Review by Frank Plowright
You’re unlikely to pick this up without knowing Ol’ Dirty Bastard as a swear-a-second founder member of hip hop collective Wu Tang Clan, and with a subsequent solo career that ran alongside a chaotic life marked by resolutely poor lifestyle choices. Crack cocaine addiction will make those for you, and often results in death, as it did for ODB in 2004.
The prologue to Oddities, Discords and B-Sides establishes alternate versions of New York, and if the city has alternate versions there’ll be alternate versions of ODB himself, recast as an all seeing guide to new realities. The idea enables an assortment of visions in different styles, each of them having New York menaced somehow, with the threats ranging from the fantastic in the form of demons and robots, or the more imaginable such as predatory capitalists. The art switches along with the moods, enabling the completely different tone of the sample pages provided by Maan House and Felipe Sobreiro. There’s also the old school Saturday morning animation style of Dojo Gubser and the greater fine art style of Mike JC.
Within the assorted stories ODB acts as inspiration and advisor, consulting his lyrics sometimes providing a solution. The opening stories carry a charm and a threat respectively, but the merging of icons in Regine Sawyer and Sobreiro’s story raises the stakes. This fairytale romance has DJ Julian providing the party beats for Josephine Baker, Zora Hurston Neale and “Bella Fitzpatrick” emphasising joy of learning and music instead of conflict.
The teams of Chris Robinson and Chris Gooding, and Jason Pierre and Mike JC take very different approaches, but both tackle the corporate homogenisation of music. It’s a battle that’s been raging since the 1960s, but here recast as heroic mythology with the future dependent on an artist sticking true to their creative inclinations. Pierre’s story is the first to properly filter in the martial arts obsession shared by Wu Tang Clan members, and like their album interludes it’s an effective pastiche. Martial arts movies advocate perfecting body and spirit to stand up against the odds, and this example is elevated by JC’s taking inspiration from Keith Haring’s colourful simplicity for his villains.
There’s definite mythologising here, and as Oddities, Discords and B-Sides is approved by ODB’s estate it emphasises the positive and idealises rather than noting the more conflicted elements of ODB’s personality, but then that’s what fiction’s for. The diversity and variety may work against total acceptance, but everyone’s going to have a favourite moment.
