Ol' Dirty Bastard and Supergrass
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14 September 1999
Ol’ Dirty Bastard
Nigga Please
There’s no questioning the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s place as the wild man of the hip-hop idiom. He was Rudy Ray Moore, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Fear of a Black Planet-era Flavor Flav all rolled up in a dusted Phillies blunt with the words “Big Baby Jesus” written across it with a bootleg Sharpie. Though the co-founding (and confounding) member of the Wu-Tang Clan was labeled an MC and a rapper by trade and association, his accidentally Dadaistic approach to the craft was exactly the eye jammie hip-hop needed to keep itself in check.
Largely produced by the Neptunes with accompanying beats by the likes of the RZA and Irv Gotti, Dirty’s second solo album is indeed his absurdist masterpiece as he blurts, sings, chants, and rants his way through what can easily be considered the most non-linear mainstream rap album ever created. Nigga Please was released in September of 1999 in the midst of a personal tornado of chaos and bad publicity. It came in the wake of ODB’s full year of criminal mischief, which found Dirty hijacking the 1998 Grammys during the “Song of the Year” award announcement to proclaim that “Wu-Tang is for the children,” getting arrested in California after making “terrorist threats” against security at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, being kicked out of a hotel in Berlin, Germany for lounging in the nude on a balcony, getting pulled over in New York for driving with a suspended license and drug possession charges twice within a five-day span, and hiring OJ Simpson’s lawyer to represent him in court among other ill-fated instances.
Anchored by one hit song, the freaky club banger “Got Your Money”, featuring a memorable hook by a pre-“Milkshake” Kelis, Nigga Please zig zags from a faithful reading of Rick James’ “Cold Blooded” to sloppy-yet-entirely-endearing warble through the Billie Holiday classic “Good Morning Heartache” with one-time Timbaland protégé Lil’ Mo. Then there’s ODB doing what the Dirt Dog does best on “I Can’t Wait”, featuring a sample fashioned from the theme music to the William Shatner police drama TJ Hooker. Those who didn’t get it still can’t understand where ODB was coming from on this, the absolute oddest gem in the Wu-Tang Clan catalog. But for those in the know—Jesus, we still rollin’ wit you. 
Ron Hart
20 September 1999
Supergrass
Supergrass
This album was a crucial step for Supergrass. While their chart position has slunk down incrementally with almost every album they’ve released, their eponymous third album established them as a solid career band. While the Britney Spears and Eminem types manufacture carbon copy blockbuster releases on pure hype, the so-called “X-Ray” album saw the band’s early, unrefined alternative punk and ramshackle twee influences coalesce into a consistently understated and subtle record, commanding their destiny while maintaining their unpretentious spirit and sense of humor.
Their 1995 debut I Should Coco ended up at number one in the UK charts, garnering them a Mercury Prize nomination and best new artist awards from NME and Q. The lead single “Caught by the Fuzz” and the Ivor Novello-winning “Alright” saw them touching back on their formative teenage years, capturing the unchecked hope and energy of youth. In 1997, In It for the Money followed it up to number two in the UK with a more ambitious and sonically varied sound, and sold more worldwide than its predecessor. This direction continued for their eponymous 1999 release.
The band was all safely in their mid-twenties at that point, and the time for naive noodling had passed. The album announced Supergrass as a mature group of talented musicians, no longer dependent on, but not devoid of, spunk. It helped to opens doors to the US market thanks to the surprise summer hit “Pumping on Your Stereo” (which made the Road Trip soundtrack) and its now-legendary supporting Muppet video.
The core of the album was not in its flashy riffs, but emotionally its contemplative, composed tracks. Among these, “Eon” is a slow moving epic that builds to a drifting downtempo peak, and “Born Again” follows suit, from an orchestra-warming-up intro to an electric piano and string-laden groove penetrated by vocoder-dampened vocals. The album was bookended by “Moving”, a touring song documenting various attributes of life on the road, and “Mama & Papa”, which closes the album on the notion that, once the nest is empty, you never can go back home.
Granted, their third album was their last to gain platinum sales, so one may be inclined to assume this was where it all went wrong. To the contrary, I see this as the album where they finally became themselves, reaching the place where all of the promise from their debut took them. The consumer only concerned with the here and now would likely miss the progression the band took to get to this point, and it’s one they continued. 2002’s Life on Other Planets would be their first album on the Billboard 200, while Road to Rouen from 2005 and last year’s Diamond Hoo Ha reached 41 and 22 on Top Heatseekers charts respectively. Yet, although their earlier albums may have had more raw energy and their later works may be more refined, in my mind, Supergrass still holds up as their best. Alan Ranta
