‘This Means War’: the story behind Busta Rhymes’ Black Sabbath remake
Busta Rhymes is partial to a collaboration, having embarked upon plenty throughout his career. But out of all of them, his partnership with Ozzy Osbourne stands out as perhaps the most unlikely.
On his 1998 album Extinction Level Event: The Final World Front, his third, Busta worked with Janet Jackson and Mystikal on a couple of songs, but the name that really stands out on the track listing is Ozzy. He was the featured artist on ‘This Means War!!’
As Busta sees it, recruiting someone like Ozzy onto a hip-hop album isn’t as strange as it might initially seem. Metal and hip-hop do share a history together, so Busta was just continuing a longstanding tradition. As he explained to NME in 2020, “In hip-hop sampling, producers went to metal bands like Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe to get the hardest snare drums.”
Busta had always been a big fan of the Black Sabbath album Paranoid, and especially its song ‘Iron Man.’ He wanted to tap into the track’s energy for Extinction Level Event, but he didn’t just sample it in a straightforward way. The process was much more complicated.
Busta arranged for a band, Lordz of Brooklynn, to come into the studio to recreate the instrumental of ‘Iron Man.’ That was fine, but for the vocals Busta needed the real deal. He reached out to Ozzy’s wife, Sharon, to request Ozzy’s participation on the track, and, in the end, the Osbournes agreed.
“Ozzy came to my studio and didn’t want anything,” Busta recalled. “He refused all the food and drinks I offered him—he’d only accept things to eat and drink from his own people. In the past, people had put shit in his food and he wasn’t going to let it happen again.”
Busta noted that Ozzy had had a “super-good energy” and that he “sang whatever I wanted him to,” ultimately helping him to create ‘This Means War!!,’ which is one of Busta’s favourite tracks that he ever made. It sits right towards the end of Extinction Level Event.
Busta also spoke about ‘This Means War!!’ to Rolling Stone in 1998, elaborating on the specific elements that drew him to ‘Iron Man’ in the first place. Explaining that he had been going “through some bullshit with people I thought was friends of mine,” he identified with the “experience of the betrayal and the disloyalty” that is at the heart of Ozzy’s lyrics in the original.
“Because the original composition, ‘Iron Man,’ is about people turning their backs on Ozzy and him becoming the Iron Man and seeking his revenge,” Busta said. “I was goin’ through the premise of the record in my life, and doin’ that record was the best thing to capture exactly what I was goin’ through.”