DMX Made Hip-Hop Feel Invincible Again
At the height of the shiny suit era, the original Ruff Ryder conquered hip-hop with raw intensity
DMX was the rapper who made us feel invincible again.
The experience of cranking a DMX track is exhilaratingly visceral. The gravelly rawness of his voice reverberates through your spine. The staccato cadence of his machine gun delivery rattles your bones. The live wire energy of his vocal presence ignites your nervous system like an adrenaline shot, whether he’s barking out threats, plumbing the darkest depths of this soul, or commanding the club the “stop, drop, shutdown ’em down, opening up shop.”
Within the four-minute confines of a song, DMX is an indestructible force laying waste to every obstacle, competitor, or inner demon in his path. And we’re right there with him.
While DMX’s music was one of the definitive sounds of hip-hop’s post-Golden Age transitional period of the late ’90s and early 2000s, the feeling he gave us was a throwback to an earlier time - a simpler one. Despite the dark savagery of many of his lyrics, the feeling he harkened back to came from a time of innocence. It’s the feeling we got when LL Cool J sliced through the guitar stabs of “Rock the Bells” proclaiming his intention to “battle anybody, I don’t care who…
