Ol' Dirty Bastard

Bio

Russell Jones is Ol' Dirty Bastard. He was named that by RZA and his cousins because, by Wu lore, there was no father to his style. Whatever that means, it is a pretty accurate description of what ODB sounded like on a record. He sang. He yelled. He drawled. He half-rapped. He went off-beat in ways that should not have worked but somehow always did. He was, by general acclaim, the most unhinged voice in the Wu-Tang Clan, and possibly the most unhinged voice in the genre.

He was born in Brooklyn on November 15, 1968. He was RZA's and GZA's cousin (all three of their mothers were sisters). He had been rapping with both of them since the late 1980s, in a crew called All In Together Now. When RZA assembled the Wu-Tang Clan in 1992, ODB was one of the founding nine.

On Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) he is the voice you cannot forget. "Shame on a Nigga." "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'." His delivery is the part of the album that critics in 1993 did not know what to do with. He was not really rapping. He was not really singing. He was performing.

Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version came out on Elektra in 1995. The album is the second Wu solo album (after Method Man's Tical) and a top-ten hit. "Brooklyn Zoo," "Shimmy Shimmy Ya," "Got Your Money" (which came out on his 1999 follow-up). The records are funny. They are sad. They are sometimes both at once. There is nothing else like them.

The other part of the ODB story is the part that is hard to read. He had serious mental health and addiction problems for most of the late 1990s. He was arrested repeatedly. He was on America's Most Wanted briefly. He escaped from a court-mandated drug treatment facility in 2000 and was on the run for a month before being recaptured. He was sentenced to two-to-four years in 2001. He came out, signed with Roc-A-Fella, started recording again.

On November 13, 2004, ODB collapsed at the Wu-Tang studio in Manhattan and died there. He was 35. The medical examiner ruled it an accidental drug overdose, cocaine and the painkiller tramadol. He had been at the studio recording. He had been clean for stretches. He was, by all reports, in a hopeful place that week.

He is not here. He has been gone for more than twenty years. Every Wu member talks about him with the same combination of love and grief and frustrated unfinished business. The catalog is short. The shadow it casts is long. If you have not heard "Got Your Money," go do that. Go listen to him just absolutely loose on a Neptunes beat. There has never been anyone else like ODB. There will not be.