It’s been a little over four years since Wu-Tang Clan‘s Ol’ Dirty Bastard died from heart failure, due to what was believed to be an accidental drug overdose. Today, Jamie Lowe releases a biographical critique, entitled Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB.
Since news of the books release was made public, Ol’ Dirty‘s mother, Cherry Jones, called for a ban and boycott of the book [click to read]. HipHopDX has excerpts from the book via the Village Voice. As the courtroom battles continue, Wu fans can view exactly what hit bookshelves earlier today.
On the entertainment value of a dysfunctional artist:
“Well I definitely think, and this includes me–I think we all are responsible. Everyone who was a fan of his watched him and gawked. And it’s the same thing that is happening with Britney Spears, on a different scale. It’s happening with Amy Winehouse. It happens with celebrities all the time. It’s this concept that their dysfunction is entertaining, and it’s an awful human instinct. But, you know, a car crashes and you can just sit there and stand by and watch it and not really feel like you can do anything. And in a lot of ways I think that that’s it. Nobody–I couldn’t have, RZA couldn’t have, even Jarred Weisfeld, his mom–nobody could’ve saved ODB. He made choices and he lived his life the way he did. And there was greatness with that, and there was a lot of destruction with that–self-destruction more than anything.”
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Lowe’s favorite ODB story:
“In an appearance on Carson Daly’s Last Call,RZA described an incident when they were teenagers in Brooklyn. It was like, ‘Yo, some guys from Bensonhurst beat us up!’ So we went to go help. We ran out there and ODB thought it was going to be a couple guys. It ended up being fifteen guys lined up with broken beer bottles all over the place…and we had…a brown paper bag and puts his hand in the bag and says, ‘Back up! Everybody back up!’ So everybody starts backing up. They was scared. But this one guy was so drunk that he just kept coming…So ODB was like, ‘Back up! Back up! Backup!’ and the guy was like ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ So ODB took his hand out of the bag and was like moving his hand around, ‘No man, you know I won’t shoot you.’ ‘There was no gun,’ RZA recalled. ‘It was a bag of Dipsy Doodles.'”
About ODB’s legacy to Hip Hop culture:
“And a lot of those have to do with the black man in society. He represented in this persona this hyperbolic representation of that. He left behind this sort of spirit in hip-hop, not spirit, but the sense in hip-hop of showmanship and having fun that I think in some ways has been replaced with boasting and materialism. He really just wanted to get out there and entertain when he was at his best. He really thrived on an audience. And it was returned to him in kind.”
