The rapper, who has died at age 50, used his gruff voice to project strength—even as he spoke honestly about human weakness.
At its best, hip-hop reveals the complexity of the human voice, and few artists show that better than DMX did. The sound that came out of Earl Simmons’s mouth was often called a growl or rasp, but those terms seem insufficient upon the occasion of his death, today, at age 50. You heard breath and bone in that voice. Its dissonance and musicality were kind of like an electric guitar. It started parties by jolting fight-or-flight reflexes. Most important, in pure tone and delivery, he conveyed the same thing his lyrics said on “What’s My Name?”: “I’m not a nice person.” The listener can’t help but sit up and wonder: What makes someone sound like this? Part of the answer to that question was that Simmons had bronchial asthma. Speaking with Talib Kweli and Jasmin Leigh on the People’s Party podcast last year, Simmons recalled childhood memories of waking up struggling to breathe, gripping the corners of his bed, and gasping so much that his tongue went numb. “That’s scary, as a child,” he said. Firefighters would often have to climb 11 floors to treat him in his apartment, and their kindness made him want to grow up to be a firefighter himself. Asthma prevented that, but, Simmons said, he nevertheless sought a career that would allow him to help people. The image of a young Simmons immobilized and fearing for his life might seem incompatible with the popular image of DMX. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, most Americans could have voted him the toughest-seeming man alive. Rapping with explosive energy over beats that evoked army bugles, Simmons specialized in vivid threats, funny taunts, and bursts of hate speech.
