#I can see my fellow pmd fans :)
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Shoutout to some cool people on my birthday
@blazer-the-delphox: my datemate/boyfriend and best friend! They write awesome fanfics and they’re just generally an awesome person and the light of my life!
@nelvana: A great friend who got me interested in Among Us and helped me get interested in actually writing my own fics. Also encouraged me to start doing art. She’s a fantastic writer and I love her fic Galaxies Above!
@teshamerkel: A wonderful friend who has encouraged my Crystalline Eventide project from the very beginning! She’s been a big inspiration to me and I love seeing all her creations! A fellow Rune Factory fan who I can always scream about RF4 with!
@kaidacreator: Someone who started supporting Crystalline Eventide shortly after it started and also someone who has become one of my best friends! They’re a spectacular artist and inspiration as well as just a great friend!
@kroxn: A fellow writer who writes about star dragons and cowboys! Hyper is a fellow PMD fic writer as an author of intriguing original works! They’re a good friend who I can always count on!
@precious-lemons: A very supportive friend who is the founder of a PMD server I spend a lot of time in. They’re always encouraging of others and is a very skilled artist who always comes up with creative stories and characters!
@tikki-tok: A fellow PMD artist who I’m lucky to call a friend! Tikki is an inspiration as well as a very wholesome person. Seeing their content on my dash always puts a smile on my face.
@samadriel-art: A very cool artist who also happens to have a Mareep line pokesona! Her story PMD Hellfire is a much loved favorite of mine and it’s always a joy to chat with her about anime and Pokémon!
@drawingleo: A great friend who has a fierce love for cowboys and space! I’m a big fan of his PMD team as well as his Among Us art! Leo is an exceptional person!
@sakarime: A fellow artist as well as a good friend! Saka is the author of Mysteries of the Soul, a very fun read if one likes Pokémon and mystery. Sake’s art is something to behold and I always love seeing her stuff on my dash.
@pixie-shmixie: A fellow Pretty Cure fan who got me hooked on the series! Pixie is a very wholesome friend who I love screaming about magical girls and mascots with!
@missmistysblog: A very kind person who is very supportive and creative, Misty has been quite supportive of my FE and PMD fics! Misty has a very neat PMD team called Team Pirates featuring the wonderful pirate lesbian duo of May and Liz. I always love talking about Team Pirates with her as well as FE3H!
@hummingbird-scratch: An artist who is a big inspiration to me! Hummingbird has a very unique art style and they have a lot of creative and neat ideas! They’re also a very wholesome human being!
@noblejanobii: A fellow PMD creator and quality friend! Janobii’s Shaymin variants are something entirely her own! I also love her PMD teams, Team Lightbringers and Team Backstreet! Her content is an absolute joy and so is she!
@everything-i-touch-is-gay: A very cool artist who I’ve been following for some time! He is a very wholesome person whose Team Mantle is favorite of mine!
@everysinglepheel: A neat artist who has been very supportive of my work! They always leave a nice word or two which is very appreciated! They draw the best dragons!
@anonymouscreampuff: A fellow PMD artist who’s content I really adore! They draw the cutest characters, especially Skye and Pan of Team Starlight! Overall they’re just a really cool person!
@hawktalonflame: The first person I ever did a Fan Art Friday for! Owl’s art is always a joy to see and she’s a really wholesome person to boot!
@rainbow-squirrels-7: Someone who I look up to a lot! She is a very cool artist who is behind PMD Outlanders, a PMD comic that takes place in the desert known as the Outlands! She’s a huge inspiration to me, and I always love seeing her work!
@dawn-at-dusk: A very neat artist who I always love seeing on my dash!
@apollor: The founder of another PMD server I’m in! I always love seeing what neat ideas they have in store next!
@local--litporeon: Another artist I’m very fond of! I especially am a fan of their Animal Crossing artwork as well as their general Pokémon art!
@starlightkeybright: A person who has been very supportive of the Glitch AU since the beginning, I always love seeing Gwilly’s teams and her PMD blog!
@mandymiriana: A very talented artist, I am a big fan of Mandy’s Undertale art! Their art has a very soft quality to it, and there’s something almost nostalgic about it!
@neothebean: Another artist I look up to a lot, Neo’s art is very cute as well as very polished!
@timegearing: A PMD artist and author I’ve been looking at recently, Tabidot’s writings and works have found their way into my queue lately, and that is because their writing and art is top notch!
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Btw it's funny bc I came here to ask if you're a fellow SE Asian when I saw 'ISSIT' in your recent reblog! Then I scrolled down to see you answering an ask regarding Singlish and recognizing this slang/language when you're outside 😂 And good to know I'm not the only one with headcanons about ah beng Atsumu omg! I always associate him with Hokkien and Osamu with Cantonese or Teochew
Hello hello my fellow SEAsian! Yes! I’m from Singapore, to be exact!
Goodness, this ah ma really revealed her inner market auntie hor. Whoops.
omg yes if you’re interested, we have a SEA server for hq fans (run by the irrepressible @forgetou) where we scream about ah beng atsumu (food panda! Atsumu who rides his PMD blasting mandopop) and ah beng iwaizumi (gym trainer at anytime fitness) etc.
Oh gosh, I’m Hokkein / Teochew myself! I absolutely can see the association - Atsumu is a little cruder and impatient and brash, so hokkein makes sense. I feel like Teochew would fit Osamu cos it’s so similar to Hokkein - yet different (my teochew grandma would argue that it’s more refined) but yes!
Please, feel free to keep screaming at me! I’m so glad to see your ask in my inbox :)
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Fellow member of the Palkia squad here to say that it's heartwarming beyond belief to see someone who's also aware of Palkia's coolness and how it doesn't deserve to be overlooked like this! I could write a whole essay defending my favorite Pokemon of all time but it'd exceed the character limit haha. It's so frustrating when every Sinnoh fan I know is another one of those "lol Pokemon with utter control over dimensions looks like a penis so it's lame" people. Anyway I love you. A LOT. End rant
Ahhh I answered this late but here we go!
I'm sure you have an idea of how relieving it is seeing fellow Palkia fans around and saying things like this. I don't understand the whole penis argument. Sure, Palkia is shaped a bit like a penis, but Giratina is an oversized centipede and Dialga is a pony with armor. The damn thing has built-in gauntlets and massive pearls on its shoulders that literally help it build energy to use a move capable of distorting space and literally vaporizing anything in its path. IT HAS A FUCKING SAIL (sail?? crest?? fin?? idk) FOR ARCEUS FUCKING SAKE IT'S THE MOST BADASS FUCKING THING HOLY FUCK (okay i've used up half of my fuck allowance for this)
Don't get me started on movie Palkia. Not only does it have THE coolest anime cry, this thing transferred an entire town into an entirely different dimension almost effortlessly! When the town was basically destroyed, it was Palkia who felt bad and fixed everything, including the shit that wasn't even its fault! In the 12th movie, Palkia was the one who didn't start beef with its siblings, saved it from a massive space-distorting water vortex, and almost single-handedly restrained Arceus for presumably hours. Not Giratina. Not Dialga. Palkia. Sure, Dialga was the one who carried the Sinnoh movies by breaking Palkia's arm, sticking Giratina in a timeloop, and sending the protagonists back in time to fix the past, but you can't say that Palkia was sitting on its ass the entire time (okay MAYBE you can for the 11th but the 10th and 12th? definitely not!) or that it was the creation trio's resident asshole. PMD Palkia is just as good if not better than movie Palkia. Yes, he comes off as an unlikable asshole at first glance, but he's a lot more reasonable than Dialga was for most of the story. He wasn't as easily manipulated, he had enough common sense to tell that the protagonists weren't terrible bad guys trying to destroy space, and he actually took action when he found out what had actually happened. Darkrai planned to meddle with time and shit to try again and Palkia pulls a MASSIVE "I'm about to end this man's whole career" and pisses all over Darkrai's plans and gives the bitch the MOST IRONIC punishment I've ever seen in any Pokemon game, spinoff or not.
Pearl was my second Pokemon game and the first that I really got to slow down and enjoy the content of the game, and Palkia was the first legendary I ever caught by myself. Yes, I am biased towards Palkia because of this, even if Platinum is infinitely better than DP. I hate seeing Palkia being treated as lesser than the other two by both TPC and the fandom. It's not the first case of a legendary being treated as lesser than the other members of its trio (Moltres, Kyogre to an extent) but it's one of the worst cases I've seen because it's not just the fans overlooking it, it's the developers as well. Giratina has two epic looking forms, an amazing shiny, and let's not forget the most iconic legendary scene. Dialga got an epic second form and a huge role in a spinoff game that's just as good as Platinum. Palkia got a side role in that spinoff game and though he was a badass (bitch busts down your door in the middle of the night to kidnap you and your best friend to try and murder you) it was still only a side role. It also never got any type of secondary form. I mean, Palkia doesn't even need one to absolutely slaughter the design aspect, but still shows the favoritism pretty well 😳
TL;DR: Palkia fuckin slaps in just about every way and I'm a stressed Palkia fan who's tired of favoritism. Also ilyt anon, thank you so much for sending this and giving me an excuse to rant at midnight about fictional creatures and favoritism. With that being said:
PALKIA SQUAD ROLL OUT
#palkia#response#long#i have been merciful with my palkia essays tonight#i could be a whole lot more annoying but i'm feeling kind tonight#i actually made a group chat just for palkia stans lmao
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So you're wondering why I'm putting this up here, and no, it's not what you think it is. While I have been terribly inactive on DA and only posting every once in a while, I'm not actually taking a hiatus from the website as a whole. No, I'm actually taking a long hiatus from drawing one thing for so long...too long, that is! And that's Pokémon.
Now, don't get the wrong idea. As much as I love Pokémon (especially since it's my goddamned childhood), I've been really unhappy with my general art direction, especially since practically 99% of gallery has been nothing but Pokémon and PMD groups, and I just feel like I don't really have much of a future. At least, not until this year when I discovered the new Metroidvania game Iconoclasts, created by Joakim "Konjak" Sandberg. I bought the game on Steam, played it, and fell in love with it...and I've been drawing fan art of it ever since. I even created a blog on Tumblr, called "Incorrect Iconoclasts Quotes", which you can find here: https://incorrecticonoclastsquotes.tumblr.com/
Thanks to Iconoclasts, I feel like I finally have a new direction to steer my art in...and it also got me thinking: If Konjak can dedicate eight years of his life to create this one amazing game, then perhaps I can dedicate my life to writing the original projects I had put off for so long. Which leads me to the primary purpose of my hiatus from Pokémon:
Effective today, there will be NO Pokémon art or writing uploaded anywhere at any time! The only content you'll most likely receive from me will be either Iconoclasts (mostly cause I'm in so deep with that game and love it to death) or just general, original content!
I know some of you are not going to like my decision, especially since that means I'll also be shelving some upcoming projects related to the franchise (especially Mystery Dungeon), but I've been getting sick to death of drawing only Pokémon lately, and I think it's time for a big change of pace and shift my focus away from it for a while.
I will only resume drawing Pokémon stuff on February 27, 2021 - yep, the day when the franchise reaches its 25th anniversary. Until then, I won't be drawing or writing anything for that franchise. Three years may seem like a long hiatus, but it'll be well worth it!
To all fellow Pokéfans...see you in 2021!
Hmm, now that I think about it...I might actually get around to drawing some Castlevania, if I have the patience (no promises, though).
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Episode 117 : Rockin' Steady
"...and though the flag been tattered and beaten..."
- General Steele
The short month of the year puts a little pressure on the recording schedule, but the show is here on time for you as always. Once again, we feature the sounds of J Dilla, Big Pun, and Big L, alongside plenty of other great stuff - and we keep the same speed going all the way through the mix!
Shows coming up;
Sadat X & El Da Sensei @ Joshua Brooks, March 20th
GZA @ Gorilla, Manchester, April 9th
Twitter : @airadam13
Playlist/Notes
EPMD ft. KRS-ONE : Run It
We start the episode with an all-NYC, all-uppercase collaboration from the "We Mean Business" LP, the seventh in EPMD's industrially-titled discography. A nod to LL on the hook, stick-up business over an Erick Sermon beat (of course), with KRS playing clean-up man flawlessly. Favourite part of the verse - real 'G's do indeed want to stay at home and read the paper.
Jay Dee : Another Batch - 11
One of a bunch of late-90s Dilla beats that got leaked onto the internet back in the day, this one smacks along with a bassline that comes through like a funky duck! I don't know if anyone ever rhymed on this, but I can imagine someone like De La doing great things with it.
Chuck D ft. Jahi : BOT
I don't know if it was intentional, but this track seems to call back to two tracks from the legendary "...Nation of Millions..." album; "She Watch Channel Zero?" ("she looking at the screen more than talking to me") and also "Night of the Living Baseheads" ("battery on low, look like fiends with a Jones"). Chuck D might have been one of the very first in Hip-Hop to catch onto the Internet, but the elder statesman sees the BS it's brought us as well! He combines here with the lead MC in the group known as "PE 2.0" to get it all off his chest, and he's got plenty more to say on the new "Celebration Of Ignorance" album.
Black Thought : 9th vs. Thought
No-one can accuse Black Thought of not being a team player, with it taking until 2018 before we saw a solo release from him, the "Streams of Thought Vol.1" EP. 9th Wonder was the producer for the project, and on this track he gets headline billing. Fans of top-flight lyricism are in for a treat here, as the MC of choice for many MCs shows his skill level in a major way.
Boot Camp Clik : World Wide
Serious track from the Brooklyn stalwarts, uniting on 2006's "The Last Stand". I absolutely love General Steele's opening verse, from which this month's epigram is taken, and then it's followed with the late, great Sean P just thugging it all the way out on the second verse! They go out of the immediate crew for production, tapping up Large Professor for a head-nodding beat that easily could have made for a fire single. Not the best-known tune maybe, but a tune that is big by nature!
Big L : Don't Front (Freestyle)
Short and powerful like a shot of rum, this is a concise taste of Big L's legendary freestyle aggression over a smooth 90s beat from Diamond's "You Can't Front".
Slum Village : Go Ladies (Instrumental)
One of my favourite Dilla beats easily, as heard on the "Fantastic, Vol.2" album, flipping a well-known 80s soul sample and somehow making it even better than you could have imagined. It's only when you listen back to what else was coming out around that time you can hear how much of a shock to the system a laid-back groove like this was.
Donnie : Cloud 9 (Spinna Mix)
If you enjoy soulful music, Donnie's 2002 debut "The Colored Section" should definitely be in your collection. "Cloud 9" was one of the standouts, and DJ Spinna puts some extra bump into it on this remix, which is on a nice 12" release. His bass style is so distinctive, and with so much of the beat being in the lower frequency range, it leaves plenty of room for Donnie's masterful vocals!
Foreign Exchange : Hustle, Hustle
There are plenty of great tracks on "Connected", the debut Foreign Exchange album, and I was sure I'd already played this - glad to find out I hadn't, as it was the perfect fit for this slot! Nicolay's beat is smooth on that kind of early-2000s, neo-soulish vibe, and then you have lyrical treats coming from every angle. Quartermaine and C.A.L.I.B.E.R spit bars about trying to get ahead in the world, and Phonte comes in beautifully on the hook, in a fairly early demonstration of his singing talent. I don't blame you if you find yourself humming this one on the way to work.
Kev Brown : Hold Fast
One of the great bassline masters in Hip-Hop, Kev Brown certainly put Landover (MD) on the map with his top-quality "I Do What I Do" album. He's just as solid on the mic, and takes the reins alone on this track from the second half of the LP. Scratches are credited to DJ PMD, who is not Parrish Smith, but in fact Peter Rosenberg (who hails from the same area) under his original DJ name!
Jermaine Dupri ft. Snoop Dogg, Warren G, and R.O.C : Protectors of 1472
Unless there's some other, non-publicised significance to the number 1472, the "Life In 1472" album has one of the most contrived titles of all time! I don't actually have the album, but this DJ Premier-produced cut is on a compilation of his rarer/lesser-known cuts. I cut this one fairly short, as I think you get the best of it in a compact dose - the last verse is by far the longest, but Snoop towards the front is the clear headliner.
J Dilla : Won't Do (Instrumental)
Classic Dilla from towards the end, based around the "Footsteps In The Dark" drums, with fragments of the vocal yelling out for help along the way. The vocal version is on "The Shining" LP, but for this instrumental, you may need to pick up the 7" boxset of the album (or the MP3 version), which contains instrumentals for every track!
Sadat X ft. Timmy Hunter : Neva
The three-bar loop makes mixing a bit tricky, but I really wanted to play this one! Sadat looks back over his life and career, and celebrates his own effort and self-belief - justifiably so. Diamond D provides the beat, as he does all the way through the "Sum Of A Man" album. It's been a long road since that first LP with Brand Nubian, but Sadat is still travelling it, and for that we should be thankful :)
Dabrye ft. Jay Dee and Phat Kat : Game Over
That beat will definitely do things on a big sound system. Sparse, menacing, insistent. Ann Arbor's Dabrye takes no prisoners on the production, and then pulls in his fellow Michiganders Jay Dee and Phat Kat, who just spit raw Detroit flames in the space the beat leaves! The 2006 "Two/Three" album is one for anyone who likes the more angular, awkward, and aggressive style of production.
Clear Soul Forces : Continue?
I've been saving the combination of this and "Game Over" for ages :) CSF's 2013 "Gold PP7s" is an essential album for anyone who thinks they don't make MCs like they used to - it should give you faith for the future! I can't even keep up with all the gaming, comic, and anime references that they just firehose you with, but the spirit is undeniable. Ilajide's videogame-styled beat bumps hard, and overall this is just one of those tracks I can't see any reason for anyone not to love!
C2C ft. Tigerstyle, Netik, Rafik, Vajra, Kentaro : Le Banquet
Here we have an all-star lineup of scratch DJs, liquefying their crossfaders one after another as the featured instrumentalists on this track from the "Tetra" album. If you listen closely, there are actually some quotes from "Game Over" in the mix - they sound like vocoded re-records, but they could well be heavily-manipulated samples...
J Dilla : Dillatronic 09
One more Dilla instrumental as we come towards the end, this time taken from the "Dillatronic" collection of beats, a posthumous collection of 41 pieces - many very short - from the MPC of the man himself.
Noreaga ft. Nature, Big Pun, Cam'ron, Jadakiss, and Styles P : Banned From TV
Late 90s thug styles, and the kind of triumphant sound that either had to start or finish the episode. Nature was the original guest on here, but while almost everyone else was invited on, Big Pun bullied his way onto the track! While everybody comes off, the true gems on this tune are towards the front - Nature's memorable opening line, and Pun's devastating verse. The Swizz Beatz production is a perfect snapshot of the keyboard-based beats of the era - the "horns" should be corny, but somehow they work in context, and the kick/basstone combo bangs! Classic Berra-ism from Nore on the last verse too - if it's with tomato juice, then it can't be Hennessy straight...
Please remember to support the artists you like! The purpose of putting the podcast out and providing the full tracklist is to try and give some light, so do use the songs on each episode as a starting point to search out more material. If you have Spotify in your country it's a great way to explore, but otherwise there's always Youtube and the like. Seeing your favourite artists live is the best way to put money in their pockets, and buy the vinyl/CDs/downloads of the stuff you like the most!
Check out this episode!
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DMX: It's Dark and Hell is Hot
Earl Simmons suffered a lonely and abusive childhood where as a troubled kid he would sometimes wander the streets and befriend stray dogs. Uprooted from his native Baltimore at a young age, the Yonkers transplant did several stints in New York’s Children’s Village group home, where he first started fiddling with drum machines and beatboxing as a means of escape. He segued from DJing to rapping as a young adult, taking the name DMX from the drum machine he used. The young rapper made a name for himself on New York’s battle circuit with a commanding voice and overwhelming tenacity. Aggressiveness would become his calling card as an MC, a defense mechanism held over from when the days when armed robbery helped him survive on the streets. His battles to live and cope both in and outside of rap would lead to 1998’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, his haunting debut, a tragically clear-eyed criminal manifesto that dared to greet damnation with defiance and a psalm.
Rocking a skull-embroidered hat, DMX the Great appeared in The Source’s Unsigned Hype column in January 1991, garnering comparisons to LL Cool J, PMD, and Hit Squad’s K-Solo (whom DMX had met in prison). The earliest DMX demos were tedious, without the defining presence he’d grow into. But it was in the ring that he truly built his rep, making an indelible mark on the underground scene with heavily rhythmic flows and a battler’s bluntness. When he traded bars with Jay Z in a cramped Bronx pool hall in the late ’90s, head bobbing violently, cigarette in hand, he proved himself to be a raw, almost boorish alternative to Hov’s shifty slick talk. The energy in the room clearly favored X’s style. Jay would later ask industry maneuverer mutual friend Irv Gotti, “You think he’s better than me?” to which Gotti replied, ‘If you look in the hood, there’s less niggas like you and more niggas like him.”
The Unsigned Hype column was known for producing deals. True to form, DMX signed to Columbia Records imprint Ruffhouse in 1992 and immediately cut a promotional single called “The Born Loser.” The track introduced his depressive tone, an ominous and confessional space that would later bring life to his most discomforting scenes. But true to its title, it failed to generate any buzz or airplay, and his overbooked label let him off the hook. (DMX claimed he was under-promoted because of groups like Kris Kross and Cypress Hill.) A few years later, Puff Daddy, head of the burgeoning Bad Boy Records, took interest in X and fellow Yonkers corner boys the LOX, but in the end chose to sign the latter over the former, deciding that X had no commercial prospects. “One thing I respect about Puff, at least he told me to my face what he felt,” DMX told “Drink Champs.” “‘His voice is too rough, he’s not marketable.’” DMX returned to the underground scene, emerging on LL Cool J’s 1997 album Phenomenon with a verse on the now infamous posse cut “4, 3, 2, 1.” Buzzing once more, he followed Gotti to Def Jam.
When Gotti pushed for Def Jam to sign DMX in his first meeting, he got laughed out of the room. “I remember when I left the office, [A&R executive] Tina Davis said, ‘if DMX don’t sell, your ass is fired,” Gotti remembered in an interview with Complex. He didn’t seem to fit with the rap moment. This was a year dominated by Puff Daddy and Bad Boy, who landed six of the seven highest-charting rap songs, delivered a huge critical and commercial success in Harlem World, and won Best Rap Album at the Grammys for the 7x-Platinum album No Way Out (famously and controversially defeating Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever). Putting money behind DMX would run counter to Bad Boy’s “shiny suit” era of glam rap.
But X brought Def Jam executive Lyor Cohen up to Yonkers for an early Ruff Ryder session and convinced him to sign the MC. At the time, DMX’s mouth was wired shut because of an altercation he’d had with some guys he was accused of stealing from. In an interview with DJ Vlad, Ja Rule remembered the ferocity through which he ripped through the wiring: “He had got into a fight or somebody got jumped... and he was rhyming with the fuckin’ wires in his mouth. Crazy shit. Like the shit about to pop. I was like ‘Okay, I like this dude.’” When they left, Cohen turned to Gotti and proclaimed, “We got the pick of the litter.”
Through his connections at Bad Boy (namely, his friends the LOX and Ma$e), DMX began working on his debut album with a producer from Harlem named Dame Grease, a fellow Yonkers product named P.K. (or P. Killer Trackz), and Grease’s unknown protege from the Bronx, Swizz Beatz. Under direction from Irv and Lyor, Grease, P.K., and X worked up a single called “Get at Me Dog” in ’97, and released it in February of ’98. It functioned as an abrasive prelude, but was at least partially aimed at X’s longtime rival K-Solo. They brought the song to Hot 97 DJ Funkmaster Flex, who aired it and added it to the first volume of his Big Dawgs mixtape. It soon took off, peaking at No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100 that May. Gotti remembers the video as the turning point: “We back to the hood, and X is the leader of this revolution.” Filmed at New York’s Tunnel nightclub, packed, sweaty, and shot in black and white, X’s crusade is articulated in its opening seconds: “Let’s take it back to the streets, motherfuckers!”
“Get at Me Dog” set the stage for It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, which explores the furthest depths of the human experience. But there is no more fitting introduction to the album than the Swizz Beatz-produced “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” a confrontational, fang-bearing mark of ferocity. The song functions much like a warning shot: Cross this threshold at your own peril. “It’s about to get ugly/Fuck it dog, I’m hungry,” he snaps. The song was a defining moment for both DMX and Swizz Beatz, but it almost didn’t happen. Swizz made the song in Atlanta when he was just a DJ and then moved back to New York to join the Ruff Ryders. DMX didn’t like the song initially, claiming it was some “rock’n’roll track” and he needed some hip-hop shit: “I’m not doing that. It’s not hood enough,” he told the producer. But Swizz and other members of the Ruff Ryders team pushed him to make the record, and it became the theme song of a movement.
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot was not only the springboard for the Ruff Ryders campaign—launching the careers of Swizz Beatz, Eve, Cassidy, and Jin—it was the catalyst for a greater shift on the New York rap scene and beyond. It was a reset button for street rap, setting the stage for runs from 50 Cent and G-Unit and Cam’ron’s Diplomats crew. “Hittin’ niggas with gashes to the head/Straight to the white meat but the street stays red/Girls gave me head for free cause they see/Who I’ma be, by like 2003,” X rapped on the intro. It didn’t even take that long.
Like Dante’s Inferno, DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot is a fiendish epic that explores the nature of sin, highlighting acts of violence, wrath, greed, treachery, and lust. The album exposes an internal struggle waged between a man and his demons—a man searching for one light in an all-consuming darkness. He has a talk with god (“The Convo”), but the devil is constantly whispering in his ear and wearing him down. He’s unsure whether his rhyme skills are the product of a contract with the devil (“I sold my soul to the devil, and the price was cheap”) or the generosity of a loving creator. It’s this duality that makes up one of the most gripping psychological studies in all of rap lore: What happens when a God-fearing man makes the devil his ally?
The centerpiece is “Damien,” a winding back-and-forth saga between X and his Hadean accomplice. The album builds to this moment, where X is seduced by his greatest admirer. In the throes of his own greed and pain, DMX embraces wickedness as a fair price for freedom from destitution. By the end, the song becomes a parable about the dangers of giving into desire when Damien coerces X into crimes he doesn’t want to commit: “Either do it or give me your right hand, that’s what you said,” he threatens. “I see now, ain’t nothing but trouble ahead.” Traces of “Damien” can be heard throughout the “Lucy” thread on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which also examines the points where fame and sin meet. (Kendrick has cited It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot as a major influence.) But “Damien” is even more tightly wound, the relationship more clearly articulated and its energy more affecting. The dynamic “Damien” is a microcosm of It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, which is either in constant motion or disclosing ongoing conversations—whether internal, interpersonal (“How’s It Goin’ Down”), or divine (“Prayer”).
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot debuted atop the Billboard 200 in May and was certified platinum by June. DMX quickly released his sophomore album, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, in December of ’98, and it was double platinum by January. In between the two, he starred in Hype Williams’ directorial debut, Belly, alongside Nas, and the film almost immediately became a cult hit among rap fans. So in a grand total of eight months, DMX became the biggest rapper on the planet. His moment was so colossal that in 1999 Jay Z boycotted the Grammy ceremony (the year he won Best Rap Album for Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life) because DMX was not nominated.
“That was the year DMX took over the world,” Nas remembered in a 2013 interview with Pitchfork. Already a star on New York’s rap scene, the Queens rapper was standing in close proximity when the DMX atom bomb dropped. “There was a guy who worked on Belly with me and DMX who’d heard the record, and every day he would try to tell me how incredible this music that was about to come out was,” Nas recalled. “I tried to get a description, like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he just couldn’t say anything. He just kept saying, ‘It moves your soul.’ He did not lie.”
Nearly 20 years later, there is still no album like it. So many of the songs on It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot document violent crimes and the flood of emotions they induce. They move swiftly, jerking around corners and through alleyways, simulating a rising heart rate and a racing mind. His peers were shooting stills, but X was dealing in savage action sequences (“ATF”) and the shadows they cast (“Let Me Fly,” “X-Is Coming”). Everything about the music—from the harshness of his voice, to the murkiness of his beats, to the bruising nature of his flows—was in service of a supreme hardness. In ‘98, the biggest MCs on the New York scene were narrators using radically different sounds to tell their stories. Busta erupted with pure energy. Big Pun enchanted with an effortless fluidity. As Wu-Tang swarmed, Tribe was in the midst of their love movement. Black Star were a conscious voice for hood theorists. Jay Z brought business acumen to the drug trade. All were reporting live, sharing their powerful perspectives from different city blocks.
But DMX wasn’t a rapper in the trenches; he was a messiah in the gutter, painting a portrait of a community laid desolate by corruption, and the sociopaths its conditions were breeding. He was the voice of the street corners and the graveyards, telling stories of the lost and the damned. From on high, he demanded empathy for man, who were cold to murder and unapologetic for their crimes because he knew it’s hard to be good in a world this broken. “There’s a difference between doing wrong and being wrong, and that ain’t right,” he says on “Let Me Fly.” He breaks the moral compass, then drags you into the abyss.
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