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B. Rhymes is all hype and hyper; and, as contemporary recording artist, he's hyper-prolific. His records are regular events at a time in which record companies would rather milk each album for all they can. They — the Rhymes recs — are always brightly lit and bobby-dazzling, some 70-some-mins-long set of songs that project a Hype Williams movie in your brain. And, to me, they always seem like the ultimate barometer of the MTV-hop generation. Style begets stylissimo, but little substance. Shiny surfaces only. A shrine to persona. Busta's got the skills t'pay th'bills, and the bills to pay the producers, and Genesis finds appearance-fee appearances from all the hot hands: Neptunes, Dre, Michaelangelo, Just Blaize, P. Diddy. These hip-pop Event records, like Event movies, are rarely more than the sum of their parts, perfunctory impulse purchases in which special effects mask all — the good and the bad — with the masculine artifice of cool. In such circumstances, an impressive cast of popular humans and some tasteful art-direction are usually more than enough to make the time tick over without concern, but on Genesis the ruse doesn't quite suspend disbelief. Disbelieving, you actually start to feel its perfunctory nature coming through. Busta's got the skills — he's in vintage verbal rotary-sprinkler-styled hyperswift syllable-spitting form on "Break Ya Neck" — but here it really seems like he doesn't know what else to be but this, his prolific back catalogue seeming like a soup in which this projected "personality" is the only thing that stays afloat, and this record here being merely a release between the last one and the next one. So, like, no matter how many choice joints are served up with multi-purpose panache — this record will sound great playing in clubs, cars, on headphones, through MP3 compression — you're left with a sense of an expensive, well-lit collage-piece, an assemblage of inventive individual scenes that don't make for a winning screenplay.
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