Ol' Dirty Bastard

Russell Tyrone Jones was born on the fifteenth of November 1968 at the Fort Greene district of Brooklyn, the son of William Jones — a Brooklyn building superintendent — and Cherry Jones, a homemaker and home-care worker. He was the maternal cousin of Gary Grice and Robert Diggs — subsequently known as the GZA and the RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. The Jones household at the Lafayette Gardens of Brooklyn was working-class Black; he was raised primarily by his mother and his maternal grandmother. He attended the Eastern District High School of Brooklyn and left without graduating in 1986.

He formed in 1989 with his cousins Robert and Gary the trio Force of the Imperial Master — the predecessor group to the Wu-Tang Clan that would across the following four years recruit Method Man, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Ghostface Killah, Cappadonna and Masta Killa. The nine-member collective formally constituted as the Wu-Tang Clan in late 1992 and signed to Loud Records in early 1993. The album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) — recorded at Firehouse Studio in Manhattan in early 1993 and released in November 1993 — is now widely regarded as one of the principal hip-hop albums of the 1990s.

Ol' Dirty Bastard contributed three of the album's principal lead-vocal performances — including the closing track Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber Part II and Shame on a Nigga. His distinctive vocal style — unmetered, untuned, performed in a slurred declamatory register that bore no debt to any prior hip-hop vocal tradition — was the principal vocal counterweight to the structured technical raps of the rest of the Clan and one of the principal aesthetic innovations of 1990s hip-hop.

He released the solo album Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version in March 1995 — recorded at Firehouse Studio across the preceding year — and Nigga Please in September 1999.

He served four years from 1999 to 2003 across multiple sentences for drug-and-weapons charges at the New York State and federal correctional systems. He was released in May 2003. He collapsed at the Wu-Tang Clan's Manhattan recording studio on the thirteenth of November 2004 and died at the studio of an accidental cocaine-and-tramadol overdose. He was thirty-five.

He is honored here as the foundational unstructured vocal voice of the Wu-Tang Clan.