crush Brothers to the L Brothers to the Funky Four +1—were true icons at the dawn of hip-hop, and they all had one thing in common: They were all part of a group. But Busy Bee was a man apart. "My thing was just rapping on the mic," he says. "All I wanted to do was get on the mic and knock out all bums." As a personality, though, Busy prefers exuberance to menace. When he smiled, grabbed the mic, and yelled, "Now where's that place we work it out?", and the crowd screamed back, "At the Alps!", Busy not only put that East Bronx motel on the map, but kept the crowd moving and kept everyone's minds off their problems waiting back home. And as the nirvana of gangster rap enters its death cycle, people are looking for hip-hop's bliss once again—even 30 years later, Busy's bubbly enthusiasm is the closest thing to euphoria we've got in this age of crack-house sympathies recast as street-corner symphonies.

Folks are tired of mourning; Busy is a cause worth celebrating. His march to the title of No. 1 MC was an exciting one, shutting down shows from the Bronx's Crotona Park to the Black Door (where he could melt the ice-grilled silence of the Casanova Crew—the most fearsome stickup kids around—and goad them into a humid call-and-response of "I got sperm/That jingle-jangle- jingles"), the Audubon Ballroom, and, of course, Harlem World, the site of the infamous 1981 show where some say the Treacherous Three's Kool Moe Dee sabotaged Busy's career in a scathing rap battle.