Busy Bee
David Parker started rapping in the Bronx in the late 1970s and became one of the era's most electric party-rockers, built around call-and-response chants that could work a crowd into a frenzy without a single written verse. His run of Sugar Hill and Enjoy singles (‘Making Cash Money,’ ‘Suicide’) made him a fixture of the early battle circuit, but he's best remembered for the December 1981 Harlem World battle where a young Kool Moe Dee's written punchlines picked apart his freestyled boasts — a beat-down widely credited with tilting the culture from ad-libbed showmanship toward the composed, lyrical battle rap Moe Dee's generation would perfect.
Busy Bee has said he was directly “inspired by Kidd Creole, Melle Mel, and Keef Cowboy” of the Furious Five to become a rapper in the first place — the group whose command of a crowd he set out to match.
listen forThe urgent, hard-nosed vocal authority Melle Mel brings to ‘White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)’ is scaled down into pure crowd-management showmanship on Busy Bee's own party-starter ‘Suicide.’
The same account of Busy Bee's early inspiration names Kidd Creole and Keef Cowboy of the Furious Five alongside Melle Mel — the full crew's tight vocal trade-offs were the standard he measured his own crowd-rocking sets against.
listen forThe Furious Five's rehearsed vocal hand-offs on ‘The Message’ get loosened into Busy Bee's looser, ad-libbed call-and-response on ‘Running Thangs.’
Afrika Bambaataa recruited Busy Bee into the Zulu Nation early in his career, putting him inside the era's biggest communal party-jam scene — the same unity-chant, crowd-as-instrument ethos Bambaataa built his own sets around.
listen forThe chanted, call-and-response unity hooks of Bambaataa's ‘Planet Rock’ are the direct ancestor of the audience-as-instrument party-rocking Busy Bee built his whole reputation on with ‘Making Cash Money.’