Join us on Friday, February 24th 8PM for Busta Rhymes at the End of the World, a lecture by artist, writer, and curator Aria Dean
The lecture will explore Busta Rhymes and his suite of apocalyptic concept albums — The Coming (1996), When Disaster Strikes (1997), Extinction Level Event (1998), Anarchy (2000), and Genesis (2001) — and their accompanying visuals.
from Aria:
Over the course of the five albums, Busta Rhymes weaves a complex narrative of global demise and eventual regeneration of which he (the ‘black child’, the ‘black man’) is at the center. In this talk, I suggest that Busta’s apocalypse speaks to something beyond generalized global crisis at the millennium–and fear of what the millennium would bring, instead speaking to an apocalyptic blackness that is influenced by both afrofuturism and Busta’s relationship to the Five Percent Nation, and resonates with directions in black radical thought, both new and old.