Lyrics on It’s Dark and Hell is Hot made many listeners squirm, especially the ghastly “X-Is Coming,” in which he adapts Freddie Krueger’s nursery rhyme from A Nightmare On Elm Street. “Ruff Ryders have a huge influence on what G-Unit, Diplomats, Roc-A-Fella did and how they wanted to show their environments from their eyes it allowed them to speak their truth.”Īs DMX was shifting the genre’s aesthetic priorities, he was also bending conventions of form and subgenre. “DMX is one of the forefathers to allow people to be honest and unapologetic,” Lowkey says. A new golden era of New York hip-hop would be marked first by DMX’s own Ruff Ryders’ crew-which included Eve, Jadakiss, and a young producer named Swizz Beatz (more on him later)-as well as 50 Cent’s G-Unit and Cam’ron’s Diplomats. It’s Dark and Hell is Hot would set a template for a new crop of hungry New York crews to embrace epic streetwise narrative storytelling. But the album wasn’t solely expulsions of rage: he showed his versatility in flow and content in songs like “Look Through My Eyes,” a wrenching ballad plumbing his past, and “Prayer,” an a capella sermon delving into his relationship with God. DMX’s battle rapping prowess was readily apparent on confrontational anthems like “F-in’ wit’ D,” and he animated his years of trauma-childhood abuse, homelessness, frequent trips to the hospital due to his asthma and stints in jail-with a mesmerizing fury. The rest of It’s Dark and Hell is Hot solidified his transformative nature. Then here comes this crazy energetic figure from Yonkers with the Timbs and the bandanas, running around with pitbulls, giving a perspective on the streets that a lot of people weren’t familiar with and taking command of what hip-hop didn’t look like.” “Puff was controlling the clubs you were watching Bad Boy Records pop bottles, wear Rolexes, Jesus pieces, Coogi sweaters. “It was a complete 180,” Lowkey, a radio show host on Apple Music, tells TIME. “Let’s take it back to the streets, motherf-ers!,” DMX shouts raspily at the beginning of the video, as if he already understood the sea change that was about to happen. DMX, bare chested, scowls and barks into the camera, which captures the scene through a stark gray-white thermal camera lens you can practically feel the sweat of the raucous, packed-in crowd. For “Get At Me Dog,” Williams filmed DMX in a grimy live performance at the famed Manhattan hip-hop club The Tunnel.
And when the label began planning his debut album rollout, they hooked up him with Hype Williams, the music video director who had presided over perhaps the pinnacle of the “shiny suit” era: Mase’s “Feel So Good” video.īut rather than fold DMX into that aesthetic, the pair went in the opposite direction. DMX kicked around the underground and battle rap circuits for several years before signing with Def Jam. When he was hospitalized, the Ruff Ryders, his hip-hop collective, gathered in person outside the hospital, and countless artists and cultural figures paid their respects on social media.Īt that time, Puff Daddy himself had no interest in signing DMX: “His voice is too rough, he’s not marketable,” DMX later recalled Puff Daddy saying.
A week after he suffered from a heart attack earlier this month, DMX died in a White Plains hospital. Over the next two decades, DMX would produce towering hits like “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” and “Party Up” while also running into legal troubles and substance abuse issues and spending several stints in prison. It would have been nearly impossible for anyone to sustain such meteoric highs. (Future would replicate the feat in 2017.) By abrasively challenging the slickness of rap’s assimilation into the mainstream, DMX had unwittingly become one of the biggest rappers in the world. Just seven months later, DMX would return with Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, which made him the only living rapper to top the Billboard album charts twice in the same year. “That was the year DMX took over the world,” Nas reminisced in 2013 about the rapper, who died on April 9 at 50.
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