DMX - Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood Album Review

The first thing to understand is how little the rest of the genre sounded like this in 1998. Rap at the top of the charts was polished, sample-heavy and built for the club, and DMX answered with a voice that growled, begged and prayed within the same song. His delivery is the album's real engine: a rasp that seems to start in his chest, short bursts of breath used like punctuation, and a habit of dropping from a bark into a near-whisper to make a threat sound more personal. Nobody else was willing to sound that exposed on a hard record, and it is the reason the album held up as a template for later street rappers who wanted a voice with both menace and wounds.

The production is where the case against the consensus starts. Swizz Beatz produces most of the record, along with PK, Irv Gotti and Dat Nigga Reb, DJ Shok and Dame Grease. His sound is distinct and instantly recognizable, built on skeletal synth lines and drums with a heavy bounce. It gives the project an identity that few big-budget rap albums of the period could claim.

But the identity is narrow. A record that leans on one producer's palette this heavily can feel like a long sequence of variations on a single beat, and several of the middle tracks do. The tracks that break the pattern, the ones built on samples from Taana Gardner and Grover Washington Jr, are noticeably the ones with room to breathe.

The writing is better than its reputation and weaker than the performance. DMX is a vivid, plainspoken lyricist who finds a repeated phrase, leans into it, and lets the voice do the rest. His best verses are about loyalty, faith and rage, held together by a personal sense of being at war with himself, and they gain force because they are not decorated. The weakness is that he often repeats a hook and a stance for the whole length of a song instead of developing it. On the lower-tier cuts, the effect is a lot of shouting around not much new information.

The guest list reflects the Ruff Ryders world as it was then. Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX, Drag-On, Mary J. Blige, Marilyn Manson and Jay-Z all appear, and the best of them are used to change the temperature of the record instead of to pad it. The Blige duet is the clearest example of how the album uses a melodic voice to soften his edges, and the Manson collaboration stretches the horror-movie side of his persona. The record can feel like a family reunion that has run long.

The most concrete weakness is the skits and the filler. Two skits fall in the first three tracks, and on a 16-track album they spend time on atmosphere that adds no music. A debut that arrived in the spring and a follow-up at the end of the year is also the sort of schedule that explains why a few songs sound like extensions of ideas already finished on the first record. It is not a big flaw, but it limits how far the album can climb.

The sequence opens on attitude and spends its first third establishing the stance. After the intro, the record moves quickly into the hardest material, and the Swizz Beatz bounce gives the early tracks a lot of momentum. The pacing is the album's most useful quality: songs are long, often over four minutes, but the beats are propulsive enough that the length rarely feels like a drag.

The middle is where the structure shows its seams. The album runs through posse cuts, a duet, a horror-movie sequel and a couple of introspective turns, and the transitions between them are rough. The change from a loud group record into a quiet, melodic confessional lands harder than it should, partly because the rest of the album gives you no signal that a change is coming. That is not a fatal flaw. It makes the record feel like a live set more than a planned arc, and that suits an artist whose power came from unpredictability. But it keeps the album from building an emotional line the way the debut did.

The final stretch is the best-judged part. After a long run of aggression, the record turns toward confession and then toward prayer, and it closes on Ready to Meet Him, a seven-minute track that lets the volume drop and the spiritual side of the persona take over. The idea of ending a violent record with a prayer was already part of his identity, and here it works as a release rather than a gimmick. The only other track worth singling out for sequencing is the title song, which arrives late enough to feel like the point the whole album has been circling.

Is the length earned? Mostly. At 16 tracks, two of them skits, the album is longer than it needs to be in the middle and shorter than it feels at the end. A tighter edit would drop a couple of the bouncier Swizz tracks and keep the stretch that moves from heartbreak to prayer. What survives is a record whose best sequence of songs is memorable, and whose weakest sequence is still carried by a voice that sounds like it is about to break.

Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood sits just below It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, and the gap is deliberate. The debut had more range, a stranger sense of space and a clearer emotional line, which is why it rates 8.3 on this site. This album is the sharper statement of style and the more commercial one, and it gives up some depth for it. Its position in the catalog is as the record that fixed the DMX persona in place, and that is a real distinction, even if it is not the same as being the best.

The lineage runs in both directions. The album learned from the Wu-Tang and Mobb Deep era of dark, hard New York rap, and it answered the shinier mainstream rap of the moment by refusing to polish anything. Ruff Ryders and Swizz Beatz went on to influence a decade of street rap, and the combination of a prayer and a threat in one voice is still audible in the way later rappers handle pain.

It is for listeners who want to hear DMX at the peak of his commercial reach, for fans of Jadakiss, Styles P and the rest of the crew, and for anyone curious how 1998 street rap sounded when it was selling like pop. It is not for listeners who need dense lyrical construction or varied production, and it is not the right entry point for someone who has never heard the debut.

Time has been kind to the best of it. The posse cuts and the confessional songs have survived as touchstones, while some of the middle has settled into the background of his catalog. Triple-platinum sales and three weeks at number one kept it in the culture, but what keeps it relevant is the voice.

Start with Slippin', the melodic and downcast center of the record, then Blackout for the Jay-Z and LOX meeting, and Ready to Meet Him for the prayer. For what to hear next, go to the debut It's Dark and Hell Is Hot first, and then to ...And Then There Was X, which is the better follow-up for hearing what he could do with a sharper focus. The record is best remembered as the one on which DMX proved he could be loud and honest at the same time, and the proof is in the last seven minutes.