Tag: Ol’ Dirty Bastard

* 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?

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.
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