Page 27 - Florida Sentinel 4-16-21

Entertainment
DMX Leaves A Legacy Of Passion, Unparalleled Success, And Pain
Onlookers remember the sound of metal breaking, but on a night in Yonkers, New York, in 1997, it was more the sound of decades of abuse, neglect, and struggle combust- ing.
It was the peak of rap’s shiny-suit era, when Puff Daddy and Bad Boy’s brand of glossy hip-hop ruled the charts. Rival labels sought to keep pace by pumping out smooth, transparently com- mercial crossover attempts that all failed to match Bad Boy’s success. At Def Jam, which had hit a down period by the mid-’90s, a young hotshot A&R named Irv Gotti was try- ing to convince his bosses, Lyor Cohen and Kevin Liles, that they needed to move in the opposite direction. Gotti thought hip-hop needed to go back to the streets, and he had just the artist to take it there: DMX—short for “Dark Man X”—a rapper who had been through the industry wringer once already but was finding new life through mix- tape freestyles. There was one problem with Gotti’s plan, however. X had just had his jaw broken in a fight, a conse- quence of his main means of making money at the time:
stickups. With X’s jaw wired shut, Gotti wanted to wait a few weeks before showing off the rapper, but X said it didn’t matter—he’d trained himself to rap through the wires. The next day, Gotti brought the label heads to Powerhouse Studios. In his 2002 autobiography, E.A.R.L., DMX likened his en- trance into the studio that day to the parting of the Red Sea: All the neighborhood rappers and hangers-on who had as- sembled moved out of the way when he arrived. “They knew what was about to go down,” he said. With Cohen and Liles watching, X stepped into the booth and unleashed verse after verse with the ferocity that would come to define him. “I started sweating,” he re- called. “I could feel the wires in my mouth pulling, straining to keep my jaws together.” Ja Rule, who was in attendance, put it more succinctly in a 2014 interview with Vlad TV: “The sh*t about to pop and break.” But X kept rhyming; he said he could’ve gone forever had Cohen not jumped up and shouted, “That’s it! He’s the man! DMX is the man!” Gotti’s gambit had paid off. The next year, Def Jam would release DMX’s classic debut,
DMX
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, and from then on, hip-hop would look and sound totally differ- ent.
The story is the stuff of music-industry legend. But it would be borderline unbeliev- able if it didn’t star DMX, who died Friday at age 50, nearly a week after reportedly suffering multiple heart attacks follow- ing an apparent drug overdose. Throughout his nearly three- decade career, DMX came to embody passion, rawness, and pure emotional honesty like
few hip-hop artists ever have, barking his way through hits like “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” and “Get at Me Dog” one mo- ment, and repenting and phi- losophizing on tracks like “Slippin” the next. His was a decidedly anti-commercial ap- proach, but it worked, and it made him the genre’s first new superstar in the wake of the killings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. To this day, few have been able to reach the heights he did—he’s the only rapper to have his first five studio albums debut at no. 1, and he was the first living hip-hop artist to have two proj- ects go platinum in the same year.
But amid the triumphs— which also included starring roles in movies like Belly and Romeo Must Die, a lucrative record company and lifestyle brand in Ruff Ryders, and more than 15 million albums sold in the U. S. alone—DMX will be known as the rapper who saved Def Jam, stated Russell Simmons.
Earl Simmons was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on December 18, 1970, the son of parents barely out of high school. His father, Joe Barker, didn’t want Earl’s
mother, Arnett Simmons, to keep the pregnancy, and cut off almost all contact with the family after Earl’s birth. He was raised alongside his five sisters in Yonkers, a city di- rectly north of the Bronx that maintained policies that segre- gated its public schools and housing well into the 1980s.
As a young child, Earl suf- fered from severe asthma at- tacks that required frequent hospital stays, some as long as a week. He also said he was abused often as a child: He told GQ in 2019 that his mother beat him so badly that he lost teeth, and in the 2020 BET do- cuseries Ruff Ryders: Chroni- cles, he recalled one summer when he was only allowed to leave his room to use the bath- room.
After Earl was kicked out of school in the fifth grade for behavioral issues, his mother took him to a boarding school for what he thought was a sim- ple interview. He ended up staying there for 18 months.
“Right then and there, I learned to just put away, con- ceal, bury, whatever, whatever bothered me and store it,” he said in Chronicles. “I think an- other side of me was born right there.”
Swizz Beatz Pays Tribute To DMX
The hip-hop community is mourning the loss of DMX.
The rap icon passed away on Friday, a week after suffering a heart attack. He was 50 years old. In the wake of his death, X’s fans and friends have taken to social media to pay their re- spects to the Yonkers-bred rapper, born Earl Simmons.
One of his closest friends and fellow Ruff Ryder, Swizz Beatz, was overcome with emotion as he honored the man who “changed [his] life.”
“I’m truly beyond devastated !!!!!! But I’m so happy my brother is no longer in pain,” said Swizz. “I watched him take everyone’s pain and make
SWIZZ BEATZ AND DMX
it his own I send my love and support to his entire family.”
He also vowed to carry on his legacy. “My brother we will never let them forget your
name and you will live forever F.A.M.E Long live King DMX THE GREAT AKA my brother 4 Life Earl Simmons Damn Dog.”
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