Return to the 36 Chambers

Ol’ Dirty Bastard was probably better known for his public persona than his actual music. There was the time he took a limo to go pick up food stamps. Or the time he turned up onstage with Wu-Tang a month after fleeing a court-mandated rehab facility, saying he couldn’t stay long because the cops were after him. Or, of course, the time he interrupted Shawn Colvin’s 1998 Grammy acceptance speech to say Wu-Tang should’ve won Best Rap Album over Puff Daddy because Wu-Tang was for the children—a day after, as is less often reported, he helped rescue a four-year-old girl from a car wreck in Brooklyn, visiting her in the hospital under a fake name until the media figured him out. He was the unpredictable bogeyman white America feared and the drunken fool Black America worried represented them to the world, and died two days before he turned 36, a number with mystical heft in Wu-Tang lore. He was soulful and impulsive and more a presence in sound than a great MC. As his cousin—and Wu-Tang producer/figurehead—RZA put it, Ol’ Dirty Bastard gave up fear. There’s some incredible stuff on Return to the 36 Chambers, starting with “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”. Really—if one Wu-Tang line survives the endless fade from generation to generation, it’ll be “Ooh baby, I like it raw”, demented cadence and all. His voice alone was funny and he knew it, which is why he not only sings loudly and off-key, but balances his more threatening verses by yelling stuff like “I wanna see blood!”—after all, he’s here to entertain you, not scare you (“Raw Hide”). Of course, it is kind of scary to hear a performer so intense, especially when he’s as unpredictable as ODB was, and it’s in the uneasy riding of that line that makes 36 Chambers feel like a classic, not to mention a template for a generation of rappers whose messiness and volatility blurred the lines between rap, indie and experimental music, from JPEGMAFIA to Danny Brown to Lil B and RXKNephew. Watch him in old footage from 1995, warbling the Frie