A little Rap Story

So this is happening on the internet today.

It's a website of fan support for DMX, who is once again in the media spotlight for something other than amazing talent. Now I don't think anyone can make someone else get sober. You can get them clean for a while, but unless addict believes in the change for themselves, there is nothing that won't stop them from relapsing. Hell, believing in the change doesn't even insure that they won't relapse. Addiction is a powerful thing. But I do believe in showing *detached* support.

It is hard for me to see one of my heroes going through these problems. Not only because it reminds how easily others in my life have fallen, but because of the men in the world that I know with addictions, DMX is truly, one of the few that I hoped would be able to embrace sobriety and have it stick. I'm not mad or disappointed (or I try not to be) because I get that addiction doesn't work on normal timetables. But damn, I wouldn't be who I AM if it wasn't for It's Dark and Hell Is Hot and Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood.

So the story goes I was 13 or 14 and so depressed that I would sleep for 15 hours a day, at that age it mean that I woke up to go to school, came home, and went to bed. I had to be urged into eating and sometimes I skipped meals. I seemed happy to a lot of people but then I've always been a semi-functional depressant. And these two albums where the soundtrack of my dreams. I listened to them over and over. And when I couldn't' express my anger at the betrayals and disappoinments in my own life, the graphic violence of X's songs allowed me to displace myself into this whole other world. It was like a transcendent experience. I truly believe God brought me to that music because it taught me how to feel again (if you know stories about my childhood the numbness makes more sense.)

I knew I wanted to do hip-hop studies since I was a senior in high school. As soon as I discovered that there was a place in academia (which I planned to go into since the 7th grade as I figured that education would be my key to escape the pain of my childhood) to talk about the importance of the music, that people would listen to me talk for hours about the amazing lyrical feats of the artist that I loved...I was HOOKED. Then I got to college and realized no one wanted a girl like me (who sounded like I was from a nice middle class suburban family) to talk about the songs that I wanted to talk about. Everyone wanted me to write another treatise about what new-wave feminism thought of this trite, misogynistic, commercial (a bad word), deformation of the art of rap.

I couldn't write that, I still can't. And I spent/spend my days thinking about why the world isn't ready for educated Black women to love hardcore, so-called gangster rap. I picked up the pen to write about hip-hop, to write academically at all, for the first time to write about X, to write about the politics of anger, to write about the travesty that is the way that most academics write about gangster/hardcore hip hop.

By the time I was at a place where I could write my own paper topics in college, X was already on his whirlwind jail tour. He was the butt of many a crackhead joke and for many had lost all rights to respect from hip-hop fans. And it hurt so much. It hurts even more to be writing from a place where I'm finally working on my mental health issues and starting on the journey of my life which will always, I believe, involve a struggle with depression. And to see the man whose words have gotten me through sooo many dark times to be still laid so low by his own demons.

DMX gave God back to me. By the time I was 13 I was convinced that She* couldn't love someone like me, that all evidence point towards a truth in much of the hate speech I heard growing up about God's relationship to 'evil homosexuals.' I'm not saying X disagrees with that message (which still saddens me to this day) but I believed him when he wrote about God loving even the most despised of us. One of my most prized possessions in the world is a copy of a DMX prayer that my older sister painted for me when I went off to college. It goes everywhere with me and always has a place of prominence in my home.

So with that I turn it over to God. Asking that He keeps Her hands on X through all of this and hoping that God will grant him the gift of sobriety just one more time (and one more time after that.)


*Sidenote because I know it's confusing: I don't believe that God has a specific gender so I switch up the pronouns even mid sentence. I am also old school (sometimes) in that I capitalize the G and any pronouns that do refer to the Higher Power (who I choose to call God.)