Ol’ Dirty Bastard was one crazy ass dude! Granted, that might be the understatement of the year, but I can’t help but reintegrate this as my speakers pump the sonic equivalent to an acid trip, Return to the 36 Chambers (The Dirty Version). But as I sit here and marvel at Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s off kilter personality, I’m also attentively appreciating the depths of Ol’ Dirty Bastard's lyrical ingenuity. For instance, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s lyrical brilliance can be heard on the Brooklyn Zoo when he states that his “Hip Hop drops on your head like rain/ and when it rains it pours.” Doesn’t sound too complex, right? Shit, you might even consider it be a rudimentary rhyme if you didn’t know that his voice stutters and drops in tone on the word ‘rain’ in order to mimic the fading of sound rain makes as it moves away from a listening body. Please, name one MC before Ol’ Dirty Bastard that ever did something like that? Or better yet, name an MC that came out before Ol’ Dirty Bastard who was known to use the rhetorical device of onomatopoeia to create a rhymes (i.e.: cherry bombing shit,‘boom’/just warming up a little bit, ‘vroom, vroom’)?
Yet, regardless of what you might think of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s skills as a lyricist, I think we can all agree that he will probably go down as one of most loved personalities in Hip Hop. I mean who else do you know would take MTV on trip to the welfare office in a limousine besides Ol Dirty Bastard? Yet, the reason we really loved Ol’ Dirty Bastard wasn’t because he had a propensity to make us laugh, but because throughout his life he lived by a credo of transparency. For instance, remember the time that he interrupted the ‘98 Grammy Awards show by proclaiming to the world that the Wu-Tang Clan was for the children? On the onset that shit was a hilarious moment in TV history. But what many people don’t realize is that for Ol’ Dirty Bastard it didn’t matter if he was speaking his mind on a corner in Brooklyn or at a prestigious venue like the Grammy Awards, if he felt he had something to say he said it. Yeah, he might have been a little off, but we trusted and respected Ol' Dirty Bastard because he always kept it real. I can't imagine how TV producers must’ve felt whenever Ol' Dirty Bastard was on set because with Dirt anything was possible. They knew, like all of us knew, that Dirt walked with an unabashed sense of self which feed his oozing aura of unpredictability. Yet, it wasn’t as if Dirt lacked shame; it was just that his idea of shame was being anything other than his true self. In life our identities are molded by our past experiences. And no matter what happens to us at the present time or in the future, we are execrably the sum of all our experiences. I think Dirt understood this fact and embraced the multitude of experiences he undoubtedly had while growing up in the abject world of black urban America. Yet, unlike many people who grew up in similar conditions as he did, Dirt didn’t just embrace his experiences but also reveled in the beauty of their imperfections. I say revel because I think Dirt understood that when someone comes from the bottom they experience and witness all of the extremes of the human condition. In witnessing the unadulterated reality of the human experience you gain an understanding that the differences that exist between yourself and the next man cowers in comparison to the similarities both of you have. I think Ol' Dirty Bastard lacked the same sense of self consciousness that the majority of us possess because he knew that at the end of the day we all had a little bit of Dirt in our souls. From this understanding, Ol' Dirty Bastard went onto express the unrelenting, horrifyingly stark, yet audaciously beautiful reality of his world. He was the embodiment of the enigmatic spirit of Hip Hop; in his voice you can hear the subterfuge of happiness, anger, and fear that ran, and continues to run, through all those who subsist on the outskirts of Babylon. Dirt was truly A sun unique and will be forever missed. Peace to the god.
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