The horrifying moment Ol Dirty Bastard forced his son to watch him do drugs
Ugh. I don’t want to be a cop about this, but drugs fucking suck and your favourite musician doing them doesn’t make them (the drugs or the musician, take your pick) any more cool.
I know I’m basically wrong here. An old man yelling at clouds while the more well-adjusted roll their eyes and get back to having functional social lives. As someone who’s been straight edge since they were 15, I also know that I have pretty stringent opinions about things I haven’t experienced.
If you ask me, though, that gives me an even more authoritative take on drugs, because I know how they make people act. If you think that any kind of drug makes you more confident, more funny, a better hang in any way, my brother in Christ, you are wrooooong.
They just make you do mental shit, especially if you go a bit too hard on them, and that is an experience that is only fun to read about, not experience first-hand. Case in point, The Wu-Tang Clan’s lunatic fringe Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
Russell Tyrone Jones is one of the most legendary figures in hip-hop and would be without any of the mind-boggling antics he got up to in the limelight. We’ve all heard the story of him taking a limousine to cash in a welfare check with his two kids. We all know the proto-Kanye Grammys stunt (“Wu-Tang is for the children!”). We all know the multiple prison sentences.
They all make up the legend. None of them matter compared to the sheer, surrealist joy of his incredible rapping, but they do help. Much in the same way that all of the stories about Iggy Pop and Courtney Love are there to prop up the music and not the other way around. The problem is that people don’t ever really look at the personal toll all these antics took on the people who knew the real ODB. From his bandmates to especially his family.
Those stories get a lot less fun when you can’t look away from them. Or, as it turns out, when the man himself won’t let you.
Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s legendary drug habit
A lot of ODB’s stories become a lot less fun when you remember that the man was a father, and one so completely out of control that he involved his kids in a lot of his stunts.
As mentioned previously, he brought two of his three kids on the limousine stunt from earlier. A stunt that, let’s not forget, MTV and the press were tipped off about, and thus these children were being shown on the national news before they could have any real say over whether they wanted that.
As they grew up, those kids began to talk about the reality of living with ODB really was like and that’s when the fun properly stops. One of his sons, Barsun Unique Jones, who today goes by the name Boy Jones or Young Dirty Bastard (hey, if you’ve got a brand, work it), tells a truly harrowing story of one of the last times he ever interacted with his father.
In an interview with Vlad TV, he said, “The last time he was here, he got as high as he could ever get.”
Jones said that on the night his father passed away, “He got as high as he could ever get. He told me to sit there and watch him. Eye-to-eye, we did that. Then that was it.” Imagine that being the lasting memory of your father, and you’ve got an idea of just how bad the reality of dealing with a drug addict can get at its worst. Of course, it’s not that these people aren’t deserving of help, quite the opposite. This is also an extreme example, it should be made abundantly clear.
This doesn’t mean the human cost of using drugs should be ignored in favour of the fun you can have with them.