The news that Ol’ Dirty Bastard had died surprised no one. A friend who knew I was a fan of the Wu-Tang Clan, ODB’s Staten Island, NY rap collective, emailed to tell me the news. I immediately checked the web for a write-up, and found the expected news that he had collapsed of apparent heart failure in a Manhattan recording studio. His passing in such a sudden manner, just two days shy of his 36th birthday, was the inevitable flameout at the end of an explosive career. Born Russell Tyrone Jones, ODB died on November 13, 2004. He left behind the musical legacy of a deranged genius, and an evolving persona that, just a month later, has already been turned into a cultural punch line.
Hip-hop fans were first introduced to Dirty on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal classic released in 1993. Wu-Tang was a rap super-group, originally comprised of eight official members. In later years the crew swelled to ten or more. ODB helped form Wu-Tang with his cousins Robert Diggs, known as the RZA, and Gary Grice, known as GZA or the Genius. Other founding members included Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon the Chef, U-God, and Inspectah Deck. Rappers Cappadonna, Masta Killa, and Streetlife made contributions on the group’s subsequent albums. Since its inception, Wu-Tang has spawned critically and commercially successful solo careers for all of its members, most notably the RZA (mainly as a producer), the GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, and Method Man. The RZA has produced movie scores for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, and both of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. Method, in addition to his own solo work, has also partnered with rapper Redman on an album (1999’s Blackout), a movie (How High) and a sitcom (Fox’s Method and Red).
Enter the Wu-Tang is often credited for reinvigorating East Coast hip-hop in the early 90s. Wu-Tang wrested control of the rap music scene from West Coast gangsta rappers like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg who dominated at the time. The album also paved the way for the success of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and his Bad Boy record label a year later. Wu-Tang stood out because of their immense combined talent and their bizarre mix of cultural imagery. The group mixed RZA’s sinister beats with obscure kung-fu movie references, conspiracy-theory Illuminati mysticism, and true-crime tales. Their home of Staten Island became known as Shaolin, and the album is sprinkled with movie sound bytes that tell the tale of the mythical Shaolin monks and the Wu-Tang sword. In a show of solidarity, the members of the group wore masks on the cover of Enter the Wu-Tang. They created their own pseudo-Asian ghetto culture, borne out of the shared experiences of growing up in the Park Hill and Linden projects and watching martial arts movies at 42nd street theaters as kids.
Ol’ Dirty Bastard immediately stood out as the most recognizable voice amidst this talented crew. His vibrato bellowing, screaming style and aggressive lyrics punched you in the throat and left you stunned while Raekwon or Ghostface moved in for the kill. His voice was an instrument in its own right, in the tradition of Busta Rhymes or Public Enemy’s Chuck D. Dirty made his first appearance on Enter the Wu-Tang on the second track “Shame on a Nigga,” in which delicately asks “Do you wanna get your teeth knocked the fuck out?” Each of his verses on the album is loaded with similar threats, punctuated with screams and howls. The image of a raving lunatic was bolstered by a mouthful of gold teeth and his half-cornrowed, wildly-braided hair. But Dirty often aimed the best jabs at himself. He raps, “I get into shit / I let it out like diarrhea / I got burned once but that was only gonorrhea.” Such frank self-deprecation is still a rarity in a musical genre built on the rapper’s ability to slay wack MCs.
Dirty’s presence on Enter the Wu-Tang is fleeting; he appears on just four of the 12 songs and none of the various skits squeezed in between tracks. Listeners get the impression that the crew had a hard time dragging him into the studio for a few takes. The intensity and brevity of each verse he did complete suggests that he could pull off his performances in one burst of verbal kung-fu. In a skit halfway through the album, Method Man explained the origin of each of the Wu’s names. He said Dirty earned his moniker because “there ain’t no father to his style.” Lyrically, he was a bastard and a misfit in relation to the rest of the group. Method Man, the GZA, Raekwon, and Ghostface built their solo careers on the strength of labyrinthine battle-lyrics and deft storytelling. Dirty’s autistic yelps contrasted chaotically with their precision. But his frenetic style and maniacal persona added to a growing legend.
In 1995, on the heels of Wu-Tang’s success, ODB released his first solo album, Return to the 36 Chambers: the Dirty Version. The album, produced mostly by the RZA, was Ol’ Dirty Bastard unleashed. Its 17 tracks were funny and funky, aggressive and disturbing all at once. Dirty’s voice was even more hoarse and boozy than on the Wu-Tang album, and he used it to even greater effect. Songs like “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” and “Brooklyn Zoo,” with their off-key piano samples and distorted bass became instant classics of the Wu-Tang canon. He mixed raunchy sex rhymes with his overt aggression to create an end product that was more vulgar and offensive than anything Wu-Tang would ever record. But true to form, he showed off a split personality, developing Ol’Dirty Bastard the lovable goof to go along with ODB the wild-eyed assassin. On “Hippa to the Hoppa,” he lets his guard down again, rapping “I keep my breath smellin’ like shit so I can get funky.” Then on the album’s strangest moment, “Drunk Game (Sweet Sugar Pie),” he croons a love song over a Casio keyboard beat while yelling shout outs to his R&B heroes in the background (”Luther Vandross! Marvin Gaye! Patti LaBelle!”). The sense of humor that he started to show on Return to the 36 Chambers would later became his most endearing quality.
In the summer of1997, the Wu-Tang Clan returned with a sprawling, two-disc, magnum opus called Wu-Tang Forever. It was the most anticipated hip-hop album of the year, and it showcased an evolving Clan. RZA’s music was brooding, darker and more cinematic than Enter the Wu-Tang. The MCs took the RZA’s cue to make their rhymes more intricate than ever. ODB, on the other hand, pulled no punches and built upon the raunch of Return to the 36 Chambers. On “The Dog Shit,” his only entirely solo appearance on any of the group’s albums, “Old Dirt Dog” mumbles, “Pardon me bitch while I shit on your grass.” His filthy style would have seemed out of place had he appeared on more than just six of the 27 tracks, two of which were just to bark a chorus. These brief appearances foretold the coming trouble and offstage antics that would seal his legacy. Wu-Tang went on a major concert tour that summer with Rage Against the Machine, but Dirty missed most of the shows.
Ol’ Dirty Bastard developed his free-associative musical style from an equally bizarre personal life. After the release of the first Wu-Tang album, he famously took MTV News cameras with him in a limousine while he collected food stamps. He was arrested in 1997 for failing to pay almost a year’s worth of child support to his wife, Icelene, and their three children (Dirty was rumored to have fathered a dozen children with various women, though Icelene insists her three are the only ones). In 1998, he rescued a girl from an overturned vehicle in Brooklyn, then crashed the stage at the Grammy Awards the next day to protest the Clan’s loss to Puff Daddy for best rap album. He grabbed the microphone from presenter Shawn Colvin and said, “I went and bought me an outfit today that cost me a lot of money, because I figured that Wu-Tang was gonna win. I don’t know how you all see it, but when it comes to the children, Wu-Tang is for the children. We teach the children. Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best. I want you all to know that this is ODB, and I love you all. Peace.” Thinking of the children, he pleaded guilty to assaulting Icelene later that year.
But Dirty didn’t confine his troubles to domestic disputes. Two months after the assault conviction, he was shot in the back in a robbery attempt at his Brooklyn apartment. Later that year, he was arrested for shoplifting a pair of sneakers in Virginia Beach, VA, and was accused of making “terrorist threats” at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. While he certainly wasn’t the first rapper to actually live the lifestyle he glamorized in his music, he did take to it with particular aplomb. In 1999 he was the first person arrested under a California law prohibiting convicted felons from wearing a bulletproof vest. Paranoia was a lyrical staple of the Wu-Tang Clan. They spun tales of government conspiracies and secret societies years before Dan Brown popularized such thought in The DaVinci Code. After one of his sons was born, Dirty refused to let doctors use needles on the boy for fear they might inject something insidious. He was more likely to be sporting Kevlar to protect himself from CIA spooks than he was from the real threats facing a famous rapper.
In 2000 ODB escaped from custody while being transported to court from a drug rehab center in Pasadena, CA. While on the run, he managed to spend time in a recording studio with the RZA, and made a furtive concert appearance with Wu-Tang in New York. He was finally arrested while signing autographs at a McDonald’s in Philadelphia. This arrest for running away from rehab and for the previous charge of drug possession, led to a two-year prison stint.
In the midst of all his extracurricular activities, Dirty released a second solo album, Nigga Please, in 1999. The album is less cohesive than Return to the 36 Chambers, due to various production credits by the then unknown Neptunes and ODB himself. The album feels pieced together, but it showcased Dirty’s inner freak. He murdered covers of Rick James’ “Cold Blooded” and Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache,” and wore a velour tracksuit and Jheri curl wig on the album cover. Nigga Please produced his biggest commercial success, “Got Your Money”, a pop dance hit fueled by the Neptunes’ bouncy production and a catchy chorus by Kelis. “Got Your Money” epitomized Dirty’s knack for creating the surreal. Top 40 radio DJs, afraid to say “bastard” on air, introduced the hot new single by “ODB.” Oblivious hairdressers, kids, and housewives hummed along to a tune by the man who once rapped, “Be careful with my balls, they’re fragile as eggs.”
Nigga Please was Dirty’s last major appearance on any recording, though he signed with Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records upon release from prison and was close to completing a new album when he died. Dirty laid down a few sleepy verses with Snoop Dogg in “Conditioner” on Wu-Tang’s 2000 effort The W, but was incarcerated while Wu-Tang recorded 2001’s Iron Flag. In a telling transition, Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav hyped up a song called “Soul Power (Black Jungle)” on Iron Flag, as if Wu-Tang needed to replace Dirty with another resident joker. By the release of Iron Flag, the Wu-Tang Clan was a mere shell of their former selves. The album feels like a half-hearted reunion after years of independent success by group members, a mere nod to long time fans reminiscing the Wu’s golden years. The absence of Ol’ Dirty Bastard just seemed like a necessary part of the group’s ongoing narrative.
By the time he was in jail, Dirty’s antics turned him into a hipster joke. Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys’ record company, sold “Free ODB” T-shirts shortly after he was locked down. Though few would doubt the Beastie Boys’ sincerity in hoping for his timely release, the lettering on the shirt is printed in the same font used by kitschy heavy metal acts like KISS, to proclaim the wearer’s intended irony. Ol’ Dirty Bastard was being included in the same class of screwball heroes as Gary Coleman and Pee Wee Herman. VH1 was even planning an ODB reality show upon his release from prison. Had he lived longer he could have raked in royalties from more contrived B-list celebrity appearances and ironic TV specials. But his death still provided fodder for the irony industry. Instead of being lionized like 2Pac or the Notorious BIG were after their murders, ODB is now eulogized by more tongue-in-cheek T-shirts at a website called cracksmokingshirts.com.
This condescending celebrity appeal makes Dirty’s death that much more depressing, because it obscures a troubling story of drug addiction and mental illness. He struggled with a cocaine habit throughout his career. At a hearing in 2003, he told the parole board that he had been clean for four years, his longest stretch ever. He said, “When you got the stardom you got ladies all around, you got all kinds of foolish things messing with your head.” After his death, family members say that Rusty, as they called him, simply couldn’t say no to the fast lifestyle of hip-hop fame. He continued to live in Brooklyn, where he took care of his parents financially and handed out money to children in the streets. But his sister Monique told the New York Times that, “He couldn’t come to the neighborhood anymore and be who he was because now he’d become ODB.”
ODB created a legend that almost eclipses his creative and quirky musical legacy. He had no problem altering versions of his life story to enhance the character of Ol’ Dirty Bastard in the name of publicity. “Our brother looked at things as selling records,” said Monique about Rusty’s mendacious claims that he had never known his father, or that he had grown up on welfare. Dirty’s aura was of his own making, as much a product of his public misbehavior as his music.
The line between the accidental and the contrived in Ol Dirty Bastard’s career path is difficult to discern. This explains the duality of his character, how a vulgar rapper and serial criminal could create such a weirdly lovable persona, as likely to croon a love song as to threaten bodily harm. He went by many names: ODB, Dirty, Dirt Dog, Osirus, Big Baby Jesus, Unique Ason, Joe Bananas, and Dirt McGirt, to name a few. Each handle surely carried a different shade of meaning for him, yet still incomprehensible to his fans. The confusion is fitting for an artist who thrived on his own musical schizophrenia.