the king of grunge (DMX, RIP)

"...As superthugs go, DMX is the most interesting, because he doesn't glamorize the gangsta lifestyle. Produced by Ruff Ryders chief soundboy Swizz Beatz, "One More Road To Cross" has the accursed, burdened heft of Blacks Sabbath and Flag--a perfect fit for DMX's stoic description of a carefully planned liquor store heist that goes bloodily wrong. "The Professional" is a bleak glimpse into the mind of a hired assassin ("Shit ain't go too well/THAT'S MY LIFE/Know I'm going to hell/THAT'S MY LIFE") while the betrayal-and-retribution themed "Here We Go Again" starts with the insuperably fatigued murmur "Same old shit, dog/Just a different day". This vision of thug life as agony, repetition, and endurance is communicated as much through DMX's hoarse rasping timbre (pure Ozzy/Rollins) and his flow (alternating between pay-close-attention-this-is-hard-earned-knowledge-I'm-sharing slow to rapid-fire blurts like he's got too much pain to cram into the rhyme-scheme's stanzas.)"

[from a review of  And Then There Was X alongside records by Jay-Z, The Lox, Juvenile)

WE ARE FAMILY: the Rise of the Rap Clans and the Hip Hop Dynasty

director's cut, New York Times, March 12 2000

by Simon Reynolds

 

When rapper DMX accepted a trophy at the Billboard Music Awards last year, he took the stage flanked by a squad of fellow artists from the Ruff Ryders label. It's hard to imagine anyone in rock doing this---Trent Reznor, say, menacingly surrounded  by the roster of his label Nothing. But in hip hop, such shows of collective strength are growing more common, as  rap labels increasingly style themselves as families. Like the mafia families whose Hollywood mythology has so influenced gangsta rap,  these labels compete to dominate the lucrative hip hop market, and in this symbolic war of clan against clan, loyalty is exalted as the supreme value.

 The two biggest forces in contemporary rap, the Yonkers-based Ruff Ryders and the New Orleans label Cash Money, both ferociously project a sense of clan identity, through logo-based regalia and unity-themed songs and album titles such as "I'm A Ruff Ryder", "Ruff Ryder's Anthem", Eve's Ruff Ryders's First Lady, and  "Cash Money Is an Army". Cash Money also has a supergroup, Hot Boys, composed of the label's biggest solo stars---Juvenile, B.G., and Lil Wayne.  As it happens, both labels are literally family businesses: Ruff Ryders was started by the brothers-and-sister team of Darrin, Joaquin and Chivon Dean, while Cash Money was founded by brothers Ron and Brian Williams. As if in recognition of their similar ethos, the two labels have joined forces for a massive rap tour currently crossing the USA.

 Although crews, cliques and posses have always been part of hip hop lore, rap's dominant lyrical mode has hitherto been first person singular.  But in the last year or so, ego has been eclipsed by what you might call "wego," the collective triumphalism of Ruff Ryders's "We In Here" or Hot Boys's "We On Fire". In the wake of Cash Money and Ruff Ryders's success, other labels are presenting themselves as families or Cosa Nostra-style syndicates. "You Are About To Witness A Dynasty Like No Other" proclaims the sticker on Jay-Z's new album, referring to his Roc-A-Fella label's proteges Beanie Siegel, Memphis Bleek, and Amil, while Murder Inc. has combined its roster into the Hot Boys-style supergroup The Murderers.

The idea of the rap group as a blood-brotherhood was pioneered in the mid-Nineties by the Wu-Tang Clan, the ten-strong band of MCs centered around producer the RZA. While the lyrics and cover art self-mythologized the group as warrior priests wielding arcane knowledge and encrypted language as weapons against power, the Wu-Tang Clan simultaneously operated as a shrewd entertainment corporation, signing its members to solo deals with different record companies and diversifying into all manner of Wu-branded merchandizing offshoots: clothing, a comic book, a website, the video-game Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style.  So iconic was the Clan's logo at the group's 1997 height of prestige and popularity that rap paper The Source could feel secure about using it as their cover image, rather than a recognizable celebrity face.

Wu-Tang's branding strategy was taken further still by Master P.'s label  No Limit, whose assembly-line turnover of releases all have  instantly recognisable cover art (garishly hyper-real "ghetto fabulous" tableaux created by design team Pen & Pixel) to match the identikit  New Orleans gangsta sound of the records.  Ironically, the Pen & Pixel look has been appropriated by countless second-division hardcore rap labels, hoping to get accidental sales from fans picking up unheard what they assume is a debut from the latest recruit to the "No Limit army". Master P. also goes in for diversification in a big way, building a business empire reputedly worth $361 million through No Limits toys, clothing, and a series of inexpensively made straight-to-video movies.

Influenced by Master P.'s acumen, Cash Money and Ruff Ryders have their own movies in production. And both labels have imitated No Limit's strategy of market saturation and hitting while you're hot. DMX has released three albums in barely more than eighteen months, and the first two months of 2000 has seen a flurry of Ruff Ryders debuts from The Lox and Drag-On, with a new Swizz Beatz compilation and Lox-man Jadakiss's own solo album soon to follow.

 Ruff Ryders and Cash Money have built their empires using techniques that are now a predictable procedures in the rap business. Reinforcing the all-for-one, one-for-all clan image, rappers from the same roster guest on each other's tracks; new artists are introduced to the public through cameo appearances in the single/video by the label's established stars. Cash Money have taken this twin strategy of cross-promotion and artist-development to the furthest extreme. Other rap artists will feature R&B singers or big-name rappers from other labels on their tracks in order to add more-stars-for-your-money sales appeal. But Cash Money's tracks never feature outsiders---the "guests" are always only other Cash Money artists.

 Still, it would be incorrect to suggest that hip hop's family values are just an ideological gloss for business realpolitik. The family is basically a microcosm of socialism, based around the same ideals like sharing, altruism, and self-sacrifice for the greater good.   Effectively, the rap clan works an  enclave of collectivism within capitalism's rapacious cut-throat competition, and as such it offers solace  and security in what would otherwise be a desolate moral and emotional void. Ruff Ryders's catchphrase  "Ryde or die" divides the world into a starkly opposed them and us: people you'd kill versus people you'd kill for/die for/ride into battle alongside. Taken from a "blacksploitation"-era cowboy movie, the name Ruff Ryders recalls the going-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory romanticism of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

Lyrically, DMX avoids two of gangsta rap's staples---flaunting wealth and abusing women-- to focus almost exclusively on loyalty, betrayal, and retribution. His yearning for a surrogate family is expressed through an obsession with dogs strikingly different from the incorrigibly lecherous canine persona adopted by George Clinton circa "Atomic Dog". DMX's use of the term "dog" to refer to himself and his clique stems from admiration for the way wild dogs run in packs and domesticated dogs give their owner's unconditional love. In song after song, DMX insists "I will die for my dogs". He imagines this canine fraternity becoming a kind of pedigreed dynasty: "My dogs, the beginning of this bloodline of mine".

DMX's doom-and-gloomy imagery--album titles like It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, songs like "The Omen"-- has as much in common with angst-wracked industrial and heavy metal artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Korn as with other rappers. A crucial aspect of his Gothic imagery is what the philosopher Michel Foucault called "the Medieval symbolics of blood", as seen in the title of DMX's second album Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood. Thicker than water but easily spilled,  "blood"  is a highly charged word in DMX's  vocabulary. Its  ambivalence condenses gangsta rap's violently polarized emotions, the way it's forever oscillating between love and hate, loyalty and skullduggery, unity and dog-eat-dog struggle.

Gangsta rappers have found a reflection of these hot-blooded passions in Hollywood's Mafia films, whose families disregard the broader society's morality and instead cleave to a privatized morality: a neo-Medieval ethics of loyalty and revenge that operates only in the domain of  kith and kin, plus bondsmen unrelated by blood but who have sworn fealty to the clan. With its code of honor among villains and its family structure, the idea of the Mafia  resonates with hardcore  rap partly because of the way it maps onto the street realities of gangs and turf wars.  But it's also because the idea of family offers a kind of unity that seems more tangible and grounded than allegiance either to the abstract, remote and problematic entity known as the United States of America, or any of the various forms of African-American nationalism. In rap, patriotism contracts to the compact and plausible dimensions of a clique, and usually one tied to a place---a project (like Cash Money's Magnolia neighbourhood in New Orleans), a borough, or at its most expansive, a city. As well being expressed territorially, loyalty is increasingly registered in quasi-genetic imagery--the family, the clan, the dynasty. [DMX would start a label called Bloodline Records]

The cinematic representation of Mafia history in films like The Godfather and Goodfellas often involves an ultimately fatal tension between family loyalty and business logic, as Medieval values imported from Sicily collide with American capitalism.  Clan elders are disrespected, bad blood sets brother against brother, rival families feud and go to war,  because conflicts arise over the new market opportunities represented by  drugs. In rap too there's a tension between the rhetoric of "til death do us part" fealty and the provisional, contractual reality of business relationships. Although The Lox were originally members of the Ruff Ryders milieu, the trio eagerly became henchmen of Puff Daddy, who signed the group to his Bad Boy label, altered their name (originally the Warlocks), persuaded them to tone down their hardcore street style, and coached them in writing radio-friendly songs. But when their debut album for Bad Boy failed to make them rich, the Lox defected, re-plighting their troth to Ruff Ryders, and releasing the  ghettocentric We Are The Streets this January. Other examples of rappers shifting allegiances between different labels/cliques include ex-Death Row artist Snoop Dogg signing on as a No Limit soldier and Eve originally being a protege of Dr. Dre's Aftermath label before affiliating to Ruff Ryders. All this suggests that rap operates less like feuding clans and more like another lucrative entertainment industry based around symbolic warfare, sports--where top players are hired guns and transfer their loyalties at the drop of a check.

Still, for some at least, the thick-like-blood rhetoric is for real. DMX, in particular, regards loyalty as a transcendent value. In a hyper-capitalistic world where market forces tear asunder all forms of solidarity and everybody has their price , he claims: "They do it for the dough/Me I do it for the love". In a skit on his third chart-topping album ... And Then There Was X, an unidentified hanger-on declares he'll do anything to get the money he desperately needs. DMX issues a stern reprimand: "Dog, you got to think about loyalty first, know wha' I'm saying? You got loyalty, money will come.  You got a lot to learn."

EVE, Ruff Ryders’ First Lady (Ruff Ryders/Interscope)
Village Voice, October 6th 1999

by Simon Reynolds

It was like the changing of the guard—that moment this summer when Missy's "She's A Bitch" flopped spectacularly while Eve's "What Ya Want" established its long thrall over BET and Hot 97. This wasn't just Eve Jeffers displacing Missy Elliott as "that next bitch" (as she describes herself in her album's notes), it was the defeat of Timbaland by Swizz Beatz, chief producer for the Yonkers label/MC clan Ruff Ryders. Indeed, there was a definite hint of slay-me-not Oedipal anxiety when Timbaland paternalistically bigged up Swizz in The Source as the only producer he checked for.

Like that other new beat pretender She'k spere (TLC, Destiny's Child), Swizz is rhythmatically a son of Timbaland, though; both take the latter's trademark microsyncopations and hiccuping hesitations and make them even more fiddly and off-kilter. The flagship single off the Ruff Ryders' Ryde or Die, Vol. 1 compilation, "What Ya Want" worked as a perfect advertisement for self—Eve pushing herself forward both as look-don't-touch fantasy object (for male rap fans) and "the one to fear" (for rival female rappers), Swizz polyrhythmically announcing the Ruff Ryders sound as "changing the game." The ultra-languid groove of "What Ya Want"—a slinky lattice of Latin percussion and piano—dovetails perfectly with Eve's seductively supercilious flow.

"Gotta Man," the first single from Eve's debut album (which entered the Billboard pop charts at No. 1 a few weeks ago) is even more striking. It's so sparse, so deceptively simple, there's almost nothing to it: a loping, falter-funk beat, a pre-orgasmic female moan like the lowing of a lovesick cow, and a plangent mandolin refrain doubled at the chorus by a singsongy schoolgirl vocal with the indelibly catchy play ground chant quality of "The Clapping Song," "Double Dutch," or "Iko Iko." "Gotta" is a chip off the same block as Swizz's other smash production of the moment, Jay-Z's love song to diamonds "Girl's Best Friend"—similar clip-clop rhythm and ultrafeminine vocal hook, but even more so-wrong- it's-right sounding. With its asymmetrical beat-loop and staccato Morse code synth-riff, "Girl's Best Friend" could al most be a hip-house or early rave track, some thing by Shut Up And Dance or 4 Hero from 1990—there's that same makeshift, threshold-of-disintegration quality.

Exquisitely blending supple lilt and stilted lurch, "Gotta Man" and "Girl's Best Friend" are the most peculiar black pop hits since Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody?" So it's a little disappointing that nothing else on Eve's debut approaches their idiosyncrasy and charm. Most of Ruff Ryders' First Lady sounds like Swizz's productions for DMX—that grimy, "ugly" sound that defines street (as opposed to under ground) hip hop in 1999. The formula is crude but effective: muddy bass thump, kick drums impacting like low blows, snares like syncopated flurries of punches to the head, and the Hook. Usually played on keyboards (Swizz prides himself on not using samples) and exuding that cheap-and-nasty '80s-digital odor, the Hook ranges from the bleat of a traumatized pocket calculator, to spindly semi-melodies like ad jingles or videogame muzik, to sub–Harold Faltermeyer synthstrumental refrains of the sort you'd hear in a pre-Hollywood Jackie Chan movie, to riffs that oddly recall early-'80s hard core techno, to random-sounding, atonal trills like mice scampering on Schoenberg's piano.

There have been hints that First Lady is not exactly the record Eve intended to make—one early interview promised a Lauryn Hill –style mélange of styles and collaborations with multiple producers. But Swizz wound up producing almost all of it—a putsch that might explain his low placement in Eve's sleeve-note thank-you list, after virtually everybody else involved in the record, including the team who designed the sleeve. And you can sorta see why she might be pissed. From the testosterone-soaked production to the title Ruff Ryders' First Lady itself, Eve is subsumed within her crew's identity. Although she holds her own amid the gruff-voiced brawl of posse cuts like "Scenario 2000," she's had to play down what was so unusual about "What Ya Want"—the sultry skrewface poise, the sweatless cool—in favor of a more in-yer-face, tomboy raucousness.

At a time when hardcore rap's sole acknowledged value is flow (verbal and cash), Eve is more than capable of running with the boys, though. Rhyming with an impressive blend of smooth 'n' vicious, she finds the requisite new twists to the standard-issue thematic repertoire: boasts, threats, brand-name checks, click salutes, and territorial boosterism (like her Illadelphian anthem "Philly, Philly," which is preceded by a nativist-verging-on-racist skit caricaturing a Bangladeshi immigrant who can't make a cheese steak correctly). Predict ably if entertainingly, Eve righteously scourges inadequates and haters, blasting "little-dick niggaz" and "fake-ass bitches" in "Let's Talk About," and in "Stuck Up" humiliating a suitor with "insufficient funds" and an unfortunate allegiance to last year's designer goodies. "Ain't Got No Dough" is the most sonically arresting track after "Gotta Man," an amalgam of con temporary r&b beats, electro high hats, and scratching (skids and disconcerting decelerations, like your turntable keeps switching off midbeat). Lyrically, though, it's just a late entry in 1999's quasi-feminist trend of divas trashing "broke-ass niggaz." The skit "Chokie Nikes" similarly savages a scrub with a fake Rolex, chronic halitosis, and poor chat-up technique. And while the anti-wifebashing "Love Is Blind" could be construed as pro-empowerment by those looking for strong women in hip hop (what other kind could there be, though, rap not exactly being a haven for the shy or self-doubting?), Eve seems as disgusted by her girl friend's weakness in sticking with her abusive man as by the perpetrator's brutality.

Basically, Eve's persona is the thug's moll. As guest rapper DMX puts it in "Dog Match," "behind every real dog there's that bitch behind him"—you'n'me–against-the-world, Bonnie & Clyde romanticism undercut somewhat by the chorus's marrowcurdling image of "paramedics on your chest/pushing and breathing." (The couple that slays together, stays together?) By far the best of First Lady's (th)ugly tracks is "Maniac." Driven by rowdy call-and-response and a TV sports–style triumphant synth-horn fanfare, the song thrillingly evokes the bristling alpha-male energy of a nightclub. It's a milieu through which Eve moves confidently, flirting with the scene's "top dog," getting "drunker than a muthafucker," and finally cutting in line for the ladies' room. The image of Eve gloating as she leaves a long line of "chicks hating" in her wake says something about the bitch-eat-bitch "reality" that rap in 1999 so doggedly represents. And it says something about Eve herself—in the contrast between the originality of the rhyme versus the petty triumph of incivility it celebrates.

JAY-Z, Vol. 3... Life and Times of S.Carter
DMX,And Then There Was X
JUVENILE, Tha G-Code
THE LOX, We Are The Streets
Uncut, May 2000

by Simon Reynolds


Critics love lost causes. It’s almost part of the job description. At a certain point, though, doggedly insisting “this should be pop, not that chart crap” gets counterproductive, blinding you to vital things going on in the world of the stuff that sells. It’s particularly problematic with rap, a megabuck entertainment industry these days, but still motored by the cruel fluctuations of popular desire, aka “the streets”. Predictably, last year’s critics polls endorsed such “lost causes” as the Roots and Prince Paul/Handsome Boy Modelling School, and overlooked huge-selling records by DMX and Eve, Lil Wayne and Hot Boys, despite the fact that the two labels/clans to which these artists are affiliated (Ruff Ryders and Cash Money) are at the forefront of a creative upsurge in hardcore rap. Yo, reality check: a bitter pill to swallow, but the truth is that Nineties rap was shaped not by 3 Feet High or Fear of A Black Planet (twin totems of the critic-cherished “lost golden age of 1988-91), but by NWA’s Efil4zaggin and Notorious BIG’s Ready To Die. Similarly, the directness of Tupac has proved far more influential than any Wu-Tang clansman’s virtuoso encryption skillz.

These new platinum-selling monsters by Ruff Ryders’ DMX, Cash Money’s Juvenile, and Jay-Z (don of his own dynasty, Roc-A-Fella) completely shred the tired critical line: major label = formula and indie (aka “undieground”) = inventive. Take Jay-Z's single "Do It Again": Rockwilder's production as harsh and mechanistic as a track by Jeff Mills, just a melody-free spasm of sub-bass, a nagging blurt of computer-in-distress bleeps, and an asymmetrical loop of punishing kicks and snares. Not for nothing does the track start with the warning: “it’s about to get real ugly in here”. Street rap like Jay-Z’s is unpretty in another sense. Like the Swans circa Greed, the lyrics--an interminable catalogue of boasts, threats and flaunted wealth--offer an X-Ray view of capitalism’s primary drives of will-to-power, alpha-male display and ravenous appetite. But where Gira’s vision was a Beckett-style dehumanized hell of domination/submission, Jay-Z and Juvenile make like they actually enjoy living like this. Lyrically, “Do It Again” revels in the playa's nightly cycle of clubbing, drinking, pulling, and taking the ho home: "6-AM I be digging her out/6-15 I be kicking her out". But the music (tres Swans, actually) makes it sound like a treadmill grind.

As superthugs go, DMX is the most interesting, because he doesn't glamorize the gangsta lifestyle. Produced by Ruff Ryders chief soundboy Swizz Beatz, "One More Road To Cross" has the accursed, burdened heft of Blacks Sabbath and Flag--a perfect fit for DMX's stoic description of a carefully planned liquor store heist that goes bloodily wrong. "The Professional" is a bleak glimpse into the mind of a hired assassin ("Shit ain't go too well/THAT'S MY LIFE/Know I'm going to hell/THAT'S MY LIFE") while the betrayal-and-retribution themed "Here We Go Again" starts with the insuperably fatigued murmur "Same old shit, dog/Just a different day". This vision of thug life as agony, repetition, and endurance is communicated as much through DMX's hoarse rasping timbre (pure Ozzy/Rollins) and his flow (alternating between pay-close-attention-this-is-hard-earned-knowledge-I'm-sharing slow to rapid-fire blurts like he's got too much pain to cram into the rhyme-scheme's stanzas.)

The Ruff Ryders camp has its moments of exuberance, like the rowdy call-and-response clamor and bruising bass-bounce of The Lox's "Wild Out" . It’s almost exhilirating enough to make you forget socially irresponsible couplets like "if a nigga step on your goddamn shoes/fuck him up/WILD OUT!!!"--virtually incitement to over-act to any perceived insult or threat. Lyrically, no two ways about it, street rap is pure evil: spiritually bankrupt, in thrall to false consciousness (delusions like “crime pays” and “some gangstas stay on top for ever”) and basically no advance on the black nihilism and commodity-fetishism of Schooly D circa 1986’s “PSK” and “Gucci Time”.

Word-wise the creativity resides in the endless, black-humorous twists on murder/money/misogyny. Jay-Z’s OG shtick pukes up some of his wittiest wordplay. In “Do It Again” he’s so iced-out with diamond-encrusted jewelry , his “wrists’s frostbit minus two degrees”, while “S. Carter” turns the rapper’s real name into the jeering chorus: “S dot carter/you must try harder/competition is NADA!”

Juvenile’s old-head-on-young-shoulders, worldly and slight-weary persona is much easier to warm to than Jay-Z’s richer-than-thou condescension. It helps, too, that Cash Money’s trackmaster, Mannie Fresh, is rap’s most creative producer right now, merging the joyous electro-style bass-boom and ear-tickling triple-time hi-hats of New Orleans bounce with incongruous stuff--baroque pseudo-classical synth-melodies, jazz-fusion guitar licks, techno stabs and textures. Fresh used to make house tracks with Chicago pioneer Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley. There’s been a bizarre convergence between rave and rap in the last year: Jay-Z’s "Snoopy Track" sees Timbaland blaring Numan-meets-Beltram synth-bombast, while his Swizz-produced “Girls Best Friend” has the off-kilter lurch of 4 Hero’s early breakbeat hardcore.

On the latest Ruff Ryder product, the Lox’s album, though, Swizz’s sample-free digital synth sound (theme-from-Rocky-style triumphal fanfares, spindly videogame semi-tunes, atonal keyboard trills) is sounding a little threadbare from over-use. The Lox don’t help with lines as blunt as “I turn your face into pudding”, “I’ma make a nigga leak”, and the niggativity nadir of call-that-a-worldview? couplet “all I know is drugs and guns and plenty of weed/and that bitches suck dick and niggas’ll bleed”.

The trouble with hardcore rap is that while producers keep coming up with sonic surprises, the MCs face a tougher challenge: how many different ways can you say “I don’t give a fuck”?