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However, as DMX said in an interview in 2020: “Everything in my life is blessed with a curse.” Though Ready Ron gave him a leg up into music, he also introduced him to hard drugs when he gave him a blunt (a joint made with tobacco leaves) laced with crack cocaine. His early mentor was a rapper called Ready Ron. He took the name DMX from the Oberheim DMX digital drum machine, though it was sometimes considered an abbreviation of Dark Man X. He worked as a DJ and human beatbox, then began to develop his own rapping style. He spent periods in juvenile detention and youth group homes, but in between found a refuge in hip-hop and rap. He developed a fondness for adopting stray dogs, and dogs would become a regular motif in his work (“Where my dogs at?” became a familiar DMX catchphrase, and he was sometimes known as Dog Man X). Subsequently he occupied much of his time wandering the streets, drifting into robbery and petty crime. After being ejected from school, he spent 18 months in the Julia Dyckman Andrus home for vulnerable children. Earl suffered abuse from his mother and her boyfriends, his mother once knocking some of his teeth out with a broom handle. His father, Joe Barker, wanted nothing to do with Earl, and his mother, Arnett Simmons, moved Earl and his older sister, Bonita, to the School Streets projects in Yonkers, New York. He was born Earl Simmons in a housing project in Baltimore, Maryland. The previous year, Jay-Z boycotted the Grammy awards ceremony when DMX failed to win any nominations. “Rappers deserve more attention from the Grammy committee and from the whole world.”ĭMX with his award for male entertainer of the year at the Soul Train Music awards, 2000. This omission prompted the rap superstar Jay-Z (who would win the best rap album Grammy that year) to boycott the awards ceremony “because too many major rap artists continue to be overlooked”, as he put it. He was suddenly the new king of Planet Rap, yet when the 1999 Grammy award nominations came around he was nowhere to be seen. He announced himself with his multi-platinum-selling debut album It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998), a stormy survey of greed, violence, crime and betrayal, which also displayed his gift for blending light and heavy textures behind an intense, menacing presence at the microphone.īefore the end of that year DMX had released his second blockbuster, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, another huge seller. The first rapper to have his first five albums go straight to the top of the US chart, DMX, who has died aged 50 following a heart attack, established himself as the premier exponent of hardcore rap in the aftermath of the violent deaths of the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur.