The chart-topping rapper who battled demons in his lyrics and life

DMX 1970–2021

For a hard-core rapper who punctuated his verses with literal growls and barks, DMX could be startlingly introspective about his demons. A dominant figure in hip-hop for more than a decade, he exploded onto the scene with his 1998 debut It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, a gritty tableau of violence, hedonism, crime, and betrayal. DMX’s lyrics (“I’m just robbin’ to eat / And there’s at least a thousand of us like me mobbin’ the street”) weren’t gangsta fantasies: Brutally abused as a child, he turned to street crime and spent much of his youth in group homes and juvenile detention facilities. The effects of that childhood trauma could be heard in even his most braggadocious songs: “All I know is pain / All I feel is rain,” DMX raps on “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem.” That inner turmoil made the rapper a star—he became the first musician whose first five albums hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart—but exacted a steep cost. His career was derailed by addiction and legal troubles; he died at age 50 last week after suffering a heart attack.

He was born Earl Simmons and grew up in housing projects in Yonkers, N.Y., said The Washington Post. “Raised by a single mother who once knocked out two of his teeth with a broom,” Simmons was institutionalized from ages 7 to 14 “and said he was arrested for the first time when he was 10, for arson.” He became a skilled car thief and stick-up artist, using adopted stray dogs to intimidate robbery victims. Taking the name DMX from a 1980s drum machine, he learned to rap from a man who tricked him into smoking crack at age 14 by passing him a laced joint. “Why would you do that to a child?” DMX said last year. “A monster was born.” He bounced around the edges of the rap world until 1997, when executives from Def Jam Recordings visited Yonkers “and let DMX freestyle for them,” said Rolling Stone. He performed “with his jaw wired shut, the result of a fight,” and was signed soon after. “DMX was an immediate titanic presence in hiphop,” said The New York Times. The genre was becoming increasingly polished, but he rapped “with a muscular throatiness that conveyed an excitable kind of mayhem.” At the peak of his fame, he crossed over into movies, starring in the action flicks Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds. But “trouble kept following the artist around,” said TheGuardian.com. He was charged with drug and weapons possession, animal cruelty, aggravated assault, and other offenses. Believed to be the father of 15 children, DMX owed $1.3 million in child-support payments in 2013 and was sentenced to a year in prison in 2017 for tax evasion. He sought redemption in Christianity, pausing concerts throughout his career to deliver a prayer with mesmerizing fervor. “I’m so emotionally overwhelmed [after shows], I just break down,” DMX said in 2019. “I praise Him. And I’m like, ‘Who am I to deserve this?’”