Key 1999 Tracks: Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” (feat. Kelis)

In the early months of 2019, I heard “Got Your Money,” Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s 1999 funk-lite anthem, everywhere. There it was bleeding out of some guy’s headphones at a café, percolating softly on the radio during an early-morning Uber ride to the airport, activating collective bops via my nail salon’s reliably nostalgic playlist. In the years since its release, “Got Your Money” has, improbably, become hip-hop-as-muzak, a four-minute stretch so familiar that it can fade into nearly any public background.

The song, which features an early production credit from the Neptunes and what may be Kelis’s first recorded appearance, is exceedingly weird. Pharrell and Chad Hugo punctuate their angular bass and crisp synths with the former’s signature organic drums; the claps really clap on this one. It’s among the Neptunes’ least polished beats, but it offers a sturdy structure for Dirty’s manic charm. Across three bizarro verses, offset by some of the most memorable ad-libs the world has ever seen, Dirty plays multiple characters – an aggrieved pimp, a chest-beating lover and his typical (rightfully) paranoid self. Pharrell, inexplicably, borrows Rick James’s “sexy, sexy, sexy” whisper throughout and Kelis ties it all together with a metallic, perceptibly weary hook promising to settle an unspecified but obvious, uh, professional debt to Dirty. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine it flying in 2019, and yet, “Got Your Money” became an indelible snapshot of the turn of the millennium, with a chart record to prove it.

“Got Your Money” was unexpectedly poppy – upbeat, melodic, and legible to broad global audiences, with the easy catchiness of a Bruno Mars song. Isn’t it wild and kind of gratifying to think that it was maybe Wu-Tang’s nuttiest, least palatable member who produced its only wedding dancefloor song of note? In the mid-’90s, when I was a pint-sized Wu fan, I must have intuited that Dirty, with his “drunken monk style,” was the slightly unhinged one. More importantly, he was the coolest, free-est and the most fun to sing along to. In 1995, around the same time that sloppy Wu-Tang “W’s” began showing up all over my notebooks, Mariah Carey personally selected Dirty to join her on the official remix of “Fantasy,” a kind of progenitor of the rap-R&B hybrid that has become a staple of both genres in the decades since. There might be no “Got Your Money” without Dirty’s appearance on “Fantasy.” As Carey herself explained during a 2018 interview with Genius, “It was a struggle to be allowed to do that. They were like, ‘What is she doing?!’” But she knew: Dirty could bridge the sing-rap divide in a single bar. He kind of already had, in his warbled way, over years of gritty RZA beats.

Then in 1998, the year before “Got Your Money,” he again perfected the rap-R&B blend with a contribution to Pras and Mya’s “Ghetto Superstar.” As ever, his signature free-flowing style betrays some deep emotional well: “Well I’m paranoid at the things I said/Wonderin’ what’s the penalty from day to day.” Dirty simply shines. The performance is made all the more wild by the fact that he landed on the song through sheer, debauched coincidence. “I was in California, he thought he was in New York City… He thought my session was his session,” explained Pras in a 2016 VladTV interview, adding that he didn’t know whether Dirty was “drunk or what.” The former Fugee graciously let him hang. Dirty listened to the beat, liked it and pretty much recorded in a single take.

The recording of “Got Your Money” appears to have been slightly less outrageous. “I was so young and it was scary, because he was so seasoned... and he was so in-your-face,” Kelis explained, rather diplomatically, in a 2009 interview with Popbytes. “As artists, because we wear our feelings on our sleeves, we come off a certain way and sometimes it’s very intimidating to people. I was mortified. He was just so comfortable in his own skin, which is beautiful. But he was beyond gracious and throughout the session he was really warm and funny.”

On a 2018 episode of Noisey Radio on Beats 1, Chad Hugo offered his own memory of the Quad Studios session that produced the song: “[Dirty] had written some lyrics for ‘Got Your Money’ and he was writing the intro for the song. He was spending all his time writing and then when it was time to go he got in the booth and he said, ‘Yo baby, I wanna eat the shit out your ass.’ That was his line. But it was ingenious.”

By the time he was gearing up for his second album N---a Please in 1999, with “Got Your Money” as its lead single, it seems Dirty had found himself ready for something like a change of pace from the dense, focused style of his Wu brothers. What resulted was something absurd and utterly compelling. The album is all sex and drugs and concerns about FBI surveillance, an apt reflection, maybe, of the life he was living as an outrageous celebrity. Dirty was increasingly known for an extensive record of public controversy; consider the time he took a limo to pick up his food stamps and wound up called out by President Clinton, or the time he became the first citizen arrested under a California law prohibiting people convicted of felonies from wearing bulletproof vests.

It all collided on N---a Please. “Dirty had helped produce the beats for a couple tracks on his first album – ‘The Stomp’ and ‘Brooklyn Zoo’ – but he didn’t get involved with the production on N---a Please. He brought in people like the Neptunes and Irv Gotti to produce the rest of the album,” explained Buddha Monk, his close friend, collaborator and onetime de facto manager, in The Dirty Version, a biography co-written with Mickey Hess. “Dirty wanted to make more of a party album that people could just have fun listening to, but the album had a rock element too. The production is loud and Dirty is screaming his rhymes.” That likely explains why “Got Your Money,” as Monk himself put it, “sounded more pop than anything Dirty had done before.”

Many of his peers were staring down Y2K and cobbling together aesthetics inspired by a looming computer-future: rappers like Method Man and Busta Rhymes were making albums with themes of pestilence and apocalypse while Missy Elliott and Timbaland were imbuing their work and visuals with a distinctly futuristic sheen. But Dirty chose to look way, way back. “You could tell from the humor on N---a Please that Dirty had been listening to a lot of old Blowfly and Richard Pryor comedy tapes. He was taking it back to the ’70s, all the comedians and musicians we listened to as kids,” Monk pointed out. “He sampled an old Rudy Ray Moore routine called ‘N---a Please,’ and used footage from Moore’s blaxploitation film Dolemite in the music video for ‘Got Your Money.’ The N---a Please album cover shows Dirty decked out ’70s-style in a Donna Summer wig and a Rick James tracksuit.”

The reliance on Dolemite clips could have had something to do with the fact that Dirty spent much of 1999 behind bars, stemming from a wide range of petty charges. But the blaxploitation influence also explains the unnerving, cartoonish pimp character he embodied on “Got Your Money” and throughout the era. He was channelling some of blaxploitation’s most present and controversial throughlines: the relationships between sex workers, the men who seek to control them and the police. Depending on your perspective, films within the genre either peddled offensive racial stereotypes, or rebelled against the the politics of black respectability. Blaxploitation was the focus of much attention in the ’90s, due to both the nostalgia of Wu-Tang and the cultural transgressions of Quentin Tarantino. Both, in their own ways, had resurfaced some of the texture of blaxploitation – in Wu’s case through an overlap with kung-fu flicks and in Tarantino’s through direct references in films like Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

In 1999, I don’t think I knew what pimping was, or that it wasn’t all that different from sex trafficking. It was only years later, from the vantage point of adulthood, that I began to understand the subtext of the relationship sketched out between the genders on “Got Your Money,” and how casually it contributed to the cultural normalization of that dynamic. It began to make me uneasy, though I didn’t, and maybe still don’t, have the language to retroactively critique the problematic inspiration of a ubiquitous song I once loved. That ubiquity has been telegraphed beyond “Got Your Money;” vocal and musical samples of the song have appeared in tracks by Vic Mensa and the Chemical Brothers, and it’s been used in movies and commercials, softly stretching its reach even further.

In researching this piece, I discovered a lot more about Dirty, who died in 2004 of a suspected drug overdose, than I knew back then, even as a pretty serious fan. I learned that, whether due to drug or alcohol abuse or fallout from an undiagnosed mental illness, he may have been abusive towards his wife and family. “I called the police on him so much that they said, ‘OK, what did he do now?’,” Icelene Jones, Dirty’s wife, is quoted in The Dirty Version as saying. I don’t really know what to do with that information, besides add yet one more person to the heap of artists whose misdeeds are a something of a stain on their art, some ever-moving point between stanned and canceled.

Looking back, isn’t that what a lot of 1999 was, for a lot of us? Loving artists without knowing about their misdeeds? Loving artists despite their misdeeds? It was a different time, but no less complicated. Dirty’s own words come to mind: “Recognize I’m a fool and you love me!”