Skip to main content

DMX VibeZ

Nobody in rap sounded like DMX, and nobody has since. Twenty-four tracks of a man who made pain audible and never once flinched from it.

Rest in power

Earl Simmons, from Yonkers, New York, arrived in 1998 and did something that had not happened before and has not happened since: his first two albums, It's Dark and Hell Is Hot and Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, both entered the Billboard chart at number one in the same calendar year. He went on to have five consecutive number one albums.

The appeal was never technical. DMX was not a lyricist in the Rakim or Nas tradition — his gift was conviction. The bark, the growl, the prayers he put at the end of albums, the way he could move from a party record to something close to a confession within a single track sequence. He rapped about addiction, abuse, loyalty and God with an openness that was almost unbearable at times, and audiences responded because none of it sounded performed.

He died in April 2021. The response — from rappers, from pastors, from people who had never bought a rap record — made clear that he had occupied a place in the culture that had nothing to do with chart positions.

What to listen for

"Slippin'" is the essential track: an unsparing account of his own life that remains one of the most honest records in the genre's history. Play it next to "Party Up," which is pure adrenaline, to understand the range he lived between.

"Ruff Ryders' Anthem" and "What's My Name" are the Swizz Beatz productions that defined a sound — sparse, jarring, built for arenas.

"Who We Be" is the most ambitious thing he made, a torrent of nouns that adds up to a life. The Prayer tracks are exactly what they sound like and belong on the playlist for good reason.

"Money, Power & Respect" with The LOX and Lil' Kim, "Top Shotter" with Sean Paul and Mr. Vegas, and "I Miss You" with Faith Evans show how well he worked alongside other voices.

Go deeper

It's Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998) is the album, start to finish. The Ruff Ryders compilations fill in the crew that came up with him — The LOX, Eve, Swizz Beatz.

His 2020 Verzuz appearance opposite Snoop Dogg is worth watching; it turned into something closer to a testimony than a competition, and it is the last great public document of who he was.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more