I set up a doctor’s appointment the next day.” With help from family and friends, he transformed his health, and today, Busta Rhymes is living his best life. “I felt ashamed because I wasn’t in the right mind to even be aware of what had happened the night before. “Security was like, ‘Your son is very disappointed and concerned by what he saw last night,’ ” he says. The next morning, Busta was hit with the truth. His surgeon had warned that it could change the octave of his voice, “closer to a chipmunk kind of n-a.” He was fearful of surgery due to the risk that it would forever alter one of the world’s most signature baritones. Polyps had developed on his vocal cords, blocking 90 percent of his air passages and causing sleep apnea so severe that his breathing, whether he was asleep or awake, resembled that of a dungeon dragon. He had eaten and drunk himself up to 340 pounds, leading to an array of medical ailments the most detrimental of these threatened to kill the rapper, if not literally then professionally. nightclub Poppy with friends and overdid it with libation-so much so that once Busta was back at his residence, it took about 45 minutes for his eldest son and his security detail to pull him out of a stupor.ĭuring that weekend, Busta was in the worst health of his life. The linguistic magician born Trevor Smith just wanted to celebrate his fallen comrades and the day’s successful video shoot for his single “Czar.” He hit the L.A. It was also the 47th-birthday weekend of the late, great Notorious B.I.G. Less than two months earlier, Nipsey Hussle had been killed. Read the rest of the stories here.īUSTA RHYMES APPEARED to be in a coma-40 minutes had passed and he was non-responsive in the back of a car after a heavy night out in May 2019.

This cover story is part of Hip-Hop Is Life, a series of profiles and features that revisit key moments in the intersection of hip-hop and Black men’s health over the last 50 years.

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