Burned CDs On a Black Boom Box: On DMX’s Passing
The first time I heard DMX’s growling, raspy bark was in the backyard of my childhood home, sitting on the back porch.
A friend of my older brother, 2 years and light years in musical tastes ahead of me, had just slipped a burned CD into the well-worn Sony that my parents had splurged back in 1996. He had pushed down the top, the spring-loaded mouth of the boom box opening up with a mischievous grin, practically begging us to feed it some explicit lyrics.
He slid in the CD. The meticulously written letters that he had Sharpie’d onto the glistening CD had 3 letters on them.
DMX.
We treated those pirated CDs like they were a SoundCloud rapper’s face, slapping ill-advised designs all over at every chance we got.
Everyone in our crew knew that one moderately rich friend whose parents had dropped a bag of cash off at Circuit City and upgraded their PC to one that could burn CDs and as soon as one person bought the latest LP, everyone rushed over with their Verbatims and their black, permanent markers to anoint the latest bars with 8th grade, gratuitous, prison-tat art and we would listen to these CDs until late into the night (*Author’s note: at age 12, that meant, like, 12:05 AM.)
That’s when I heard Party Up.
It was like feeling the G-force of a rocket launch. It was momentum.
I was behind the wheel of an exotic convertible, weaving through traffic at 118-MPH.
I was sky-diving, but instead of clouds, I was passing through cocaine clouds.
I felt all of these things, my Tween pulse hammering right along to the thundering sounds of DMX, and it was utterly captivating.
It wasn’t just what he said, delightfully vulgar and wild and voice dripping with a kind of magmatic anger, but it was how he said it: when DMX would rap, it was like he just punched the headliner in the face, stole the microphone and decided to tell you he just whooped your ass.
My mother, suffice it to say, was horrified.
But, back then, the friend with the good (*read: unedited) rap CDs was like the plug. You’d sneak them over, hide DMX or Outkast or Public Enemy in a Jock Jams 2 case or tuck them way at the back of the voluminous trapper keeper that was jammed full of burned CDs and hope that your parents didn’t go thumbing through.
Today, DMX passed away.
He died after an overdose, mere days after I had just discussed with my 8-year-old why there were so many bleeps and barking sounds in the radio version of Party Up.
And DMX did what DMX did so well.
He grabbed that microphone again; grabbed us. Hauled our attention towards him like the gravitational pull of a small planet.
For a man whose songs were never at rest. The rocket fuel MC who was always in the midst of another launch to escape Earth’s atmosphere, all I can hope for is this, may he find the opposite of those songs: peace.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play Ruff Ryder’s Anthem for my son. The edited version. And we’re going to laugh at how 30 seconds of the song is missing because it had so many bad words.
