The Triumph & Tragedy of DMX
Feel the pain, feel the joy / Of a man who was never a boy
-DMX
It’s taken me a while to write this.
I started writing this a month ago when DMX died, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say, so instead I had to figure out what I didn’t want to say. And that can only be achieved by writing a lot of words and hating every last one of them, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the past, oh…three weeks.
I’ve been trying to hone my reaction skills as a writer. I’d like to be able to read breaking news, absorb it, and post a cogent and fully-formed reaction to it within 24–48 hours. Sometimes I spend so much time thinking about what I want to write that by the time I actually sit down to write it, it’s already been covered to death, which makes me feel like I’m not contributing anything new to the conversation and so I just abandon the idea. I sort of feel that way now: everyone has already written about DMX. It’s a saturated market.
I probably could have saved some time if I’d started writing this when DMX was comatose and on life support and it seemed pretty clear he wasn’t going to wake up, and even if he did it was unlikely he’d ever be a fully functioning human being again. But I wasn’t really concerned with having something ready to publish the moment he died; I know nobody comes here for breaking news, and I didn’t want to spend the time he was in that coma thinking about writing. Mostly I just wanted to do what everyone else was doing: hoping he’d miraculously get better or, failing that, hoping the end would come quickly and peacefully. An easy death was the least he deserved — he’d had a hard enough life.
So I waited. And even though everyone’s already written about DMX, I still wanted to write something. Since the moment I heard him 20-odd years ago, he’s been my favorite rapper, and he never seemed to get the respect he deserved while he was alive. It might be too late now, but then again, maybe it’s never too late to acknowledge what someone means to you.
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
-Aldous Huxley
It is a commonly-held belief that the best art comes from great pain. I don’t know if that’s entirely true, but I think it’s safe to say that good art rarely comes from a place of comfort and security. Blind Willie Johnson’s music was so profound that it influenced multiple generations of guitarists, from Robert Johnson to Eric Clapton to Jack White. But what if his stepmother hadn’t thrown lye in his face when he was a boy? What if he was just Willie Johnson, a kid who grew up in a happy, loving home? Would he have been able to tap into whatever it is that makes great artists great?
It’s an interesting question. In Willie’s case there’s no way to know, but in DMX’s case you can draw a straight line between the pain he endured as a child and the artist he would go on to become. His traumatic childhood didn’t just inform his music, it was often the subject of it:
“Stay lovin’ my peoples, even though they don’t want me”
“I would’ve traded the chance of bein’ a child with a father / For my talent of bein’ able to survive when it’s harder”
Earl Simmons’ childhood was one trauma after another: born to teenage parents and a father who wanted nothing to do with him; routinely beaten by his mother and her boyfriends throughout his childhood, including having two of his teeth knocked out with a broom when he was six years old; so starved of love as a child that he started living on the streets of Yonkers at the age of 11, sleeping in Salvation Army bins and befriending stray dogs in an effort to feel the love and acceptance he should have gotten at home; tricked into smoking crack at the age of 14 by the man he considered a mentor.
That DMX made it to the age of 18 is remarkable. That he went on to become one of the biggest hip-hop artists in history is nothing short of miraculous. But the trauma of his childhood stayed with him for the rest of his life, present in his addictions, his music, the way he interacted with the world. Nobody in hip-hop bore the scars of his trauma — past and present — as proudly and as visibly as DMX. His music ran the gamut. He could be lighthearted and wryly funny in one song, dark, violent, and frightening in the next.
That’s what made him popular, but what truly set DMX apart and made him loved by so many people was his capacity for introspection and willingness to explore his own vulnerabilities in his music. A lot of hip-hop artists rap about life’s struggles, but until DMX came along, rappers almost always treated those struggles as transient, things that they either already overcame or would soon overcome. Life was hard, but we made it, or Life is hard, but not for long because I’m gonna make it.
Nowadays, hip-hop artists speak freely about their emotions and struggles in their music, but that wasn’t always the case. DMX may not have been the first rapper to get emotional on a record, but he elevated it to another level and brought an unflinching honesty to his music that most rappers would shy away from. He was comfortable with discomfort, at ease with uncertainty. He shared the kinds of things most people would bury deep down inside themselves, and he emotionally exposed himself in a way that hadn’t really been seen before in hip-hop.
DMX came on the scene during the “Shiny Suit” era of hip-hop, a time when a lot of artists were aiming for some kind of crossover appeal that could get them airplay on MTV. Most of those attempts failed, and most of the few that succeeded did so only briefly. It seemed like every hip-hop artist was chasing that audience to some degree or another, making songs for “the ladies,” wearing platinum chains and tailored suits, rolling up to the club in a Bentley, poppin’ bottles of Cristal.
But not DMX.
While Puff Daddy was making short film music videos, DMX was filming sweaty, frenzied shows at The Tunnel, wearing a choke chain and Timberlands. The difference was stark: Puffy was in the club. DMX was in the parking lot waiting to rob people as they came out.
Rob and I steal – not cuz I want to, cuz I have to
And don't make me, show you, what the Mac do
If you don't know by now, then you slippin'
I'm on some bullshit that's got me jackin' niggas, flippin'
Let my man and them stay pretty, but I'ma stay shitty
Cruddy: it's all for the money, is you wit' me?
DMX wasn’t alone in rejecting the excesses of the late ‘90s; there’s never a shortage of rappers who keep it real for the streets, kid. But usually, when a rapper talks about dealing drugs or robbing people, it sounds like a résumé: I sold this much crack and robbed this many people, so when I say I’m from the streets you know it’s the truth. It almost feels focus-grouped, aimed at striking that perfect balance between street credibility and commercial appeal. DMX found that balance, but what was really remarkable was that he did it without even trying. When he rapped not just about the violence, but the inner turmoil that comes with it, you believed he was speaking from experience, and if you were a stickup kid, you knew he understood you. He didn’t try to tell the streets what he thought they wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear:
People that are really living, that are suffering, that are really going through it, they want to hear it because that might stop them from popping you in the head, stealing your bag.
Just the fact that someone feels their pain [is why they listen to me]. I share with them and I soak it up and spit right back. Here’s your problem magnified, and now you no longer feel alienated for having that problem. Your problem has become the world’s problem.
There was no posturing with DMX, no public image. He was himself at all times. And who he was was fucking magnetic.
I don’t know when exactly I started listening to hip-hop. I do remember that I had a tape of MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em, and one of the first CDs I owned was Homebase by DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince. At that point, I liked hip-hop, but I didn’t fall in love with hip-hop until I heard DMX on Ma$e’s “24 Hours To Live.” At that point, my parents only let me listen to the clean versions of rap albums, so the fact that an edited DMX verse was enough to catch my attention is saying something.
Obviously, 11-year-old Ryan wasn’t sitting in his bedroom in Marshfield, Massachusetts, listening to an edited copy of Harlem World and going “Now THAT’s that street shit.” DMX resonated with me because I’d never heard a rapper display that kind of raw emotion before.
His flow and rhyme patterns were unique, almost erratic: some lines were staccato, like there was an exclamation point every other word. Other lines seemed like they had way too many words to fit cleanly into a single bar, but somehow he always made it work. His verses always had a rawness to them, a lack of polish or artifice. It was high-energy, but not in the way that Onyx or M.O.P. are high-energy (i.e., yelling) — it sounded more urgent than loud, which is a rarity in hip-hop. Most artists try to sound relaxed or languid, like the lyrics are just effortlessly sliding out, every syllable in place.
When you listen to Jay-Z or Biggie or Big Daddy Kane or Rakim or Big L, every line is delivered in the same way, no matter whether the lyrics are sad, angry, menacing, or introspective. DMX let the lyrics guide his delivery: if he was being intimidating; if he was mournful; if he was being smooth; if he was panicked, on the run from the ATF; you heard it in his voice. His music felt more engaging and vibrant — I didn’t feel like I was listening to him tell me a story, I felt like I was in the story. And the moment I heard his verse on “24 Hours to Live,” DMX became my favorite rapper.
By the time “Ruff Ryders Anthem” was released, I was deep into hip-hop. I remember hearing it on the radio, putting a blank cassette in, waiting until they played it again and recording it. I listened to that tape constantly; I even wrote down the lyrics line by line so I could rap along. Not long after, my parents went out of town and my grandparents watched me and my brother, and our grandmother took me and my brother to a CD store (shout out to Strawberries). I convinced her that I was totally allowed to listen to explicit albums and picked up DMX’s debut It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, and that was it. I was hooked.
That Christmas, my other grandmother got me Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (the explicit version, much to my parents’ dismay); the sight of DMX in a bathtub full of blood probably put a damper on the Christmas spirit. The next Christmas, my parents gave in and got me the explicit version of …And Then There Was X though they tried to balance it out with Will Smith’s “Willennium.” (It didn’t work, although “Willennium” is a pretty good album.) That’s probably around the time I picked up a cheap silver Ruff Ryders pendant at the mall and started wearing it to school. I was all-in, man. I had a pair of red Timberlands; I bought all the Ruff Ryders compilation albums. I even bought a copy of Drag-On’s Opposite of H2O when it came out. Was it a good album? No. Did that stop me from wearing it out anyway, listening to the two songs DMX featured on over and over? Also no.
I think I was drawn to DMX because his music was the first time I connected and engaged with something in black culture entirely on my own. Nobody introduced me to DMX, not my dad or my cousins or whoever; I found him myself. I loved DMX because I loved DMX.
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot sold almost 5 million copies; after that kind of success, most rappers would disappear for a few years and resurface with a slickly-produced sophomore effort about living the good life, or pretend that success hadn’t changed them. Not DMX: Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood was released in December of the same year, making him the only living rap artist to release two multi-platinum albums in a single year. (He eventually went on to become the first rapper to have his first five albums debut at #1). But the success of It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot didn’t change DMX’s approach to his music. On the contrary, it was as if he’d never succeeded in the first place.
Even after his career stalled in the mid-2000s and he became known more for his brushes with the law than for his music, and even during those long stretches when he didn’t release any new music and I expanded my horizons and listened to new artists, nobody could replace DMX as my favorite artist. By the mid-2010s, it was clear that he’d lost his fastball a little bit, but it didn’t matter. I still loved DMX.
Eventually I came to accept that DMX wasn’t the same artist as the one who made me fall in love with hip-hop, but I was okay with that — there was more substance in his first three albums than most artists have in their entire careers. And around that time, I started paying more attention to DMX as a person, and it only made me like him more. He was honest, charming, and funny as hell:
He was just a charismatic, likeable guy, which is rare for hip-hop artists and especially rare for older artists. As they get older, a lot of hip-hop artists fall into the trap of complaining about the current state of hip-hop, which usually just gives the impression that they’re clinging to the past, trying to preserve that moment in time when they were on top. But DMX didn’t care about that; hell, he didn’t care about it when he was on top.
DMX was never going to assume the “elder statesman of hip-hop” role the way Jay-Z has. DMX didn’t rap to get rich or to get out of the hood. Hip-hop wasn’t a career path for him, it was an outlet for all the pain he’d endured. It was a way to feel the love that had been so cruelly withheld from him as a child. So even when he no longer had that magic from his first four albums, I didn’t forget about him. In a way, I was relieved that he didn’t have that fire in his belly anymore, because maybe that meant he had finally overcome the pain and tragedy that defined so much of his life. Maybe he’d finally surfaced from the depths of his pain. Or, at the very least, maybe he’d learned how to control his pain before it destroyed him. Any of those would have been good enough for me. But you can never really escape your past.
In 2016, DMX collapsed in a Ramada Inn in Yonkers and was revived with Narcan, although he attributed it to an asthma attack. He went to rehab in 2017, then was jailed for tax evasion until 2019; when he was released, he went back to rehab. But then he re-emerged, and for a while it seemed like he was going to be okay. He led a prayer at Kanye West’s Sunday Service; he did a feature interview with GQ; he did a lot of Instagram videos where he shared life lessons and talked about (among other things) gardening:
I was happy for him. A part of me hoped that the new DMX would resonate with present-day Ryan the way 26-year-old DMX resonated with teenage Ryan, and even if he didn’t, it would have been enough just to see him grow old and truly enjoy life without his demons pulling him back. But it didn’t happen, and now he’s gone. Maybe it was always going to end like this.
On his first album, DMX asked:
Think back 26 years, like “What if his birth was a miscarriage?” And I never existed?
Have I given something that, if taken away, you’d have missed it?
I don’t know how my life would be different without DMX’s music, but I know it would be missing something. Earl Simmons may be gone, but DMX will live forever.
Rest in peace.