Good and Evil Battle for DMX's Soul

It's among the longest standing and most cherished clichés in the hip-hop world: Litter the musical landscape with corpses, violate "bitches," insult gays, then dedicate your album to God, as if to sanctify the relentless blood on the tracks. Earl Simmons, the ferocious rapper better known as DMX, is not above such gestures. In the dedication to his 1998 debut, "It's Dark and Hell Is Hot," DMX writes, "I am thanking my top dog, my Lord first."

That might sound like the basest hypocrisy, but in the case of DMX, there's something more complex at work. As his album's title indicates, the 29-year-old rapper has a fearsome vision, one that sees the desperate, violent, crime-ridden world of the inner city as a kind of moral inferno, a place where choices are few and false moves fatal. "You musta forgot, dog/This is the city life," he explains to a rich mark he's threatening to rob,
"Ain't a f---in' thing sweet
And ain't nothin' fair
Just another n---a dead
Don't a motherf---er care."
On "What's My Name," he screams in brilliant understatement, "I'm not a nice person."

That the quality of niceness would even come up, highlights the intriguing quality of DMX. One of the central assumptions of his three albums ("Flesh of My Flesh Blood of My Blood" and "...And Then There Was X" are the other two) is that in a better world, he would be a "nice" or, more to the point, good person.

The corollary to that is: It's not, so he isn't.

Obviously, from a strict spiritual perspective, his position is indefensible. Isn't the entire point of virtue to be a corrective for conditions that reward vice? But from a social point of view, it's what's real, a brutally unsentimental version of the old bumper-sticker message: "You Want Peace? Work for Justice."

For many rappers, peace is nonexistent, and the justice is the harsh code of the street. But DMX's emphasis on loyalty differentiates him from the majority of gangsta rappers. Valuing this virtue no less than Tony Soprano or Dante Alghieri, DMX views betrayal of trust as the gravest sin.

More tellingly, his songs are completely free of the designer-label materialism that infects so much of hip-hop. He repeatedly denounces greed and the exhibitionism of the rich; his own desire for wealth is a pragmatic wish for insulation against the world's shocks. Beyond that, money doesn't interest him--as he says on one track, "I do not worship money."

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