In this era fraught with turmoil, with unemployment on the rise and Birthers and Teabaggers breathing down our collective neck, sometimes silence screams louder than any botox-afflicted VH1 reality star. The absence of a strong moral compass is more indicative of the collapse of Western society than any ensuing degradation.
Earl Simmons, the Dark Man X. No public figure so encapsulated the late ’90s/early aughts era. No other poet had the singularity of vision to tell it like it was. Now he’s gone, and we’re all poorer for it.
In “Party Up (Up In Here),” an uncompromising jeremiad and his magnum opus, the Dog/Dark Man echoes the sentiments of one Conan the Barbarian, that there is no greater pleasure in life than to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of their women. For Mr. Simmons, there is no truth but that which is carved out of obsidian by bare fists, no solace but in death.
For a country fed up with neo-liberalism and mecha-Reaganism, DMX offered a new dichotomy we could all get behind. No longer Republicans and Democrats, this nation, he proposed, was best divided between Cats and Dogs. Between cowardly, self-serving scrubs and Real Dudes.
No one else could approach his rhetoric. His swag was phenomenal, likening being in the presence of his enemies (always nameless, faceless) with visiting a gentleman’s club.
He also has one of the greatest rap sheets in history. Real talk.
His accomplishments are too numerous to list in full, but his beef with Ja Rule was one of the 11 or 12 best of that year. And listening to “Party Up” on YouTube still makes my eyes misty, harkening back to Mitzvahs of yore.
Alas, it’s like he fell asleep, a sort of hip-hop Rumpelstiltskin (ed. Rip van Winkle). May he return like a hip-hop Aslan, barking at us like a dog while doing wheelies on an ATV in downtown Hoboken.
(ed. Wait, he had an album come out in 2006 that debuted at number two? That undermines this thesis. So, this is a little embarrassing. You’ve been great, folks.)