In his 2002 autobiography, E.A.R.L., DMX likened his entrance into the studio that day to the parting of the Red Sea: All the neighborhood rappers and hangers-on who had assembled moved out of the way when he arrived. The next day, Gotti brought the label heads to Powerhouse Studios. With X’s jaw wired shut, Gotti wanted to wait a few weeks before showing off the rapper, but X said it didn’t matter-he’d trained himself to rap through the wires. X had just had his jaw broken in a fight, a consequence of his main means of making money at the time: stickups.
There was one problem with Gotti’s plan, however. Gotti thought hip-hop needed to go back to the streets, and he had just the artist to take it there: DMX-short for “Dark Man X”-a rapper who had been through the industry wringer once already but was finding new life through mixtape freestyles. At Def Jam, which had hit a down period by the mid-’90s, a young hotshot A&R named Irv Gotti was trying to convince his bosses, Lyor Cohen and Kevin Liles, that they needed to move in the opposite direction. Rival labels sought to keep pace by pumping out smooth, transparently commercial crossover attempts that all failed to match Bad Boy’s success. It was the peak of rap’s shiny-suit era, when Puff Daddy and Bad Boy’s brand of glossy hip-hop ruled the charts. Onlookers remember the sound of metal breaking, but on a night in Yonkers, New York, in 1997, it was more the sound of decades of abuse, neglect, and struggle combusting.
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