Songoftheday 2/10/22 - … You give me your number I'll call you up, you act like your p***y on interrupt...

 

 

"Got Your Money" - Ol' Dirty Bastard featuring Kelis

from the album Ni**a Please (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak; #33 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 6

 

Today's song comes from rapper Russell Jones, who was famous under the moniker Ol' Dirty Bastard. Along with cousins Robert Diggs (RZA) and Gary Grice (GZA), Jones was a part of the iconic rap collective Wu-Tang Clan. Their 1993 album Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is considered one of the most seminal albums in hip-hop, and while it just missed the top-40 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, the record has gone on to sell over three million copies. Each of the members have gone and had respectable solo careers, with Clan-mates Method Man and Raekwon already scoring top-40 pop crossover hits in the late 1990s. Ol' Dirty Bastard himself had started out guesting on a few tracks, and released his debut solo set Return To The 36 Chambers: Dirty Version in 1995, which went to #7 on the Billboard 200, and #2 on the R&B Albums list, going on to sell over a million. Two singles charted from the set, with "Brooklyn Zoo" making the R&B Singles top-40 at #40, while getting to #54 on the pop Hot 100 and #5 on the Rap Singles list. The album was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Album in 1996, the first award in that category, losing out to Naughty By Nature for their Poverty's Paradise. Also in 1995, Ol' Dirty Bastard was the featured rapper on the remix to friend Mariah Carey's #1 pop hit "Fantasy", which exposed him to a much broader audience than before.

 

In 1998, he was a featured rapper on the single "Ghetto Supastar" from Pras Michel and Mya which appeared in the movie Bulworth. The record went to #15 on the Hot 100, and #8 on the R&B Singles list, and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Duo/Group Rap Performance , which went home with the Beastie Boys for "Intergalactic".

The following year, Ol' Dirty Bastard returned with his second solo disc Ni**a Please. By that time, he was more known for his criminal record than his music, going back and forth to prison on drug and weapons charges.. Nevertheless, his second album on Elektra Records landed his biggest crossover success. "Got Your Money", written by Jones with Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo of the production team the Neptunes, featured singer Kelis, a fellow New Yorker that was about to release her own debut album herself. Also it's her voice anchoring this disjointed record, her chorus is pretty repetitive in retrospect, and it's the Neptunes' groove that really saves this from being a disaster, framing Ol' Dirty's rambling with a booty-shaking backdrop. By that time he was in and out of jail so much that for the music video they had to edit shots of him from his previous clips over snippets of the blaxploitation flick Dolemite, with Kelis spliced in for the chorus...

"Got Your Money" became Ol' Dirty Bastard's second top-40 "pop" crossover record in December of 1999, as well as Kelis' first. The song rose to #19 on Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart, and #4 on the Rhythmic radio list. It also climbed to #6 on the Rap Singles chart. Internationally, the single peaked at #11 in the UK. The Ni**a Please album, released in September of that year, became his second top ten album on the Billboard 200 at #10, while also getting to #2 on the R&B Albums tally. 

Jones' life after this went downhill, as Elektra dropped him after he left his court-mandated drug rehab and went on the lam only to be arrested for drugs again. After spending a few years in prison, the indie label D3 released a Frankenstein mashup of Ol Dirty Bastard tracks without a single moment of his input in 2002 called The Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones, nevertheless it still made the top-40 on the Billboard 200 at #33, and #6 on the R&B Albums list. He eventually signed with Jay-Z's label Roc-A-Fella a year later, but an album recorded never was released. In the beginning of 2004, he popped back on to the Hot 100 as a featured rapper (under the alias Dirt McGirt) on NSYNC member JC Chasez' mediocre single "Some Girls (Dance With Women)", which went to #88 on the chart. But that year saw his drug troubles get even worse, and in November of that year, Jones overdosed and passed away. A posthumous mixtape, Osirus  popped on to the Billboard 200 chart at #157. As for Kelis, she will return to the series.

(5/10)

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And here's Dirty doing "Got Your Money" at a show...

Up tomorrow: A deceivingly-named Italian Eurodance act comes in colors.