N***a Please

If the off-key singing, weird interjections (“I wanna see blood!”) and generally joyful madness of Return to the 36 Chambers wasn’t enough for you, there’s always N***a Please. In the intervening years, Ol’ Dirty Bastard had transformed himself from an offbeat-but-deeply-entertaining MC to one of the first rappers to really be able to hold his own on crossover R&B tracks—a quality most evident in his feature on Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” and, later, the Mýa/Pras track “Ghetto Supastar”. “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” was catchy for a hardcore rap track, but the Kelis-featuring, Neptunes-produced “Got Your Money” feels like a pivotal moment not only in the hybridising of rap and R&B, but of hip-hop becoming the dominant sound in mainstream pop. On the one hand, you could say it was his crooner/lounge-act side paying off. On the other, it revealed something a little deeper about his art. ODB never had the density of delivery or depth of imagination of, say, Ghostface. But he was able to pull together cultural threads that hadn’t quite been pulled together before: the x-rated side of comedians like Redd Foxx, the surreality of Funkadelic (especially Bootsy Collins—revisit something like “Be My Beach”), the slickness of Rick James (witness his “cover” of “Cold Blooded”) and unrepentant griminess of an MC like Bushwick Bill. He wasn’t a role model (“I Want Pussy”), nor was he particularly enlightened when it came to politics or women, but he did—for better and worse—have an irreplaceable measure of soul that was hard to ignore, and often touched deeper than his crass comedy suggested (his interpolation of the Billie Holiday standby “Good Morning Heartache”). “He ain’t on no commercial shit,” Chris Rock says at the top of the album. It went gold.