Album: A Son Unique
Release Date: Officially Unreleased / Nov. 6, 2006
Producers: RZA, Damon Elliott, etc.
Review: Alright, from word one this is a complicated album to explain. Please excuse the lengthy intro/disclaimers since in some ways, this album doesn't technically exist.
I've heard it said that before his passing in 2004 from a drug overdose, Ol' Dirty Bastard had been re-marketing himself, instead going by Dirt McGirt. Dirt McGirt is a long-standing alias professionally dating back to at least Return to the 36 Chambers, where on the track "Goin' Down" he shouts himself out as "Dirt McGirt, that's my motherfuckin' name / Love to flirt, that's my motherfuckin' game." Though official word on the subject of the official name change is pretty slim, there's supporting evidence in DJ Noize's ODB tribute track on 2005's Think Differently compilation. Amid the beats and samples of ODB talking (just after the reading of W.H. Auden's "Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephone...") he clearly says "It's time for me to move on. It's time for Ol' Dirty Bastard to not exist no more. It's time for a new Ol' Dirty Bastard, a baby Ol' Dirty Bastard, not called Ol' Dirty Bastard..."
Then comes the album name. Dirty adopted Unique Ason (or Ason Unique) as his righteous name in Islam's modern sect of Five Percenters. The majority of Wu-Tang members follow this belief, which owes to the idea that society is divided neatly into three categories of its population: 85% are willfully ignorant or uncivilized, another 10% take advantage of the 85 and a mere 5% of the population can hope to achieve enlightenment through properly living the teachings of Islam. This religious terminology is present throughout the Wu's long history; Method Man says in ODB's "Raw Hide" that he fears "for the 85 who don't got a clue." ODB's first line in "Brooklyn Zoo" is "I'm the one-man army Ason." At any rate, rearranging Unique Ason gives us A Son Unique - ODB is the embodiment of the one-of-a-kind spirit schooled in part by modern Islam and his life growing up in Brooklyn.
Next is the release date. A Son Unique was close enough to completion upon Dirt's death that it was very nearly released as his official third studio album. As I mentioned in our retrospective on Nigga Please, the record labels had had enough of his legal shenanigans before his death that they assembled mixtapes, greatest hits albums and other compilations to qualify him as having fulfilled his contract with them. This is where we get albums like Osirus: The Mixtape and The Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones. In terms of all-new material that wasn't scraped from the bottom of the studio's barrel, A Son Unique was it. Dirty actually died in the studio on a day on which he'd been recording the material However, during the ensuing posthumous rights to the recordings themselves, record label Dame Dash and ODB's widow Icelene Jones ended up in a gridlock that included a two-year lead-up to the finished (?) product.
In November of 2006, the album had apparently been finished enough that some promotional copies of the CD are said to be floating around the black market, with the widest release being a quasi-legal debut on iTunes which was very quickly removed thereafter. It remains unreleased officially, besides the date in question: November 6, 2006. In deciding whether or not to cover this album for Map of Shaolin, I decided if it were finished enough that the studio had sent it to publication, it deserved a spot on the Map.
Finally, the personnel. Without a finalized package to reference, we're left with second-hand accounts of who produced what and which rhymes belonged to whom and when they were recorded. For example? Clearly, Lil' Frame's contribution to "Pop Shots" was finished after Dirt's death, as the first sound is Frame saying "Rest in Peace, Ol' Dirty." We also know beyond the shadow of a doubt who produced some tracks, as the music for "Skrilla" previously appeared somewhat cleaned up as "The Glide" on Method Man's 4:21: The Day After and are credited to RZA. Album review sites (eg Rolling Stone) also have finalized articles that were published on the eve of the album's digital release/disappearance. At any rate, a hodgepodge list of credits has since consistently appeared on leaked downloads of A Son Unique and a Wikipedia page made for the album. Without intending to add fuel to the rumor fire, I'd like to add that the production credits I reference here are all taken from my leak of A Son Unique and its Wikipedia page (that developed after I obtained my copy in 2006) and I can't verify their authenticity 100%.
Out of respect for the late Ol' Dirty, the work that went into this project and the criminal act of it being shelved, here's a full-on track-by-track review.
The album's opener, "Lift Ya Skirt," features Missy Elliot, but starts with a piano playing "Hallelujah" before getting into its jazzy refrain. Dirt and Missy both spit tight verses that get the album popping off right. The hook "Dirt Dog, Dirt Dog, you our man / If you can't do it no one can!" is as silly and bouncy as Chris Rock's hook from "Recognize" off of Nigga Please. Dirty gets the chance to sing in his bizarre and soulful style for the hook on "Pop Shots" and he gets in some fun braggadocious lyrics - "I scrap with the best / If I spit ten rhymes, nigga, nine gon' connect." It may have a bit of filler, though, as DJ Premier skratches the sample "See my name is the ODB" dozens of times throughout the track.
The beat on "Operator" is maybe a bit more mainstream/polished than I'd like, with a hodgepodge hook of ODB and Pharrell that nearly makes for a fun call-and-response, but frankly it's hard to decry anything on an album that we're lucky to have at all.
Then comes the RZA-produced "Back in the Air" with a Ghostface Killah verse bookended by two verses from Dirty. Ghost sounds right at home on this track, but ODB's lyrics really take off more than they have so far on this record. In the first verse he brings some classic Wu-style references to '70s cinema with "I show no mercy, dunk like a bar of Hershey / Call my gun Lil' Seymour, bitch, or Big Percy" (two characters from Uptown Saturday Night), also calling out fake emcees like Puff Daddy with "This is Dirt McGirt, ho, not P. Diddy / All we got in common is the money." But the third verse is his best, with the following lines:
"Stealin' anything that twinkle bright to my eyesight
Many nights I used to stay up at the twilight
And wonder to myself if there's a Heaven or Hell
Been alone in these streets since 11 or 12
On my own, I run buckwild in the west
A knucklehead nigga, I used to sleep in my vest
Had no home, my moms used to show me no lovin'
Burn the crib down trying to dry my shirt in the oven."
"Work for Me" doesn't grab me as much, sitting on par with "Operator" as a decent track but by no means a stand-out. If anything, both tracks suffer from the same trouble as Method Man's Tical 0, in that they sound more like a commercial effort than a Wu-Tang member's fascinating creativity let off its leash.
"ODB, Don't Go Breaking My Heart" is absolutely a reworked cover of the Elton John song from which it borrows its name, with Macy Gray and ODB trading lines on the hook in between ODB spitting some quick and incredibly scattered/messy verses that sound like "Let's get Hot Dogs on a Stick now three drinks of lemon fresh drip over back of back the ngh king-size bed fiffo kee let's dooooo the doooooo" and Macy Gray making furious mouth sounds like she's scarfing popcorn while sick with rabies. Unfortunately, it's one of those times that ODB's unpredictable persona stumbles over the finish line face-first instead of in the charming drunken boxing way that made him such a folk hero.
"The Stomp Pt. II" features RZA on back-up vocals for the hook and Dirt actually connects his rhymes twice per line - every other beat. For example, "Things ain't the same today, this is the game they play / Dirt the name they say, throwin' the blame my way / So they can change my face, take and claim my space / But I remain the ace, always maintain my space." It's short, fast and furious like its namesake "The Stomp" from Return to the 36 Chambers, and does a good job reaching nearly the same heights.
"How Ya Feelin'" is a classic fast-paced wacky circus with Dirty as its ringmaster, frantically tying together tangents about parole, MTV appearances and sex into a three-minute frenzy. Despite the altogether different feel of its music, it's the same all-over-the-place attack that made his verse on "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'" in 1993.
RZA returns - and brings Raekwon and Method Man with him - for "Intoxicated," which also features Macy Gray. Rae and Meth absolutely kill it - Meth opening his verse with "Yo I was born on the same day as Dr. Seuss / Plenty of friends, Henny and gin, who got the juice?" - before Ol' Dirty closes the song with a really tight verse of his own. "Silence on Smith with six shots, lick shots / Leave ya head like a Shaolin monk with six dots / Hit a gush, twistin' a sweet switcher / In search of Bobby the Digital, bitch, not Bobby Fisher." It may be his most reeled-in but simultaneously effective verse on the album, and one of the best arguments for the album's release.
"Dirty and Grimey" isn't at all bad, but feels more like a N.O.R.E. track with a guest spot by ODB than the other way around. Glad it's on the album, but ends up in the middle of the pack.
At its outset, "Danger Zone" sounds like a fucking mess, and Dirty's rhymes barely fix it. It may be the only track on the album that I feel wouldn't have made it on if Dirty would've lived to see it to completion. Whether or not it's really a crappy song (taste is subjective, after all), it just doesn't seem like it fits on the album.
Then comes "Skrilla," which is the closest the album comes to capturing a perfect evolution of the Return to the 36 Chambers sound we could hope for when we push Play on A Son Unique. Big stomping percussion with hand claps and finger snaps reign over popping bass synth, '90s gangsta rap keyboards, weird saxophone, Wu slang, shouted hooks and unstoppable lyrics. Dirty's energy and flow on this track are, to me, the epitome of what made him so incomparable to any other rapper in American music history. Check out some of these brilliant couplets, which are slung at you through an indomitable sound that threatens to jump out of your speakers and slap your mama in the face:
"My nameplate travel through the interstate
Glock in the stash box, my drop top ventilate."
"Disrespect me where I lay my head, my hammer spray
My cybertech nylon suit reflect gamma ray."
"Beer belly, I chuckle like Kris Kringle
Put four grams of cocaine crushed up in a single."
There's absolutely no way on God's green Earth to follow "Skrilla," but "Don't Hurt Me Dirty" does a good job of bringing us back down to Earth for the end of the album. It's got that cleaner/electro/club sound that a couple of the other tracks do (eg "Operator," "Work for Me" and "Dirty and Grimey") but with stronger lyrics than those offer.
Legacy: Some of the tracks that ended up on the kind-of-unreleased A Son Unique debuted a year prior when WuTangCorp.com released an official ODB tribute mix that also included hits from both of Dirt's previous albums, edited for time and mixed into a continuous playlist. If anything, it only helped to drum up interest for the album. It's a real shame it hasn't seen an end-all be-all, official, in-store release, but at least we music pirates still get to hear these 13 cuts in some fashion. As a 45-minute package and third album from Wu-Tang's fallen soldier, this release is a mostly successful return to form from the weaker tracks on Nigga Please to rest - in quality - somewhere between Dirty's two previous outings. Ultimately, on the downside, some of the tracks suffer from sounding too cleaned-up and commercial, perhaps in a way Dirty wouldn't have gone organically (eg "Dirty and Grimey" or "Danger Zone"). Also, a couple others sound like they contain some posthumously cut-and-pasted moments that soil their otherwise solid delivery ("Pop Shots"). However, despite its occasional hiccups, A Son Unique brushes against brilliance on more than one occasion (see "Recommended Tracks" below). Dirty was coming back and sounding great before his unfortunate death, making up for his absences on The W and Iron Flag with several instant classics featuring Wu-generals and others without. Had it been finished on schedule, it likely would've released in early-mid 2005, in the 15-month gap between Masta Killa's brilliant debut No Said Date and U-God's unsuccessful Mr. Xcitement. In fact, since No Said Date itself came out just weeks after Method Man's weakest effort, Tical 0, Dirty's A Son Unique likely would've made a smooth transition, with a couple uninspired tracks peppering an otherwise enjoyable listen.
As it is, it surfaced in an odd unofficial way just after the street-influenced Method Man comeback 4:21 and the rugged More Fish by Ghostface Killah. Two months later RZA dropped the hand-picked Wu-affiliate-laden Afro Samurai soundtrack, as the Wu catalog once again broadened its scope and took on a new visage. Rest in peace, Mr. Jones; the world isn't the same without you.
Recommended Tracks: Lift Ya Skirt, Back in the Air, Intoxicated, Skrilla.
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