Yet even among a super-group of nine MCs with distinct styles and mysterious monikers, Dirty's half-sung/half-rapped delivery stood out. Their idiosyncratic sound – gritty, dark, aggressive – was built around snippets of the kung-fu films and soul music they'd grown up with. In 1993, the Wu-Tang Clan altered the shape of hip hop with their seminal debut, Enter The 36 Chambers. And then there's all the things he did that nobody had seen before." Part of that his son, Young Dirty Bastard. More importantly, I think he left a legacy behind. "But, to me, he's no less than a Jimi Hendrix or any other great artist who had a nutty way of thinkin'. "People are always going to talk about his personality," says Wu-Tang's Raekwon. Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest said that if you listen to Dirty's lyrics, there's no question that the person behind them is a mastermind. Questlove credited 'Brooklyn Zoo' as being so radical that it changed the way he thought about rap music that it felt as if Screamin' Jay Hawkins had somehow made the best single in hip hop history. Kanye West said he'd cut a piece of his finger off just to have that voice. George Clinton, for instance, believes that Ol' Dirty Bastard introduced a new cadence to music. Somewhere along the line, the qualities that made him special and the esteem he's held in by other artists have become overlooked. But they add little, if anything, to the music. You can find them almost anywhere his name is mentioned. There are enough stories about his brushes with controversy. But as his legal troubles spiralled into a sideshow, I could tell that there was much more to Dirty than the buffoonish caricature he was often portrayed as. Maybe it was the way that, shortly after we shook hands and said goodbye, he marched into traffic – with cars honking and swerving all around him – and disappeared into the blare of rush-hour.Įven as a naive teenager, that encounter felt like a glimpse into a world of which I had no real understanding or experience. Maybe it was the curtain of bloodshot pink that hung halfway over his right eye, so thick that you couldn't see through it. Maybe it was the way he drifted off on a tangent too difficult to follow. I can't pretend there was no sign of it that day. Long before he passed away from an accidental overdose in 2004, two days short of his 36th birthday, his merits as an artist became increasingly overshadowed by his reputation for erratic behaviour. Apart from the occasional sliver of information that slipped through, all I had to go on was the music.Īs that began to change, Dirty's life turned into headline material. Streaming updates about artists and their antics had yet to become all-pervasive. I didn't realise any of that at the time. He'd been in jail, shot at several times and was under surveillance by the FBI. Dirty's demeanour seems all the more remarkable now, looking back, considering the difficulties he was struggling with. He indulged me graciously, laughing when I tried to persuade him to visit Ireland, filling me in on his plans for a new album. Dirty paused for a beat, gazing at me intently, before replying: "Well, I love you too!"Īll these years later, I still can't imagine a better response. I could feel myself trembling, so unsure of what was happening that I said it again. The words just blurted out, tumbling to an awkward halt. Instead some primitive impulse took over, compelling me to stride up to the man and exclaim: "Dirty. So when our paths happened to cross that afternoon, I didn't stop to think the situation through. As a teenager growing up in Ireland, floundering for an identity of my own, the weird world of Dirty felt like a perfect fit. The man seemed fearless: immune to criticism, impervious to judgement. My beats are slammin.His music felt so unapologetically eccentric, so brazenly unself-conscious, that some of that exuberance rubbed off on you just by listening.
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