If There’s No Father to His Style, Call Him ‘Bastard’

“To the public he was known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard but to me he was known as Rusty. The kindest, most generous soul on earth."

Cherry Jones, mother of ODB

This past Saturday (November 13) marks the sixth-year anniversary of the death of Russell Tyrone Jones, the rapper more famously known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Strangely enough, on this past Monday (November 15) he would have been 42.

It is a daunting task to try and write a thousand-word obituary on a man one hardly knows anything about. Sure, I remember playing basketball to Wu Tang Clan tracks when I was in high school; but that was only as a result of high pressure and a lot of persistence from a very close friend of mine who demanded his hip-hop CDs get as much play time as my overdone, and inappropriate in comparison, classic rock repertoire. It was not long before I began to recognize my own closeted affection for the Staten Island collective. Soon thereafter, and much to the surprise of my good pal Chris, I was requesting the Clan each time we got into his truck to head off to football practice, drink rye and gingers at a bush party, or cruise the ‘dangerous’ redneck streets of my hometown. What was this kung-fu stuff? I didn’t have a clue, and I didn't really much care.

What I did know was narrowed down to two indisputable certainties: 1) I had no idea what this guy was rapping about, and couldn’t relate to any of it. And 2) It didn’t matter, because "oh baby," I too, “like it raw.”

The thing about a guy who comes onto the scene under the moniker ‘Ol’ Dirty Bastard’, and backed by a group called ‘The Wu Tang Clan’, you would assume presents an immediate problem to his listeners. And while for a while, I felt guilty for once thinking this way, the more I learn about ODB, the less guilt I feel. Shock was his modus operandi--the idea that people didn't understand him, but stopped to look and listen anyhow, was exactly the entertainment value he was trying to achieve. It was a style that would separate him from just about all of his contemporaries. I speculate that the reaction I got from his music was the very response he was looking for. He wanted his audience to hear his music and watch his performances in a “what the fuck just happened” state of disbelief.

A case in point (his most famous case, to be exact):

During the fortieth Grammy award ceremonies (1998) in Rockefeller Plaza, Dirty jumped onto the stage to interrupt the “song of the year” recipient speech in a state of full- consciousness of what he was doing. His intention became his desired result. You see, in 1998 the Grammy’s had still not recognized the rap-portion of the show as a television worthy event; and this pissed Dirty off. Frustrated that the awards for hip-hop artists were handed out a day earlier, during a non-televised ceremony, ODB took advantage of this moment to share with the rest of the country his sentiments for the injustices of a biased music industry. While many viewers saw it as a form of “distaste,” others applauded Dirty for his stance against racial prejudices in a country and industry that is supposed to be a leader in the disintegration of exactly that. In 1998, were organizers and leaders in the American Music Academy really that much in the dark about a genre of music that was over two-decades old and, by then, deeply immersed in American culture? If so, Dirty sure rattled them to attention.

A lot can be said about the life of Russell Tyrone Jackson that this article does not have the time nor space for. (As a side not, if you are interested I suggest Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB by Jaime Lowe, which was the primary research source for this article). I could have spent much of my time filling you in on all of his sexual escapades that led to fatherless and unsupported children. I could have gone into detail over his trouble with the law, time spent in and out of US’s notorious and discriminatory prison system, and the somewhat lengthy criminal record he managed to acquire over his thirty-five years in this world. Finally, I could have discussed his personal battle with drug and alcohol abuse, supposed and much disputed mental instability, and the official cause of his death: “Accidental overdose from a lethal combination of Tramadol [a painkiller] and cocaine.” But none of this gets down to the core of the man known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

Time is the ultimate equalizer. The further we move away from nineties hip-hop, the more we come to recognize it as a major player to a much greater subversive trend. What we often fall guilty of when thinking about these acts of subversion is that it is individual ‘people’ who make the parts to these cultural shifts; they don't just happen on themselves. Ol’ Dirty Bastard was one of those people. In other words, while our language is mostly predicated on the idea that ‘hip-hop’ now stands alone as a viable, sustainable American culture, independent from other subcultures like country, punk, indie, metal, etc., we should be thinking about the people that made it this way. It wasn’t some anomaly born out of thin air. It was a culture built on the character and styles of artists and performers like Russell Jackson.

Alas, forget my self-prescribed verbose haughtiness. It is said much better in the vernacular of the culture:

“What’s the world without Dirt? Just a bunch of fuckin’ water.” Rhymefest