Ol' Dirty Bastard: N*gg* Please : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Morally bankrupt, artistically questionable, politically incorrect, racially divisive and just plain wrong, ODB's second album is the ultimate guilty pleasure. This is African-American nihilism at its most resolute and shamelessly hilarious. "Kill all the government microchips in my body/I'm the paranoid nigga at your party," he confesses on the title track. "I kill all my enemies at birth/ Shut the fuck up, bitch, and let me stick my hands up your skirt." If this were a movie about a future president and a monkey, it would be called Gonzo Goes Bonkers.

But Nigga Please is a hip-hop album, and a hysterical and mad-brilliant one at that, not just a field recording from the drunk tank. On a strictly musical tip, this is the only Wu product in years (RZA's recent greatest-hits package excepted) that doesn't resound with Shaolin's death knell; it reminds us that the most memorable moment on Wu-Tang Forever is when ODB accuses the rest of the group of looking like "the nasty backup dancers for En Vogue." The beats on Nigga Please are tight and firm packages with a jaunty aerobic attitude about them that might bring a twinkle to George Clinton's dimples. The chorus "Jesus, I'm rolling wit' you" is enough to give a whole Soul Train line mother-ship fever, while "All in Together Now" sounds like a lost track from the Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow sessions.

As the only member of the Wu family who doesn't need beats or rhymes to draw a crowd and hold its attention at gunpoint, ODB brings new meaning to the term breaking the fourth wall, that imaginary barrier supposedly separating the world of the performer from that of his audience. As various news reports have shown, all the world is this man's stage, preferably those parts where industry awards or food stamps are being handed out and a freestanding urinal is as close as the nearest curbside. Those concerned with ODB's health are directed to the bluesy title track, in which he chats up his medicine chest: "I'm immune to all viruses/I get the cocaine/It cleans out my sinuses." But lyrically, the man of the hour is in rare rude-boy form, particularly on the single "Got Your Money," where he declares, "I don't have no trouble with you fucking me/But I have a little problem with you not fucking me'' and "I don't want no problems/Because I put you down in the ground/Where you cannot be found.''

ODB pays homage to fellow fun addict Rick James on "Coldblooded,'' which is just plain cute; more macabre is ODB singing the Billie Holiday standard "Good Morning Heartache." Well, not exactly singing so much as croaking and murmuring the lyric behind the vocals of the young lady he's hired to re-enact Diana Ross' version of the track from Lady Sings the Blues. Never one to lick boots, ODB sticks it to The Man on "Rollin' Wit You." While Puffy is cozying up to Donald Trump at Justin's, ODB will be in the alley getting louder than a bomb: "I'm telling y'all bitch-ass niggas/. . . Y'all colored bitch-ass, faggot, punk-ass motherfuckers don't see/ That these white people are trying to take over your shit!" Eminem, Kid Rock and Fred Durst are surely planning early retirement.

Leave it to those other vague and nervous-type MCs to indulge in studio gangster fantasy or to duck and hide behind the literary niceties of irony, metaphor and symbolism; ODB is walking his talk, bringing hip-hop that gospel truth it's been missing, as only a stone-cold pimp trickster truth teller can. Master P, sit down. We all know who the real no-limit soldier is. (RS 823)

GREG TATE