The guy was a piece of shit. Plain and simple.
In life and in death, ODB was complicated
By ANDREW DANSBY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
Russell Jones' mother put a human face back on her son. "To the public he was known as Ol' Dirty Bastard," she said in a statement after his death Saturday. "To me, he was known as Rusty, the kindest and most generous soul on the Earth. ... Russell was more than a rapper; he was a loving father, brother, uncle and, most of all, son."
Associated Press
Rapper ODB, Ol' Dirty Bastard, whose real name was Russell Jones, collapsed and died last Saturday.
Of course, to some of the 13 children he reportedly fathered, Jones, who collapsed and died Saturday at a New York City recording studio, was a child-support-avoiding absentee. He was also a crude misogynist prone to violent outbursts and gunplay. He was also a man who needed help.
And never got it.
Though he was on the receiving end of a bullet more than once, Jones didn't check out like several other rappers, killed because of a beef settled with a firearm.
But the tragedy of his life was the result of another social blight that was played up for yuks. His bizarre behavior made him rap's irrepressible clown prince. It also stemmed from mental illness and substance abuse that went untreated and in many ways was encouraged.
Jones' rap sheet was as cluttered and long as one of his meandering, speedy rhymes. He was charged with assault in 1993, and shot in the stomach a year later. Trouble dogged him through the '90s. He was arrested for failure to pay child support, drug possession, making terrorist threats, possession of body armor, assault, shoplifting and attempted murder. In 1998, he was shot again during an attempted robbery.
That's the short list.
According to reports (of the news and arrest variety) he had a copious appetite for crack and, some record industry sources claim, hookers.
But the crooked consensus was that Jones' spiral toward oblivion was a small price to pay for the frantic enthusiasm that he brought to pop culture: The crazed energy of hits like Shimmy Shimmy Ya and Got Your Money, his penchant for renaming himself (Osirus and Big Baby Jesus among others), the siege of the stage at the 1998 Grammys to protest the Wu-Tang Clan not winning an award, asking police not to arrest him because he was a children's role model, the days he spent on the lam after skipping out on court-ordered rehab.
Through it all, he had great counsel, managing to walk away from one set of charges after another without doing time and without addressing his problems.
But Jones' line of legal credit ran out in October 2000, when a judge weary of his recidivist ways, handed down a four-year prison term.
A stark prison interview with the rapper found him drug free, but depressed and on suicide watch.
He was paroled in 2003 and promptly signed with Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella records (under the new name Dirt McGirt), where he began work on a solo record, diligently recording during the day in order to return home by his court-ordered curfew. The first weeks of Jones' parole were captured in a VH1 documentary that offered hope for a new start.
He even reunited with the Wu-Tang Clan earlier this year at a concert that yielded a live album released in September.
Only those close to Jones know if he slipped back into any bad habits, but to his credit, he hadn't run afoul of the law since his discharge.
But he never had a chance to become the role model he claimed he was during a moment of profound, panicked delusion.
His music, when it avoided pure, profane misogyny (which wasn't often), could be strangely compelling. But as with all jesters, it was the carnivalesque freak show that folks wanted to witness, a tantalizing flash of flickering insanity. Any humanity he brought to his music was lost on the laughing legions until last weekend when he turned up dead like Yorick.
It's a lofty comparison, Ol' Dirty Bastard and Shakespeare's doomed funnyman, and one the unhinged and ineloquent Jones hardly warranted.
But Jones was too troubled to know that his '90s successes had offered him an escape from the hard-scrabble streets of his youth. He would rise and fall, time and again. He traipsed along oblivious, immersing his life in tragedy, and the way that tragedy was glorified and left alone to fester, was full of foreshadowing, pointlessness and waste.
Jones' lifestyle suggested an early end would come. Autopsy results won't be known until later this week. And in many ways, it doesn't matter if he died of natural or other causes. Another record, perhaps several, will be cobbled together and released. It will remind people of that unpredictable rapscallion Ol' Dirty Bastard and his unpredictable deeds. But it's too late to judge him for his poor behavior, and it's too late to help him with it.
The show, the good and bad, is over.
