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DMX’s battle rapping prowess was readily apparent on confrontational anthems like “F-in’ wit’ D,” and he animated his years of trauma-childhood abuse, homelessness, frequent trips to the hospital due to his asthma and stints in jail-with a mesmerizing fury. The rest of It’s Dark and Hell is Hot solidified his transformative nature. Then here comes this crazy energetic figure from Yonkers with the Timbs and the bandanas, running around with pitbulls, giving a perspective on the streets that a lot of people weren’t familiar with and taking command of what hip-hop didn’t look like.” “Puff was controlling the clubs you were watching Bad Boy Records pop bottles, wear Rolexes, Jesus pieces, Coogi sweaters. “It was a complete 180,” Lowkey, a radio show host on Apple Music, tells TIME. And when the label began planning his debut album rollout, they hooked up him with Hype Williams, the music video director who had presided over perhaps the pinnacle of the “shiny suit” era: Mase’s “Feel So Good” video. DMX kicked around the underground and battle rap circuits for several years before signing with Def Jam. The American public embraced Combs’ vision of excess to the fullest, with the blog Billboard Chart Rewind later writing that “Bad Boy Records took over the charts in 1997 similar to The Beatles’ domination in 1964.”Īt that time, Puff Daddy himself had no interest in signing DMX: “His voice is too rough, he’s not marketable,” DMX later recalled Puff Daddy saying. Following the death of the icons Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., Combs was almost single-handedly responsible for hip-hop’s “shiny suit era,” in which big-budget videos, lavish party-throwing, and dancefloor-ready music seemed like prerequisites to commercial success. It’s difficult to overstate how popular Puff Daddy was before DMX’s arrival. It’s Dark and Hell is Hot album art Kickstarting a New Era of New York Hip-Hop Here are the ways that It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot irrevocably changed the hip-hop landscape. And the album’s legacy continues to reverberate with a new generation of artists two decades later. When he was hospitalized, the Ruff Ryders, his hip-hop collective, gathered in person outside the hospital, and countless artists and cultural figures paid their respects on social media.įew who were hip-hop fans in 1998 can forget the enormous impact of It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot. A week after he suffered from a heart attack earlier this month, DMX died in a White Plains hospital. Over the next two decades, DMX would produce towering hits like “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” and “Party Up” while also running into legal troubles and substance abuse issues and spending several stints in prison. It would have been nearly impossible for anyone to sustain such meteoric highs. (Future would replicate the feat in 2017.) By abrasively challenging the slickness of rap’s assimilation into the mainstream, DMX had unwittingly become one of the biggest rappers in the world. Just seven months later, DMX would return with Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, which made him the only living rapper to top the Billboard album charts twice in the same year. “That was the year DMX took over the world,” Nas reminisced in 2013 about the rapper, who died on April 9 at 50.