He developed a fondness for adopting stray dogs, and dogs would become a regular motif in his work (“Where my dogs at?” became a familiar DMX catchphrase, and he was sometimes known as Dog Man X). Subsequently he occupied much of his time wandering the streets, drifting into robbery and petty crime. After being ejected from school, he spent 18 months in the Julia Dyckman Andrus home for vulnerable children. Earl suffered abuse from his mother and her boyfriends, his mother once knocking some of his teeth out with a broom handle. His father, Joe Barker, wanted nothing to do with Earl, and his mother, Arnett Simmons, moved Earl and his older sister, Bonita, to the School Streets projects in Yonkers, New York. He was born Earl Simmons in a housing project in Baltimore, Maryland. The previous year, Jay-Z boycotted the Grammy awards ceremony when DMX failed to win any nominations. People in the hood.”ĭMX with his award for male entertainer of the year at the Soul Train Music awards, 2000. “I’d rather make music for people that I come in contact with, people that I can count on. “I’m not going to make for the mainstream,” he told GQ in 2019. The son of a broken home who lived on the streets for much of his youth, DMX spent so much time in jails and courtrooms, because of innumerable arrests for drugs, firearms, robberies, tax evasion and more, that it is remarkable he was able to find the time to make records and appear in films and TV. Grammy recognition never came DMX’s way, probably because he embodied the edgy and lawless life depicted in his work, even if he did protest that he was a Bible-reading Christian.
“Rappers deserve more attention from the Grammy committee and from the whole world.” This omission prompted the rap superstar Jay-Z (who would win the best rap album Grammy that year) to boycott the awards ceremony “because too many major rap artists continue to be overlooked”, as he put it. He was suddenly the new king of Planet Rap, yet when the 1999 Grammy award nominations came around he was nowhere to be seen. He announced himself with his multi-platinum-selling debut album It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998), a stormy survey of greed, violence, crime and betrayal, which also displayed his gift for blending light and heavy textures behind an intense, menacing presence at the microphone.īefore the end of that year DMX had released his second blockbuster, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, another huge seller. The first rapper to have his first five albums go straight to the top of the US chart, DMX, who has died aged 50 following a heart attack, established himself as the premier exponent of hardcore rap in the aftermath of the violent deaths of the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur.
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