This story is straight bonkers. Great read.
This story is straight bonkers. Great read.
Wu-Tang Clan – Diesel
Wu-Tang Clan – Windpipe
* Slate’s James Parker reviews/explains Jaime Lowe’s Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB through the lens of spiritual autobiography–in the Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s case this means his relationship to the teachings of the Five Percent Nation/Nation of Gods and Earths, which is sort of like the Nation of Islam Meets Illuminatus! In so doing he looks at the Wu Tang Clan as worldbuilding project:
Dirty’s home in hip-hop was the Wu-Tang Clan, where–commercially speaking–NGE doctrine was part of the package, part of the plan. His cousin and fellow Five Percenter the RZA masterminded it on brooding solo walks around Staten Island, N.Y.: In order to conquer the world, Wu-Tang would have to be a world. Nine killer MCs pickled in late-night kung fu flicks, chess lore, Marvel comics, street life, weed cabbalism, and NGE slang eschatology–a hip-hop Middle Earth, with its own legends and grades of being. No other crew could match the sorcerous allure, the smoky Dungeons & Dragons vibe curling off those minimal Wu-Tang beats. “I lived in at least ten different projects,” wrote RZA in The Wu-Tang Manual, “and I got to see that the projects are a science project, in the same way that a prison is a science project. … And in comics, when a science project goes wrong, it produces monsters. Or superheroes.”Ta-Nehisi Coates responds and elaborates:
Wu-Tang, to me, was what I always understood black geekdom to be. Karate flicks, Comic Books (but what about the Wonder Woman bracelet), cartoons (form like Voltron), wrestling (My style broke muthafuckin backs like Ken Patera) etc. They took all of that and then filtered through New York, and through the lense of urban black America, at large. It was a great time.Indeed it was! Speaking as a white Ivy League suburbanite, I think the geek element, and the emphasis on worldbuilding even beyond the geek stuff, is why I maintain a connection with the Wu above and beyond any other hip hop acts. It really, really feels like a shared intellectual experience to me. (The closest anything else comes is Public Enemy growing up on Long Island.) But it’s also a really fun and enjoyable art project–the only other artists I can think of who fire up my imagination through sheer totality of vision and expanse of imagination the way the Wu Tang Clan does are the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, who were just as interested in worldbuilding via psychedelia + utter mastery of myriad songwriting traditions/mysticism + exploration and admixture of worldwide roots music respectively.
* Did that make any sense?
N.A.S.A. – Strange Enough ft. Karen O, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, & Fatlip
Looks like the album leaked.
Q-Tip – Renaissance Rap (Remix) ft. Busta Rhymes, Raekwon & Lil’ Wayne
Finally that record got released.
Raekwon, Ghostface & Crooked I – Yes Sir
No Father to His Style
The spiritual journey of Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
By James ParkerPosted Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009, at 6:50 AM ET
Ol’ Dirty Bastard.Ol’ Dirty Bastard”Creation is original freshness related to God,” said Ol’ Dirty Bastard. No, wait—it was St. Thomas Aquinas. Could have been ODB, though: No one doubted his original freshness, and the entropic rapper was quite as prone to a theological outburst as he was to one that was deranged or dirty-bastardly. Inducted as a 10-year-old into the Scholastically complex systems of the Five Percent Nation—the breakaway sect founded in 1963 by former Nation of Islam minister Clarence 13X Smith—Dirty in his short life would stray wildly from the path, but the teachings stayed with him. Always at his fingertips were the Supreme Alphabet, the 120 Degrees, the Nine Basic Tenets. “The black man is God!” he proclaimed at the end of a 1994 performance on The Arsenio Hall Show. And to an interviewer in 1997: “I’m God. That’s my identity, one of the low gods. One of the earth gods—one with a lot of wisdom.” Was he high? Almost certainly. But neither afflatus nor clinical grandiosity were at work here: For the Five Percenters, otherwise known as the Nation of Gods and Earths, these were the proverbs of a simple piety.
Continue Reading “No Father to His Style”
Drum N Bass ODB Remix to enjoy.
This comes from one of the first reviews of the album.
Erykah Badu NEW AMERYKAH pt. 1 the BREAKDOWN!:
“”Telephone” – last track of the album inspired by a story Dilla’s mother told Badu. Evidently during his final days, Dilla would float in and out of coherence, having very real conversations with people no one else could see. One of these people, as Dilla told his mother, was ODB. Dirty was telling Dilla that when he gets to the other side not to get on the red bus, though it was inviting. The white bus would be the one to pick him up. Great, beautiful song. Lyric: “Telephone! It’s Old Dirty. He wants to give you directions home.” Only Badu could make ODB sound like a visionary guide through the afterlife. When people say funerals are celebrations of an individual’s life (as they fight back tears and look anything but celebratory), this song makes you believe it. The track closes with the uplifting words “Celebrate tonight” repeated.”
I’ll up the track as soon as I have it.
Source: Okayplayer (via)
When I first heard this, cold shivers. Now the Swedish Sincerely Yours made a video ssnippet of that song. Just enjoy one of the last great ODB songs.
YOURS0069 ODB
Thank you for not playing along with the charade. For not doing the expected, for not doing the simple. Thank you for not running and hiding. And above all – thank you for having fun.
Some people are just too real for this world.
And, you know we didn’t mean anything by that thing about who we’d pick last to sleep over at the HQ. There’s always a special place here for you.
SY February 2008
Ol’ Dirty Bastard – “Wastin’ Time (No More)â€
[audio:https://www.vogeltjesdansbende.nl/weblog/wp-content/uploads/24-wu_tang_clan-odb_forever.mp3]
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ODB Online store loge on with authorized merchandise from the estate of Russell Jones via Merchdirect
In early January 2008, the New York-based MerchDirect announced that they had signed a deal with the estate of Russell Jones, aka “Ol’ Dirty Bastard” to produce and sell “authorized merchandise/wearable art sanctioned by widow Icelene Jones”. Lee Tepper, CEO of MerchDirect stated in the release that the initial ODB merchandise would be available for February, Black Music Month and true to his word, the “ODB Online store” (merchdirect.net/odb) will open its doors as of Tuesday, February 12th.
Media and fan response to the initial deal announcement was worldwide and news services, blogs, hip-hop sites, magazines, radio station sites, etc. reported that MerchDirect is the only “estate authorized company” permitted to manufacture a new line of ODB merchandise. The ODB news spread far and (world)wide: India, England, Canada, Suriname, Spain, Finland, The Netherlands, Croatia, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, and the United States and now, the first facet of the line is available – the T-shirts.
Continue Reading “The Official ODB Merchandise”
Everybody is pretty in the blue about who would do such a thing. It wasn’t like Dirty had so many enemies. And it just a paint roller going over it. Apocalypse is coming.
Who would do such a thing? The mural of Ol’ Dirty Bastard in Bed Stuy recently got licked with a paint roller, covering Ol Dirty’s mug and probably rendering the welfare card completely invalid. It was just last summer that the mural was painted by Victor Goldfeld on Putnam and Franklin Avenues. So who done it?
Source: Razor Apple (via)