There are two sides to the mind and character of Russell Jones, aka Ol' Dirty Bastard: On one level, he's one of the craziest motherfuckers to emerge from the haze of popular music in the past twenty years, running police and journalists alike ragged with his ingeniously extreme delinquency. This year alone, it almost seems as if his rap sheet had doubled in size after consecutive run-ins with the law on charges and allegations ranging from terrorism to drugs to running a red light. It's a string of events that has branded Dirty as unstable and disturbed. On a whole other level though, that the majority of finger-pointers fail to even notice, the man has one of the most brilliantly outgoing minds in hip-hop. A creatively tossed brain salad of Dolemite, Rick James, Sid Vicious, and Richard Pryor, ODB seems to have taken every little aftershock he's incited upon society and utilized each one as a well thought out point plan for his unique guerilla style of self-promotion. In actuality, he's even used the industry's doubt over whether or not he's stable enough to produce a proper follow-up to his now classic 1995 solo debut Return to the 36 Chambers: the Dirty Version to his advantage. With the hype radar so distracted by his antics outside the realms of hip-hop, the Dirt Dog was able to quietly reinvent his sound without compromising his drunken Shaolin style.
