DMX

• 1. Introduction

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  DMX sold 251,000 copies of his debut album in its very first week. That number alone would be remarkable for any artist. But Earl Simmons did it while sleeping in empty storage bins just years before, robbing students for food and a leather collar for a stray dog he had adopted off the streets of Yonkers. The question the rest of this story answers is not how DMX became famous. It is how a man raised in that kind of darkness turned pain into one of the most commercially dominant runs in hip-hop history, and what it cost him.

• 2. Yonkers and Early Wounds

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  Earl Simmons was born on the 18th of December 1970, in Mount Vernon, New York, to a 19-year-old mother named Arnett Simmons and an 18-year-old father named Joe Barker. His father painted watercolor paintings of street scenes and sold them at local fairs before moving to Philadelphia to pursue that work. Earl was left behind as the middle child in an unstable household.

  By the age of five, his mother had sent him to live with relatives in the School Street housing apartments in Yonkers. He was diagnosed with bronchial asthma in childhood and raised as a Jehovah's Witness, a faith he later walked away from after being injured in an accident caused by a driver. At ten years old, following abuse at home and expulsion from middle school, he was sent to a group home.

  At fifteen, Earl returned to Yonkers with nowhere to sleep and no money. He slept in empty storage bins. He befriended stray dogs. He robbed students to pay for food, clothing, and a leather collar and harness for one of those dogs. When that failed, he turned to carjacking. Those years on School Street were not a rough patch. They were the foundation of the voice he would build everything on.

• 3. The Name and the Network

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  His career began in 1985, when a local rapper named Ready Ron took Earl on as a beatboxer and ad-lib man for small shows around Yonkers. Watching Ron gain prominence on the scene, Earl decided to start rapping himself. He took his name from a piece of music equipment: the Oberheim DMX drum machine. He turned the initialism into "Divine Master of the Unknown" and later "Darkman X".

  In 1988, while serving time for carjacking, DMX dedicated his hours to writing lyrics and battling other inmates. He developed a style he called "Spellbound," spelling each word out letter by letter. Among the rivals he battled in prison was K-Solo, a name that would follow him into his career. The early Ruff Ryders collective assembled around him during those years: a preteen Jadakiss, a young Swizz Beatz, and the Yonkers brothers Joaquin "Waah" and Darrin "Dee" Dean, who were building the label from the ground up.

  In 1988, a music industry figure named Irv Gotti was rooming with producer Chad Elliott, who introduced Gotti to DMX and the Dean brothers in the Schlobohm housing projects. Gotti persuaded Waah Dean to buy him a drum machine to produce records for DMX. The result was a beat called "Born Loser," produced in 1989 by Elliott and Gotti, which became one of DMX's earliest demos. That single collaboration between a future Def Jam president and a jailed beatboxer would eventually become the foundation of one of the most successful artist-label partnerships of the late 1990s.

• 4. The Climb to Def Jam

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  In January 1991, DMX appeared on The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show and delivered a freestyle that got attention. The Source ran a feature on him in its Unsigned Hype column, which spotlighted unsigned hip-hop artists. That same year he signed a management deal with Ruff Ryders Entertainment, and Columbia Records signed him to its subsidiary labels Chaos Records and Ruffhouse Records. His major debut single "Born Loser" was released in 1993. It failed to chart. Columbia let him go.

  For two years DMX remained independent, grinding. In January 1994, Death Row Records attempted to sign him in a joint venture with Ruff Ryders, but the deal never came together. Then Irv Gotti, who had grown alongside DMX since the Schlobohm days, became president of A&R at Def Jam Recordings. He arranged a showcase for then-president Lyor Cohen. DMX was signed to Def Jam in May 1997.

  Before the album was even released, guest verses on singles by Mase, The Lox, and LL Cool J built anticipation across the label's audience. His debut single for Def Jam, "Get at Me Dog," was released in February 1998 and earned a gold certification from the RIAA. The stage was set for what would become the most concentrated commercial run any rapper had achieved up to that point.

• 5. Five Albums, Five Number Ones

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  It's Dark and Hell Is Hot arrived in May 1998. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold over six million copies. Its single "Ruff Ryders' Anthem" was nominated for Best Rap Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. Then, in December 1998, seven months after the debut, DMX released Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood. That album also debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. No rapper alive had put two consecutive number-one Billboard 200 albums in a single year before. The last person to do it had been Tupac Shakur.

  ... And Then There Was X followed on the 21st of December 1999, his third consecutive number-one debut. Its single "Party Up (Up in Here)" became his first top-ten hit on the R&B charts and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Solo Performance. The album itself was nominated for Best Rap Album at the 2001 Grammy Awards and was eventually certified six-times Platinum.

  The Great Depression landed on the 23rd of October 2001 as his fourth straight number-one debut. Grand Champ arrived in September 2003 as his fifth. No artist had ever opened five consecutive studio albums at number one on the Billboard 200. By the time he died, DMX had sold over 75 million records worldwide. The style that drove all of it was deliberately the opposite of what was dominating radio at the time: while Puff Daddy and Bad Boy Records were defined by big-budget videos, designer clothes, and club-ready sounds, DMX came from Yonkers with Timberlands, bandanas, and pit bulls, offering a perspective on street life that, as one Apple Music radio host later put it, was "a complete 180."

• 6. Screen, Page, and Pulpit

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  Grand Champ included an international bonus track called "X Gon' Give It to Ya" that would outlast the album by decades. The song appeared in the 2016 film Deadpool and its trailers, reaching an entirely new generation of listeners.

  In 1998, the same year as his debut album, DMX appeared in the film Belly alongside rapper Nas. Romeo Must Die followed in 2000, Exit Wounds in 2001 alongside Steven Seagal, and Cradle 2 the Grave in 2003 alongside Jet Li. In 2006, he starred in the BET reality series DMX: Soul of a Man. That same year he published E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX, a memoir he titled using the initials of his birth name.

  Religion ran through DMX's public life in ways that surprised people who knew him only from the music. He described himself as a born-again Christian who read the Bible every day. While incarcerated, he told people he believed he was there with a purpose: to deliver a specific message to a specific person, a message that Jesus loved them. He became a transitional deacon and said in 2009 that he had received a call to be ordained as a pastor. In 2016, he gave a sermon at a church in Phoenix, Arizona. On the 10th of January 2026, Foster Memorial AME Zion Church posthumously ordained him as a minister.

• 7. Legal Troubles and Addiction

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  DMX was in jail more than 30 times across his lifetime. The offenses ranged from robbery, weapon possession, and carjacking to animal cruelty, impersonating a federal agent, and tax evasion. His relationship with the legal system began in 1986, when he was sent to the juvenile unit of Woodfield Prison in Valhalla, New York, for stealing a dog from a junkyard. Later that year, he received a two-year sentence for another crime and was sent to Industry Institution in upstate New York. In December 1986, just days into that sentence, he and his cellmate escaped. His mother forced him to turn himself in. He finished the sentence at the MacCormick Secure Center in Brooktondale, New York.

  In June 2004, he was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport on charges including cocaine possession, criminal impersonation, possession of a weapon, and driving under the influence, having claimed to be a federal agent while attempting to carjack a vehicle. In July 2017, federal prosecutors charged him with 14 counts of tax fraud for failing to file income tax returns between 2010 and 2015, a period during which he earned at least $2.3 million. He pleaded guilty to a single count. Judge Jed S. Rakoff sentenced him to one year in prison in March 2018 and ordered him to pay $2.29 million in restitution. He was released on the 25th of January 2019.

  At the root of many of these incidents was an addiction DMX said began at age 14, when Ready Ron, the rapper who first gave him a stage, tricked him into smoking a marijuana cigarette laced with crack cocaine. Ready Ron denied this account in a social media post after DMX's death. Whatever the origin, DMX entered drug rehabilitation multiple times, including in 2002, 2017, and 2019. On the 10th of February 2016, he was found unresponsive in a parking lot at a Ramada Inn in Yonkers and revived with Narcan. He was also father to 15 children from 9 different women, and filed for bankruptcy three times, with his first filing on the 30th of July 2013 citing child support obligations as the primary claim.

• 8. Final Years and Remembrance

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  On the 2nd of April 2021, at approximately 11:00pm, DMX suffered a heart attack at his home and was rushed to White Plains Hospital in critical condition. Paramedics worked to resuscitate him for 30 minutes. He suffered cerebral hypoxia during that period. His attorney Murray Richman confirmed the next day that he was on life support. His former manager Nakia Walker described him as being in a vegetative state with lung and brain failure and no current brain activity.

  On the morning of the 9th of April 2021, DMX lost functionality in multiple organs, including his liver, kidneys, and lungs, and was pronounced dead at age 50. The Westchester County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed on the 8th of July 2021 that the official cause of death was a heart attack. He is buried at Oakland Cemetery in Yonkers.

  A Celebration of Life was held on the 24th of April 2021 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, with a limited capacity of 1,900 people. Kanye West's Sunday Service Choir performed. DMX's casket arrived on a black monster truck with "Long live DMX" painted on the side. A procession of hundreds of motorcyclists rode from Yonkers to Brooklyn in homage to Ruff Ryders. Speakers included Eve, Nas, Swizz Beatz, and Ruff Ryders founders Waah and Dee Dean.

  His funeral took place on the 25th of April 2021 at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, lasting around five hours to a limited capacity of 2,000 people. DMX's casket was red and bore the word "FAITH" in large lettering. Former Def Jam president Lyor Cohen spoke by video. At the service, New York community leader Erica Ford presented DMX's family a proclamation from the New York state Senate declaring the 18th of December, his birthday, "Earl 'DMX' Simmons Day." His eighth and final studio album, Exodus, was released posthumously through Def Jam on the 28th of May 2021.