The Evolution of Ol' Dirty Chinese Restaurant

When people talk about the Ol’ Dirty Bastard* they usually use terms like “crazy,” “gangsta rapper,” or “Oh my God what the fuck was up with that guy.” However, by saying stuff like this we reduce a fascinating human being to just a few easily dismissed elements - the Ol' Dirty totality was much more than the Ol' Dirty sum of its parts.

Early in his career, ODB functioned as the comic relief of the Wu-Tang Clan, the seminal rap group of which he was a member, and a group so great that if you haven't heard of them you should probably have your citizenship revoked. The Wu was talking about some pretty heavy stuff, so they needed a guy like Dirt McGurt to come in there and lighten things up from time to time. His persona was that of the rampaging id, a guy who had given himself over totally to his basest desires, rapping mainly about sex, drugs and bodily functions. ODB's raps were pretty much totally informed by something called the pleasure principle, which is, um, a principle that drives us to seek pleasure. I don’t have exact figures but I’m pretty sure that roughly eighty-four percent of Dirty’s subject matter had to do with girls, rambling nonsense, poop, or very often some combination of those elements. These topics are often the symbols through which the id manifests itself.

The id is in constant conflict with the superego (which tries to control the id), while the ego is tasked with balancing the id and superego. Check out 2:39 in the video for "Brooklyn Zoo," in which ODB is with his crew. At first, it looks like his buddies are backing him up in case the shit goes down, but it becomes clear that they have to restrain Dirt Dawg because he's not going to be able to contain himself.

The id is often unconscious and acts automatically; it supplies humanity’s impulses and urges, and drives us to create. Check out this video of Dirty kicking a freestyle off the top of his head while zonked out of his mind.

Did you see that! That right there is the very definition of tapping into the id in order to create art. The thing that's absolutely astounding is that ODB recorded like this pretty much all the time during his earlier years. He'd just get wasted, go into the studio, and then ride the beat to greatness.

Sometime in between the release of his debut album Return to the 36 Chambers (The Dirty Version) and his sophomore long-player N---ga Please, it seems that Ason Unique launched a full-on war against rational thought. Choice lines from the album include, "I'll kill all my enemies at birth!" and "You can't use the word 'napkin!'" Behaviorally, he was no less off his rocker. He tried to collect a welfare check while he had the number-one album in the country, interrupted the Grammy's to point out that the Wu-Tang should have beaten Puff Daddy for Best Hip-Hop Album**, and had a guy in his crew with the unfortunate name of Shorty Shitstain. Clearly ODB was out of his goddamned mind.

But what if by outing himself as a crazy person, Big Baby Jesus was actually allowing himself to break free of the structures of society? Consider the video for his and Busta Rhymes' track "Woo-Ha! (Got You All in Check!)"


Busta Bus and Dirt are rapping from inside a padded room, implying that they've been institutionalized and therefore removed from society, rendered as "other." However, it is often from the position of "other" that one has the most power, because society's constraints no longer apply to someone outside that society's structure, freeing them up to innovate now that they're no longer contained within pre-existing boundaries. Dirty's position as other gives him the mobility to break through the structure and turn N---ga Please into a genuinely powerful and challenging work of art, and it's clear that he understands this, even going so far as to state he's "not caught up in your law" on the album's title track.

I'm not going to lie - N---a Please is an extremely difficult album to get through. It takes a while in each song for Ason to actually start rapping, and he actually doesn't appear on one track ("Gettin' High," the track that the aforementioned Shorty Shitstain shows up on) and is almost completely absent from a couple of others. Many of the songs ("I Want P---y" being the main one that comes to mind) are still dealing with satisfying the urges of the id, but the album as a whole completely fucks with the binaries that we think about within the context "black" music and "white" music, destroying the myth that a hip-hop album must have rapping on all the tracks. An easy listening song like "Good Morning Heartache" has no place on a hip-hop record - Dirty's warbling croon sounds like a strung-out Frank Sinatra - and on "I Can't Wait" he's screaming like a hardcore punk singer. Tracks like this would not normally be included on a hip-hop album, but Big Baby Jesus had the license to do whatever he damn well wanted, because he was no longer constrained by the structures of society.

In addition to breaking musical boundaries, this was the period in which Ol' Dirty Bastard was dropping some serious knowledge. On "All in Together Now" he calls himself "A dalmatian. . . I'm white and I'm black. You can't understand it, then fuck you!" Statements like this completely denies that a binary exists between black and white, acknowledging that race is just a societal construct and that we're all amalgamations of various racial influences. Now, the argument can (and probably should) be made that ODB didn't take any of that stuff into consideration when he ad-libbed those lines, but that doesn't matter. Intent is unimportant when considering stuff like this; all that matters is the meanings that can be taken once the song is released.

Besides making vague comments on the nature of race, ODB was also making concrete political statements during this period. In "Ghetto Superstar," his collaboration with Pras of the Fugees and Mya, the basic thesis statement of Dirty's contribution to the song is this:

"The government and upper classes have no idea what's going on at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. My unique position as a gangsta rapper who has been othered by society allows me to both see these problems and comment on them."

I consider this period in Dirty's life his artistic zenith, because a couple years after the release of N---a Please, ODB would be caught up in a tragicomic run of legal troubles, losing himself almost completely to drugs and alcohol. His seemingly magical ability to tap into his id for on-the-spot lyrical inspiration would soon be lost, and he would be forced to depend on ghostwriters for the remainder of his career, before dying a tragic death in 2004. However, as the remaining members of the Wu constantly remind people, the Ol' Dirty Bastard would not have wanted the world to mourn his death, he would have wanted the world to celebrate his life. So when we think of ODB, let's think of his contributions to hip-hop and his evolution to the unique status as an "other," outside of the structures of society, mmkay?

*Also known as Osirus, Dirt McGurt, Dirt Dawg, Ason Unique, The Ol’ Specialist, Big Baby Jesus, Ol’ Dirty Chinese Restaurant, etc. You get the idea.

**Which is true, but that still doesn't make it okay to speak your mind on national television while somebody else is supposed to be receiving an award. As Kanye West recently learned.

Quick Thoughts on the VMA's

1. Tonight is pretty conclusive proof that Kanye is a gigantic cokehead.

2. Beyonce didn't only make one of the best videos of all time, she made the best audio/visual combination ever to descend upon humanity.

3. Green Day's new singles are all kind of slight compared to the old stuff.

4. Muse tonight. . . meh. Would definitely play something more, uh, interesting next time you're trying to introduce your band to mainstream America.

5. I'm really digging the idea of putting Tracy Morgan and Eminem together. Didn't work out that well in real life.

6. Asher Roth seems way less famous than pretty much everybody else up for an award. On that note, why is Kid Cudi not more famous? He should totally look into making that happen.

7. Flo Rida. Not hip hop.

8. Wale should be the leader of every house band ever, too bad the announcers keep talking over him. That's not a really good way to push him, MTV. On a similar note, Wale's bongo player is named Stup and he looked really comfortable bongo-ing along with All American Rejects.

9. Oh, now Muse is playing that one song that everybody knows. And then they cut it off after like 3 seconds before the dude could start singing.

10. Hilariousest thing about the broadcast? The angry masses booing whenever Kanye's name was mentioned.

11. Eminem is looking a lot skinnier these days.

12. It's more commercials than VMA's this year. Turning it off now.

Class Blog Post One Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Relapse

Hey young world, let’s talk about some of that new-fangled rapping music. More specifically, Eminem’s new album Relapse and how the mainstream music reviewed it in a way that shows their own biases and aesthetic preferences, and not in a way that actually reflects the quality of the music.

The basic consensus on Relapse is that it’s mediocre at best and Eminem seems to have regressed back to a middle-school level of sophistication. Regardless of the reviews, the album is outstanding. The beats were provided almost exclusively by the good Doctor himself, Dr. Dre, which means sonically the album is flames. And oh, the rapping! Eminem weaves verbal tapestries with rhyme schemes and flows so incomprehensibly dense that his subject matter is really inconsequential – the point isn’t what he’s saying, it’s how he’s saying it. And for the record, he’s saying it with more intensity, clarity, and technical virtuosity than he’s had since his days as a subterranean rhyme slinger.

Anyway, let’s look at Relapse through the prism of two seemingly antithetical publications – mainstream paragon Rolling Stone and those plucky indie tastemakers at Pitchfork Media. RS gave Relapse a stellar four stars out of five (read the review here), and Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen awarded it a tepid 4.8 out of 10.0 (which you can peruse by clicking this lovely little hyperlink). Neither review does much to enlighten its readers as to the actual quality of Relapse – instead, it’s much more enlightening to look at what each review says about its respective publication.

Rolling Stone’s take on Relapse reflects the mag’s tendency to reinforce the musical status quo via their lead reviews. The first review listed in every issue of Rolling Stone is generally that which is considered the most notable release of the week, and is routinely given an overly generous review. Examples of this phenomenon include the last two Bruce Springsteen albums as well as the most recent U2 album, all of which received a perfect five stars. And while I understand that both The Boss and U2 get a lifetime pass as far as reviews go, let’s be real – those three discs only had like six good songs between them. Ideally, the critical pass should exist so that canonical artists never face the shame of a critical flogging; however, RS takes the principle to the extreme, anointing thoroughly mediocre albums as false classics. Relapse is given a similar treatment with the RS four-star review, which it probably would have gotten even if the album was terrible.

Pitchfork, on the other hand, steamrolled Relapse, slapping it with a dismissive 4.8 out of 10.0*. Regardless of the rating, Cohen had some nice things to say – he claimed that Em was “more (‘on’) than he’s been since 2002,” and admitted that the fact that Dr. Dre had provided wall-to-wall production on the disc was “cause for celebration.” Yet Cohen claimed to pretty much hate the thing. I posit that this has nothing to do with the actual quality of the record and everything to do with the “Pitchfork Aesthetic,” Pitchfork’s general preference for lo-fi recordings**. In the rap arena this means the site loves stuff with beats that sound like they were recording on a child’s Casio keyboard. Seeing as the beats on Relapse are so expensive-sounding they come off as the sonic equivalent of an eighty foot yacht, it was almost inevitable that the album would be poorly reviewed, not because of how it was, but because of what it wasn’t.

* It should be noted that so far for the month of September, Pitchfork has given out an average review of 7.0/10.0. If its review system were refinagled so that a 7.0 were equitable to an average (C) grade, that means Relapse got an F. Interestingly, Relapse scored better than only one album this month, The Entrance Band’s self-titled release, which was lambasted by Ian Cohen (the same guy who reviewed the Em disc) because the band’s guitarist had the sheer audacity to have been influenced by Jimi Hendrix. It should be noted that I listened to some of T.E.B.’s cd, and it wasn’t half bad. 7.6 territory at worst, but then again I like the Grateful Dead so I’m pretty okay with guitar noodling.

** Well, as of late. Pitchfork tends to switch it up every once and a while. It really liked anything that sounded remotely like The Arcade Fire for a while, too.