He speaks candidly and clearly, only pausing and getting choked up when he talks about missing his kids. His hair and beard are grown out, the corners of his hairline receding into two deep V’s. DMX wears a black-and-white striped uniform with a pink undershirt, an infamous visual trademark from Joe Arpaio’s reign as the local sheriff. “I said, ‘You know what? This has to be God’s country.’ ”ĭuring that 2009 interview, the reporter asks him questions from across a table in the visitation room of a Maricopa County jail. “It was at that point that I fell in love with Arizona,” DMX would later say in an interview with a local news affiliate. Four cars lined up, hazard lights blinking, and DMX’s crew stood on the side of the road, watching a new day begin over the Sonoran Desert. and the sun was starting to rise, the horizon in front of him transforming from deep purple to bright orange. The environment was the opposite of where DMX had come from, far from the tall project buildings that kept one side of the street shaded.Įarly one morning, on the way back from recording all night at Phoenix’s Chaton Studios, DMX pulled over on the highway. It wasn’t uncommon to pull up to a stoplight and see a pack of coyotes heading off toward the mountains. This was before Phoenix’s outer suburbs had been developed his exit was the last one on a stretch of highway that was still being built. They would pack buckets of chicken, fill a cooler with beer, strap rifles to their four-wheelers, and ride out into the desert for hours until there was nothing around them but soil and sky. Even after late nights, he would wake up early and sit by the pool, reading the Bible. Along with his go-to producers, his road managers, and his close friends - all the people who made sure his early albums came together - he rented a few houses in a quiet neighborhood in Scottsdale. Now the whole world wanted a piece of X.Īfter three years of nonstop movement, DMX found space to reflect in the desert. He used to be feared in his own neighborhood in Yonkers, New York - someone people would avoid when they saw him coming around the corner with his dog. Just a few years before, Puff Daddy had said DMX was unmarketable. His single “Party Up (Up in Here)” was breaking down the door to a new demographic of fans. He had channeled all the pain of his first three decades on Earth, all the rhymes that had been filling up the pages of his notebooks for years, into three multiplatinum albums. By then, he had already become an unlikely superstar, a barking battle rapper turned crossover sensation. In 2001, DMX went to Arizona to record his fourth album.
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