DMX the kind of influence who is too often overlooked
Although his lyrics have influenced millions of lives, the work of rappers like DMX is often excluded from important conversations about spirituality and poetry.
DMX, whose real name was Earl Simmons, 50, died Friday after being on life support for several days.
In his music, DMX talked about his struggles with drug addiction, his family, his friendships, his enemies, his relationships and one night stands; he prayed to God and talked to Satan. He growled and barked in catchy rhythms over melodies that sometimes made me want to dance and sometimes scared me and made me turn off his music as fast as I could on my CD player.
I remember hearing DMX’s music on every station in the late 1990s when I was in high school. Sometimes other students and I would listen to his music on a small boombox in the “Black section” of the Hopkins School student lounge, a small corner where we kept our books, studied, talked and laughed together.
This was the only place that DMX seemed to be welcome at the school. Although we discussed poetry in my English classes, I regret that rappers like DMX were not included in those conversations. Poetry is “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. DMX’s lyrics did all of those things.
I’m sure that I would have been more enthusiastic about my classes if we studied more rappers and other Black people and topics that felt more relevant. Instead, most of the books we studied centered around whiteness and historic topics, while DMX rapped about topics that were happening right down the street from Hopkins.
I had no idea then that I would grow up to be a writer, but it was rappers like DMX that would give me the courage and the skills to tell the stories that I do now — not necessarily what I learned on that hill in Westville.
As a 10th and 11th grader, I remember listening to DMX on the car rides to and from school and rushing home to watch BET, MTV, and listen to Hot 97, a New York City-based radio station that played rap, hip-hop and R&B. I was so devoted to tuning in and getting that musical education that I wasn’t getting during the school days that I would keep letting the songs play through static that
I’m sure would have made someone else just give up and turn to another station.
On Saturday afternoons, before joining an organization called City Kids, where we got to produce our own songs and write our own lyrics, I was at Christian Tabernacle Baptist Church for choir rehearsal. On Sundays, I was there for church service. DMX wasn’t welcome at church, either, more than likely because the curse words he used in his lyrics offended the ears of our parents and grandparents.
But what the elders in the church may not have realized was that their children and grandchildren were listening to DMX in their rooms and having the same spiritual anxiety that DMX rapped about. We pretended we were wholesome on Sunday mornings with our fresh hairdos and ironed clothes, but after church we battled our own demons alone with DMX songs playing in the background because he seemed to be the only one who understood what we were feeling.
There were times I was scared to listen to DMX because I was brainwashed to believe that talking about Satan would send me straight to hell, but when I got older, I listened more and understood that I felt some of the same things he felt. I understood him more. I appreciated him more. The way that people received DMX with open arms made me realize that others appreciate when we share our struggles.
I am grateful for DMX, his life and his transparency about the pain he experienced. I am grateful for the lessons he taught me about tenacity, creating art to express the negative feelings that society tells us we’re supposed to suppress. I am grateful that he made it acceptable for writers of my generation to write about the things that have hurt us the most.
I am grateful for the lessons he taught me about tenacity, creating art to express the negative feelings that society tells us we’re supposed to suppress.