There are two sides to the mind and character of Russell Jones, aka Ol' Dirty Bastard: On one level, he's one of the craziest motherfuckers to emerge from the haze of popular music in the past twenty years, running police and journalists alike ragged with his ingeniously extreme delinquency. This year alone, it almost seems as if his rap sheet had doubled in size after consecutive run-ins with the law on charges and allegations ranging from terrorism to drugs to running a red light. It's a string of events that has branded Dirty as unstable and disturbed. On a whole other level though, that the majority of finger-pointers fail to even notice, the man has one of the most brilliantly outgoing minds in hip-hop.
A creatively tossed brain salad of Dolemite, Rick James, Sid Vicious, and Richard Pryor, ODB seems to have taken every little aftershock he's incited upon society and utilized each one as a well thought out point plan for his unique guerilla style of self-promotion. I mean come on, you gotta be pretty stiff not to think his infamous bum rush of the Grammy stage during Shawn Colvin's snoozy acceptance speech to speak his mind on the injustice the Wu Tang Clan received in the hip-hop category was an act of genius. In actuality, he's even used the industry's doubt over whether or not he's stable enough to produce a proper follow-up to his now classic 1995 solo debut Return to the 36 Chambers: the Dirty Version to his advantage.
With the hype radar so distracted by his antics outside the realms of hip-hop, the Dirt Dog was able to quietly reinvent his sound without compromising his drunken Shaolin style. Nigga Please is the strongest and most consistent Wu-Tang album since Ghostface's Ironman, and all with minimum presence of his fellow Clan members--which seems to be a good thing these days. With the second wave of Wu solo albums failing to make the impact they once did, favoring polish and hits over grime and spit like Meth's T2: Judgement Day and GZA's Beneath the Surface, Dirty continues to feel right at home at the ghetto level of the 36 Chambers.
Nigga Please still manages to keep that could-give-a-fuck steelo displayed on the last joint intact while still finding the Big Baby Jesus throwing Moet bottles at the walls separating hip-hop and old school hard funk while incorporating a good amount of live instrumental backing (courtesy of hot production upstarts The Neptunes). "My words can't be held against me," he proclaims over the RZA-sized '92 style bounce of the album's title track. "I'm not caught up in your law." Lyrically, the ODB is rawer than he's ever been before. On the hilarious first single "Got Your Money," he touches base with his baby mama drama by rollin' in the club to "find more girls to put babies in," as he once stated during an interview on MTV. He smashes the soap box over the head of the white devil on tracks like "Rollin' Wit You" and "Nigga Please," and "lets all the world know he be getin' high" on his GQ-blacvaginafinda (like the Onyx song) track "Getting High," the only cut to feature guest vocals from a fellow Wu-Tang partn
er, LA The Darkman. On the amazingly demented rendition of Rick James' "Cold Blooded," ODB thanks his fellow ghetto superstar for allowing him to pay homage before displaying his variably improved chops as a funk singer.
The undeniable highlight of Nigga Please is a startlingly straight-faced, organic rendition of Billie Holiday's torchy blues ballad "Good Morning Heartache," which finds Dirty slovenly slow dancing cheek-to-cheek with Missy Elliott protégé Lil' Mo. It's a sincere and tender statement that sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the no-brow project humor and shocking fabulous-ness of the rest of the album. But just like Chris Rock says in the intro, "This is the Ol' Dirty Bastard, not the Embryol' Dirty Bastard." He don't give a fuck about what you think or expect from him. And who would want it any other way?
