Payback time...

Ol' Dirty Bastard - Nigga Please - 1999

Looks like I'm gonna have to buy a CD in November. I haven't bought an album since the RZA's "Birth of a Prince." I felt kinda guilty because I downloaded about 100 Wu-Tang related albums in a month so I figured I should buy at least one album. So I did.

When it comes to rock and metal, I spent enough money on CD's in high school to justify never buying another album from those genres. I didn't even buy the new Slayer album that was released a couple weeks ago. It is the first Slayer album I haven't purchased.

But next month the new Ol' Dirty Bastard album is finally gonna be released. He died almost two years ago and the album he was working on is just getting released now. I've already heard most of the songs and they're nothing special, but I have to buy this album based on principal alone.

Its ODB that made me take hip hop serious, as absurd as that may sound. In high school I listened to a little Easy-E and Onyx but only because it was funny and entertaining. Driving around listening to "Bust Day Ass" by Onyx brings back many hazy memories of the Ozmobile and the mean streets of Deer Lake.

But anyway, I was living in Halifax in 2001 (I think) when my cousin Diggz left a copy of "Nigga Please" at my apartment. On my way to work one day I popped it into my discman and my life was forever changed.

I didn't know hip hop could be raunchy, raw, humorous, serious, and scary all at the same time. ODB was like the Kurt Cobain of hip hop or something. He may be imitated but it will be impossible to match his quality. I feel this way about Nirvana's Nevermind as well.

"Nigga Please" was also the soundtrack during some of the best nights of my life. Sitting around in the woods wasted out of our minds listening to this album with my hometown posse was definitely enhanced by the unstableness and unpredictability of ODB.

Nigga Please is one of the craziest records ever released in my opinion. The vocal work rivals something like early Bad Brains because ODB just lets loose with throat splitting screams and yelps, all while keeping it so fucking real. The chorus of "You Don't Want to Fuck With Me" is one of the worst sang phrases of any artist ever, but it works so well. Nigga Please is a very frantic piece of work and some of his rhymes are so fuckin' ridiculous that they are extremely clever.

On the track "I Can't Wait" he gives a shout out to the Eskimos and the submarines. On "You Don't Want to Fuck With Me" he speaks some great crack head truths such as "Fuck God, God don't forgive" and "You really wanna cum the cocaine make your pussy numb." At the end of a great freak on the track "Rollin' Wit You" he asks "Yo, did you understand that?"

Then there's one of the best chorus's to ever grace any song "Big baby Jesus I can't wait, Nigger fuck that I can't wait." The insanity of the way he sings this will probably never be topped.

I want to quote the full album but I'll refrain but here are a few more than memorable quotes that pop into my head

"I'm the paranoid nigger at your party."

"You can call me dirty, and then lift up your skirt, and you want some of this dirty? God made dirt and dirt bust ya ass."

"If I got a problem, a problems got a problem 'til its gone."

"When I throw at football pass at a bitch she miss."

"Cancer, herpes, mumps, seizures, diabetes, TB if your against me, (cops) you die easier"

"Yeah my momma can not protect y'all"

A lot of the credit on this album has to be given to the men who cut and edited ODB's rants and put them together as objects that resemble songs. A lot of the verses are obviously rearranged, clipped, overlapped, underlapped, and whatever else you can think of. ODB was likely just in a coke craze for much of the recording of this album and it shows, but thankfully the producers were able to arrange ODB's outbursts into a very memorable album.

The beats are also great and consistent. I don't think there's one bad beat on this album, and that can't be said for many rap albums, even Wu-Tang releases.

Fuck, this is just a great record and there will never be anything else quite like it and without my cousin Diggz leaving this at my apartment, I don't know how my life would be today. I would have probably never searched deeper into hip hop and I'd be missing out on Kool Keith, Gangstarr, Lootpack, Biggie, Madlib, Nas, Talib Kweli, and the list goes on and on and on.

In the end, hip hop is simply the black man's version of punk rock.