ALL: Ol’ Dirty Bastard

The A&E documentary Ol’ Dirty Bastard: A Tale of Two Dirtys revisits an oft-told tragedy. Ghostface Killah calls Ol’ Dirty Bastard “the soul of Wu-Tang Clan,” but one can’t help but notice that he and Raekwon are the only members of the group to appear on camera. RZA’s absence is palpable – he and Dirty’s widow, Icelene Jones, have had a contentious relationship since the rapper’s death in 2004. Mariah Carey shows up with her considerable star power to describe how she and Dirty made the classic single “Sweet Fantasy.” Damon Dash, who is far removed from his Roc-a-Fella glory years, bravely addresses why he signed Dirty to a million-dollar deal despite the rapper displaying troubling signs of schizophrenia while in prison, and clearly needing therapy upon release. There’s a lot of great camcorder home videos from Icelene that gives the documentary a poignant intimacy. But too much of Dirty’s work after Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version is cast in a negative light. An Elektra Records executive claims that his second album, 1999’s Nigga Please, sold poorly because his increasing drug use. That’s clearly wrong: it earned a RIAA gold certification and yielded a major club hit in the Neptunes-produced “Got Your Money.” A Tale of Two Dirtys strains to show us that Dirty was a creative musician, not a holy fool. Unfortunately, A&E doesn’t do artistry. It specializes in celebrity dirt. There’s endless scenes of Dirty wandering some anonymous hallway, presumably in a drug-induced daze. Under such conditions, one doesn’t know if they should take Byronn Bain’s comment that “This country has had a love affair with Black pain and suffering since its beginning” as an ironic or a cautionary statement. A Tale of Two Dirtys was directed by Jason and Sam Pollard. Four Screens, Pulse Films, and the Ol’ Dirty Bastard Estate produced it.