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Last rhymes (continued)
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Osirus: The Official Mixtape (JS Records), released this month by his mother, collects the tracks that ODB was working on when he collapsed in the studio and died last November 13. It is likely far from the last word on Dirty — still in the vaults is the official studio album he made for Roc-A-Fella, to which Osirus was intended as a prelude — but it shows that he was at least attempting, albeit fitfully, to make a serious comeback. 36 Chambers netted a pair of hits, his signature songs "Brooklyn Zoo" and "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" (years before Missy Elliott did it, the latter included the astonishing sound of ODB rapping backwards). But all his subsequent albums were flawed. Nigga Please helped make him a household name thanks to the Neptunes’ "Baby I Got Your Money" (with Kelis singing the hook), but it also had plenty of filler, including a tortuously off-key cover of Rick James’s "Cold Blooded." A third album of dubious origin, The Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones (D3), appeared during ODB’s incarceration, with some half-realized material fleshed out by numerous guest raps. All of which meant that the bar was set low for Osirus. And though it’s better than Trials and Tribulations, it’s no masterpiece: its beats are on the cheap, and on the second half of the disc, ODB sounds exhausted, physically as well as mentally. You can only hope his voice on "Don’t Stop Ma (Out of Control)" has been electronically slowed; if not, he was in pretty bad shape. At the beginning of the album, though, he’s in his old form. On the single, "Pop Shots," he sings the title so that it grates like fingernails on a blackboard — "It’s my paa-aaa-aaaap! Shaaaaats!" Screamin’ Jay Hawkins wanted to be an opera singer and almost had the voice for it, but he got pigeonholed as a mau-mau. Dirty was a mau-mau through and through, but he wanted to sing, and he never let his lack of skill prevent him from doing so. He reveled in the broken sound of his voice: he took such pleasure in those bum notes, and he scattered them liberally through his verses. So it is on "Pop Shots," but then he turns serious: the topic of the song is autobiography, and what he wants to tell us is that his name was Dirt long before he picked up a microphone — it was a title he’d adopted on the streets of Brooklyn back in 1986, wearing a four-finger ring that spelled out D-I-R-T, like some ghetto-Robert-Mitchum-in-Night-of-the-Hunter shit. One of ODB’s gifts was his ability to carry off the illusion that he didn’t care what came out of his mouth, that he spoke without thinking, but on "Pop Shots" he also wants you to know that he worked hard at being a rapper and wanted to be considered among the greatest. "Tell the truth I strive with the best," he says. "If I spit 10 rhymes, nigga, nine gon’ connect." This was true, but it was that tenth rhyme — the one that didn’t connect — that his fans came to revere. No one departed from the script like ODB. It was when he hit the off-ramp, when the time came to abandon the rhyme scheme, that it became clear just how different he was from everyone else: he would strive to accent not just the wrong syllables but the wrongest, and instead of trying to hit a note, he’d make a heroic feat of not hitting it. Hip-hop fans loved him for it like a puppy, but this was what was radical about ODB, the thing that set him apart from every other vocalist in hip-hop. "Oh baby I like it raw," might’ve been his most famous line, but he might’ve said just as convincingly that he liked it wrong. There are flashes of the old brilliance on Osirus. Like his haunted-house, google-eyed gurgle on "Go Go Go." On "Who Can Make It Happen like Dirt," he declares he’s "on another level ’cause I dance with the Devil/Then I slap a bitch in the eye with a bevel." Elsewhere, he squashes John Lennon like a beetle over the music from David Bowie’s "Fame." None of which gets at the real meat of ODB, which is his phrasing: a line from "Stand Up" goes something like, "OOOOooooooohhhh! Tell-me-who-the-fuck. Eyyyyye. Been!" Ol’ Dirty’s influence is hard to gauge, if only because no one, with the possible exception of Busta Rhymes, has attempted to follow in his footsteps. The names he gave himself — Big Baby Jesus, Osirus, Dirt McGirt — had the ring of some chthonic divinity. In rock and roll, it’s a cliché to combine the filthy and the cosmic, but in hip-hop, ODB has no successors. In a genre of cryptic prophets, he was the holiest fool. "They say Dirt and sunshine make the flowers grow/I say fuck a bitch raw and drop yo’ gun on the flo’," goes a line by one of ODB’s protégés, a rapper called Rhymefest, on Osirus’s "Dirty Dirty." The symmetry of the rhyme in that line and the evenness with which he delivers it shows you how far he has to go before he’s anywhere in ODB’s league. But then Rhymefest surprises you on the final, unrhymed line of the song, and you think there might be hope for him after all: "What’s the world without Dirt? Just a bunch of fucking water."
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