There Was No Father To His Style; Remembering Ol' Dirty Bastard

One of my happiest days as a music journalist came in 1999, when I got an advance copy of Ol' Dirty Bastard's second solo album, Nigga Please. What a rewarding surprise it was to hear an artist who had become more renown for the tumultuous details of his personal life-he was amidst a string of nine arrests over the span of 13 months at the time-return with a work of music so powerful and compelling, so brazenly different from anything I'd heard before. "A biblical storm set to funk beats," I called it in a review I wrote for Vibe.

One of my saddest days as a person came in 2001, when I drove eight hours up to Dannemora, New York, near the Canadian border, to interview Ol' Dirty at Clinton Correctional Facility, where he was serving a four year sentence for drug charges and parole violations.

Sitting across the table from me in the harshly lit visitors room, the famously wild and spontaneous personality was muted and confused. He was scared, paranoid, and not making a lot of sense. He was in obvious poor health and seemed to be suffering hallucinations while we spoke. He was someone who needed help, and he wasn't getting it. Less than three years later, a year and a half after he got out, he was dead. A drug overdose at age 35. Five years ago today, November 13th, 2004. He is greatly missed, and Nigga Please still sounds as good as ever.