Master P and Snoop Dogg’s albums seemed to point to No Limit as the next Death Row or Bad Boy. 1998 saw the release of Money, Power & Respect, Vol 2… Hard Knock Life, Capital Punishment, 400 Degreez The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, Charge It 2 da Game, Confessions of Fire, and Aquemini. X was arguably the biggest thing in rap at the time, and it’s hard to overstate what it means that he was even in the running for the title. The crowd, to my ears, is noticeably more impressed. He finishes with a brutal image-“a straight razor will put pinstripes across your windpipe”-and brings a joint to his lips without taking a breath. His body bounces and his head snaps-not always on the same page as his shoulders. When he finishes, we hear sounds of approval from a group of opening acts and hangers-on. The whole verse is built off the bemused, silky flow he would ride to a billion dollars. This was Jay when he still wore jerseys and du-rags and spat black mafioso rap (“feds still tryna build a case since ’93”). In Backstage, the documentary about the 1999 Hard Knock Life Tour that DMX and Jay-Z headlined, a cypher breaks out in one of the green rooms. You can’t have a man gunning for the title of King of New York and Best Rapper Alive in a group with someone who doesn’t even seem to recognize the legitimacy of the throne. It fell apart almost immediately, and it’s easy to see why. Irv Gotti, then an A&R rep at Def Jam, tried to capitalize off the stunning early success of Ja Rule, Jay-Z and DMX by forming a supergroup called Murder Inc.
He didn’t ride beats so much as drive them, and when they didn’t suit him he rolled right over them. If he wasn’t your favorite rapper then he was better than your favorite. The beat makes you suspend disbelief the voice makes you believe. A great rapper isn’t just a good poet, but a good actor. I find myself shouting, apropos of nothing, “they catch feelings, I catch bodies ” or “ya nigga in my DMs and he writing love letters ” as though I’m not the one who catches feelings and writes letters. If a rapper has real charisma they’ll have you repeating the lies and undermining your own station in life.
I don’t think anybody should have a garage that big, but it sounds good. To hear them tell it they’re all killers, dons, money long, pushing something foreign they’re going to put up in a twelve-car garage. That kind of thing is hard to pull off in a genre built on presenting fiction as fact. It could be vicious, it could be wounded, but it was never false. He barks after those closing lines, and somehow the bark, which showed up a lot, never felt like a gimmick. DMX’s music was intoxicating and horrifying. DMX closes out his song “Look Thru My Eyes” with the words “Feel the pain, feel the joy / Of a man, who was never a boy.” This, in two lines, is his entire career, as well as his autobiography.