Last rhymes Ol' Dirty Bastard's Osirus BY CARLY CARIOLI

When the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard got out of prison for the last time, in 2003, he surprised his friends by signing to Roc-A-Fella Records. Some members of the Wu-Tang Clan questioned his move to a rival camp, and Pharrell Williams — whose first big break had been producing "Baby I Got Your Money" on ODB’s Nigga Please (Elektra) and who had hoped to sign Dirty to his Star Track label — professed to be heartbroken. Less than a decade after his stunning 1995 solo debut, Return to the 36 Chambers (Elektra), an album he never topped, Ol’ Dirty had his back to the wall. Broke, a drug addict, his movement limited by the strict terms of his probation, he recorded a number of freestyles and guest appearances to celebrate his release; these were rushed onto the streets as if he were a terrorist making tapes to prove he hadn’t been killed. On one, Roc honcho Dame Dash introduces his new recruit and asks him to spit a few lines. As soon as Ol’ Dirty opens his mouth, you know it’s him — he may sound rusty and tentative, but soon he’s working up to a lather. "My beats are funky/My rhymes are spunky/Sometimes I say well, goddamn, what’s the recipe? Well I don’t know! I asked my momma, she don’t know! She said, ‘Go ask your goddamn father!’ "

Those lines are quintessential ODB: in his songs, rhyme was at best optional. He often surprised you with phrases that seemed to describe a universe that obeys laws different from our own. ("I kill my enemies at birth," he once blurted.) The entire point of a rap freestyle, as in a jazz solo, is to produce an improvisation with the coherence of a composition. But Ol’ Dirty was to freestyling what free jazz is to bop: he was the antithesis of coherence, a rapper who thoroughly resisted rhyme and reason. He often mocked, in the scrambled tones of his voice and his departure from prescribed meter and tempo, the very notion that rap has anything to do with either. That Dame Dash freestyle was an example of how he could vaporize your expectations: first descending into a corny rhyme (spunky/funky) and then abandoning rhyme altogether — and when he did this, well, what was he doing? What if hip-hop didn’t even have to pretend to rhyme?

Sometimes it seemed that Ol’ Dirty was at his best when he’d lost the thread and his subconscious took over. The act of going from "My beats are funky" to "Go ask your goddamn father" seems beyond the act of composition — it’s just something that came out of him one day when he was standing at a microphone. Except that it wasn’t: the same verse, in a slightly different phrasing, had first appeared five years earlier on a song called "Kiss of a Black Widow," on Wu-Tang producer the RZA’s 1998 album RZA As Bobby Digital in Stereo. If ODB seemed utterly impulsive — this was a man who after months on the lam had been arrested signing autographs at a McDonald’s — the truth was always more complicated.

At the beginning of his career and again at the end of it, Ol’ Dirty Bastard warned his fans not to underestimate him. Even from his first appearance on CD, "Shame on a Nigga," from Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers (Loud/BMG), he sounded ancient and guttural. Caked and gritty, shrouded in grave dust and sprinkled in zinc, his voice had a metallic grain as distinctive as Howlin’ Wolf’s. He often added a vibrato accent to prolong certain syllables; this could make him sound like a preacher wagging his finger from the pulpit, and it gave him an authority that never dissipated, not even when he clowned. He had an extensive repertoire of growls, gasps, stutters, moans, grunts, and falsettos, and he would often switch among several of these in the course of a single line, attacking a phrase from several angles at once. "I get into shit, I let it out like diarrhea/Got burnt once but it was only gonorrhea/Dirty, I keep shit stank in my drawers," he shouted on "Shame on a Nigga," foreshadowing a scatological bent that, as in the work of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins decades earlier, often overshadowed his inimitable technique. "I come with that loco/Style from my vocal," he rasped. "I’m no joker, play me as a joker/Be on ya like a house on fire — smoke ya!"

He did get played as a joker, increasingly so as his output went from surrealistically brilliant to merely erratic. But though Dirty was often called on to provide comic relief — as his duet with Mariah Carey on the remix of her "Fantasy" attests — even his comedic mode was refined. He had no precedent in hip-hop, but it’s clear he had absorbed the comedy of Richard Pryor and Blowfly: his lengthy intro at the beginning of Return to the 36 Chambers was a tribute to both, by turns mock-superlative ("Tonight you’re gonna see something you’ve never seen before," he boasts in a voice reminiscent of Pryor’s uptight-white-folks impersonations), reflective ("I’m happy to be living, nigga try to shoot me down," he says in a near-whisper), and absurdist (crooning, to the tune of the Roberta Flack weeper, "The first tiiiime ever you suuuuuucked my diiiick"). The name Ol’ Dirty Bastard was itself a tribute of sorts to Redd Foxx, a connection that was finally made on record last year when ODB rapped over a sample of the Sanford and Son theme, on a song called "Old Man" from Masta Killa’s No Said Date.

Osirus: The Official Mixtape (JS Records), released this month by his mother, collects the tracks that ODB was working on when he collapsed in the studio and died last November 13. It is likely far from the last word on Dirty — still in the vaults is the official studio album he made for Roc-A-Fella, to which Osirus was intended as a prelude — but it shows that he was at least attempting, albeit fitfully, to make a serious comeback. 36 Chambers netted a pair of hits, his signature songs "Brooklyn Zoo" and "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" (years before Missy Elliott did it, the latter included the astonishing sound of ODB rapping backwards). But all his subsequent albums were flawed. Nigga Please helped make him a household name thanks to the Neptunes’ "Baby I Got Your Money" (with Kelis singing the hook), but it also had plenty of filler, including a tortuously off-key cover of Rick James’s "Cold Blooded." A third album of dubious origin, The Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones (D3), appeared during ODB’s incarceration, with some half-realized material fleshed out by numerous guest raps. All of which meant that the bar was set low for Osirus. And though it’s better than Trials and Tribulations, it’s no masterpiece: its beats are on the cheap, and on the second half of the disc, ODB sounds exhausted, physically as well as mentally. You can only hope his voice on "Don’t Stop Ma (Out of Control)" has been electronically slowed; if not, he was in pretty bad shape.

At the beginning of the album, though, he’s in his old form. On the single, "Pop Shots," he sings the title so that it grates like fingernails on a blackboard — "It’s my paa-aaa-aaaap! Shaaaaats!" Screamin’ Jay Hawkins wanted to be an opera singer and almost had the voice for it, but he got pigeonholed as a mau-mau. Dirty was a mau-mau through and through, but he wanted to sing, and he never let his lack of skill prevent him from doing so. He reveled in the broken sound of his voice: he took such pleasure in those bum notes, and he scattered them liberally through his verses. So it is on "Pop Shots," but then he turns serious: the topic of the song is autobiography, and what he wants to tell us is that his name was Dirt long before he picked up a microphone — it was a title he’d adopted on the streets of Brooklyn back in 1986, wearing a four-finger ring that spelled out D-I-R-T, like some ghetto-Robert-Mitchum-in-Night-of-the-Hunter shit. One of ODB’s gifts was his ability to carry off the illusion that he didn’t care what came out of his mouth, that he spoke without thinking, but on "Pop Shots" he also wants you to know that he worked hard at being a rapper and wanted to be considered among the greatest. "Tell the truth I strive with the best," he says. "If I spit 10 rhymes, nigga, nine gon’ connect."

This was true, but it was that tenth rhyme — the one that didn’t connect — that his fans came to revere. No one departed from the script like ODB. It was when he hit the off-ramp, when the time came to abandon the rhyme scheme, that it became clear just how different he was from everyone else: he would strive to accent not just the wrong syllables but the wrongest, and instead of trying to hit a note, he’d make a heroic feat of not hitting it. Hip-hop fans loved him for it like a puppy, but this was what was radical about ODB, the thing that set him apart from every other vocalist in hip-hop. "Oh baby I like it raw," might’ve been his most famous line, but he might’ve said just as convincingly that he liked it wrong.

There are flashes of the old brilliance on Osirus. Like his haunted-house, google-eyed gurgle on "Go Go Go." On "Who Can Make It Happen like Dirt," he declares he’s "on another level ’cause I dance with the Devil/Then I slap a bitch in the eye with a bevel." Elsewhere, he squashes John Lennon like a beetle over the music from David Bowie’s "Fame." None of which gets at the real meat of ODB, which is his phrasing: a line from "Stand Up" goes something like, "OOOOooooooohhhh! Tell-me-who-the-fuck. Eyyyyye. Been!"

Ol’ Dirty’s influence is hard to gauge, if only because no one, with the possible exception of Busta Rhymes, has attempted to follow in his footsteps. The names he gave himself — Big Baby Jesus, Osirus, Dirt McGirt — had the ring of some chthonic divinity. In rock and roll, it’s a cliché to combine the filthy and the cosmic, but in hip-hop, ODB has no successors. In a genre of cryptic prophets, he was the holiest fool. "They say Dirt and sunshine make the flowers grow/I say fuck a bitch raw and drop yo’ gun on the flo’," goes a line by one of ODB’s protégés, a rapper called Rhymefest, on Osirus’s "Dirty Dirty." The symmetry of the rhyme in that line and the evenness with which he delivers it shows you how far he has to go before he’s anywhere in ODB’s league. But then Rhymefest surprises you on the final, unrhymed line of the song, and you think there might be hope for him after all: "What’s the world without Dirt? Just a bunch of fucking water."