We are closing out the year with a bang with the legendary rapper, producer, entrepreneur, actor, and icon Busta Rhymes. Born Trevor George Smith Jr., he was raised in East Flatbush by Jamaican immigrant parents in a home with “a lot of love” and a constantly shifting rotation of music playing. He grew up on everything from reggae and soul to rock and jazz. And when he stepped out of the house, he was greeted with even more sonic variety.

East Flatbush was (and still is) a predominantly Caribbean melting pot, and the sounds of the neighborhood—hip-hop, calypso, Haitian music—blended with its inhabitants’ hard-working ethos to shape Rhymes’s early feelings about music and accomplishment. “My determination, my perspective on failure not being an option, comes from what we were surrounded by

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