Beginning in the mid-2000s, he began to fade from the charts. In a devastating interview last year, he explained that the person who first encouraged him to rap was also the one who first exposed him to crack, forever intertwining the art that was his salvation with the addiction that constantly threatened to undo him.ĭMX’s life became a tug of war between his musical gift and his traumas. Many of the stories contained in his 2002 book, “E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX,” are matter of fact and harrowing. He took to crime young, specializing in robbery. Physically abused by his mother as a child, he spent significant stretches of time in group homes. He rescued stray dogs, and tattooed a tribute to one of his dogs, Boomer, across the whole of his back, but also pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges.īut he remained a subject of sympathy: DMX was a wild man, and a broken one, too.
#X gon give it to ya gif license#
That’s partly because the tumult of his personal life constantly landed him in the spotlight - he was arrested dozens of times, for charges including drug possession, aggravated assault, driving without a license and tax evasion. They put me in a situation forcing me to be a man When I was just learning to stand without a helping hand, damn Was it my fault, something I did To make a father leave his first kid? At 7 doing my first bidĮven though DMX’s time at the top of the genre was relatively brief, just a few ferocious years, he was never erased from its collective memory. Even when he dipped into flirtation, like on “What These Bitches Want,” he didn’t change his approach.īut when he took on his own troubled past on “Slippin’,” he tempered himself just a bit, as if showing himself some grace: His voice was unrelentingly coarse, and in his peak era, between 19, he used it for one chest-puffed anthem after another: “Party Up (Up in Here),” “What’s My Name?,” “Who We Be,” “X Gon’ Give It to Ya,” “Where the Hood At?” Often, he rapped as if he were trying to win an argument, with repetitive emphasis and terse phrasing designed for maximum impact. The staccato bursts on “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” - an early Swizz Beatz masterpiece - matched DMX’s jabs of melancholy: “All I know is pain/All I feel is rain.” Just as the genre was moving toward polished sheen, he preferred iron and concrete - rapping with a muscular throatiness that conveyed an excitable kind of mayhem. Even at his rowdiest and most celebrated, he was a vessel for profound pain.įrom the release of his debut Def Jam single, “Get at Me Dog,” in 1998, DMX was an immediate titanic presence in hip-hop. His successes felt more like catharsis than triumphalism. For DMX - who died Friday at 50 after suffering a heart attack on April 2 - hip-hop superstardom came on the heels of a devastating childhood marked by abuse, drug use, crime and other traumas.
In his songs, he growled like a dog, credibly and often.Īnd yet there were no DMX clones in his wake because there was no way to falsify the life that forged him. He starred in “Belly,” the seminal 1998 hip-hop noir film. He performed at Woodstock ’99 for hundreds of thousands of people. 1 on the Billboard album chart and has been certified platinum several times over. In 19, he released three majestic, bombastic albums: “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot,” “Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood” and “… And Then There Was X.” Each one debuted at No. Even when DMX was the most popular rapper on the planet, he was a genre of one: a gruff, motivational, agitated and poignant fire-starter.