^{Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB
by Jamie Lowe
published November 25, 2008
Faber and Faber
hardcover, 288 pgs.}


I get Jamie Lowe's new book, Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, and first thing I do is flip to the inside back cover. Not out of any sort of subconscious pre-judgmental desire for journalistic authenticity in this biography of one of hip-hop's most enigmatic tragic-comic figures. But studying Ms. Lowe's portrait and bio, what strikes me most is not that she's a white girl wearing what appears to be a kimono with Mesopatamian accents, but the fleeting idea that Tammi Littlenut had written a book, the one I’m holding here about Ol' Dirty Bastard.

See, I've had this secret crush on Tammy Littlenut from Strangers with Candy since I first saw the episode when she and Jeri (Amy Sedaris) were supposed to take care of their five pound sugar sack of a baby, and Tammi Littlenut ends up with all the responsibility and eventually ends the episode with her, Chuck Noblet (Steven Colbert), and Mr. Jellineck (Paul Dinello) jumping on the bed in a motel room. I had a few things going in my favor following the initial impression of Ms. Lowe's picture: Fantastic red hair? Check, even though her picture is in black and white. Lives in Brooklyn? Check, my roommate had spied Tammi Littlenut around the Lorimer stop off the L train. But when push came to shove and I was forced to confirm the most stringent detail, I had to look up Tammi Littlenut on IMDB, and alas!... Her real name is not Tammi... I mean Jamie Lowe, but Maria Thayer! Hopes dashed.

But it wasn’t a complete loss. Ms. Lowe's highly personal detective story recounts the life, times and eventual last days of Ol' Dirty Bastard, aka Big Baby Jesus, aka Dirt McGirt, aka, Ason Unique, aka Russell "Rusty" Jones, and is, upon further reading, an exhaustive and thorough portrait of the man himself, from growing up in Brooklyn freestyling with the RZA and developing his unorthodox and perverse rhyme scheme¹ to his final days, when he was heavily medicated––both doctor prescribed and self inflicted––as he became a shell of what he once was and felt the world could probably do without him when he finally died in 2004 after a bag of cocaine he purposefully or accidentally swallowed, broke apart inside him.

_{1 (His mother, Cherry, once told him "You have the nerve to get out there and sing when you know you can't sing," while Ms. Lowe's puts it this way: "He rapped when he felt something and he deconstructed words by pouring meaning into guttural sounds. His train of thought derailed from the moment he opened his mouth." [p142]}