Review
Genre and Mood
Busta Rhymes released Gimme Some More on 26 October 1998, seven weeks before its album: hip-hop and rap at a sprint, energetic, intense and, once you see the video, playful. Wikipedia files it under hardcore hip-hop and notes that it is often considered the summit of his rhyming style.
Song Summary
Busta wrote it with George Spivey, better known as DJ Scratch, who produced it. The beat rests on a sample: the violin riffs under the main rhythm come from the opening theme Bernard Herrmann composed for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. Over it Busta packs three verses and a chorus in which every line is answered by the title, and the whole thing is over in two minutes and thirty-nine seconds. It was recorded in 1998 at Soundtrack Studios in New York.
Musical Breakdown
No source times the song, so this walk-through follows the lyric’s structure and the sources.
Intro
Busta opens with a story about a childhood fall in which he bumped his head; the video turns it into its cartoon opening.
Verse 1
The first verse comes in at full pace, a list of boasts in short, end-rhymed lines, with the sampled violins in the beat beneath it.
Chorus
The chorus is call and response: Busta asks, and the answer comes back each time as gimme some more.
Outro
After the third verse and a last chorus the track simply ends, short enough that the video, at almost three minutes, runs longer than the album version.
Concepts in Focus
sampling lets a producer build a beat from someone else’s recording, and DJ Scratch reached for one of the most famous string themes in film. The sampled violins carry a theme written to put a cinema audience on edge into a rap single.
The sampled figure works as a riff: a short, repeated phrase that drives the song. Listen to how the rapping locks to it.
The music video, directed by Hype Williams with Busta credited as Busta Remo, is shot through a fisheye lens in fast motion. A child playing young Busta is chased through a house by a blue monster with yellow eyes, intercut with Busta and the Flipmode Squad as a boxer, a stockbroker, a miner, a pimp and more; NPR remembered him rapping as a boxer, a cowboy and a zoot-suited gangster. It was nominated for Breakthrough Video at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards.
Artistic Context
Extinction Level Event: The Final World Front followed on 15 December 1998 on Flipmode and Elektra, the third album of an apocalyptic run after The Coming and When Disaster Strikes…, whose single Busta Rhymes, Jamal – Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See (feat. Jamal) had also been recorded at Soundtrack Studios. The album reached number 12 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum.
Impact and Reception
Gimme Some More reached number five in the UK, where it went silver, and number 29 on the US R&B/Hip-Hop chart, and it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance in 2000, losing to Eminem’s My Name Is. Turn it up and watch the video.
