DMX

Earl Simmons was born on the eighteenth of December 1970 at Mount Vernon, New York, the son of Joe Barker — an itinerant artist — and Arnett Simmons, a teenage mother. The Simmons household at Yonkers was unstable, severely impoverished and across his childhood marked by sustained physical abuse from his mother's successive partners. He spent substantial portions of his adolescence at the Children's Village juvenile facility at Dobbs Ferry. He attended several Yonkers public schools intermittently and did not complete high school.

He took up rapping at sixteen at the Yonkers school-yard battles of 1986 and 1987 under the stage name DMX — from the Oberheim DMX drum-machine he had encountered at an early Yonkers studio session. He recorded his first demonstrations under DMX Master Earl at the small Yonkers Born Loaded studio in 1991 and signed with the small Columbia Records subsidiary Ruffhouse Records in 1992 — under terms that did not produce a commercial release.

He signed with Def Jam Recordings in 1997 under the new presidency of Lyor Cohen. He recorded the album It's Dark and Hell Is Hot at the Sound on Sound Studios in Manhattan across late 1997 and released it in May 1998. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 — the first hip-hop album to do so without a preceding charting single — and sold over five million copies in its first eighteen months. The subsequent four solo albums Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (1998), ...And Then There Was X (1999), The Great Depression (2001) and Grand Champ (2003) each debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 — making DMX the only artist in the chart's history to debut at number one with each of his first five releases.

He starred in the films Belly (1998), Romeo Must Die (2000), Exit Wounds (2001) and Cradle 2 the Grave (2003).

He suffered across the following decade from a sustained cocaine and prescription-opioid addiction and was incarcerated multiple times for drug-related offences.

He collapsed of cardiac arrest at his Westchester home on the second of April 2021 and was held on life support at the White Plains Hospital. He was removed from life support on the ninth of April 2021. He was fifty.

He is honored here as the principal voice of late-1990s East Coast hip-hop.