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      DMX, Rapper Who Dominated Billboard Charts, Dies at 50

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      He released a string of No. 1 albums that reflected his gritty past and featured a gruff and unmistakable lyrical style.Earl Simmons, the snarling yet soulful rapper known as DMX, who had a string of No. 1 albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s but whose personal struggles eventually rivaled his lyrical prowess, died on Friday in White Plains, N.Y. He was 50.His family announced the death in a statement. He had been on life support at White Plains Hospital after suffering what his family called “a catastrophic cardiac arrest” a week earlier.“Earl was a warrior who fought till the very end,” the Simmons family said. “He loved his family with all of his heart, and we cherish the times we spent with him.”On April 2, Mr. Simmons had a heart attack at his home in White Plains. In the days that followed, his representatives said he was on life support “in a vegetative state.” Outside of the hospital, family and friends gathered with hundreds of fans, playing DMX’s music aloud and praying, holding up their arms in the shape of an X.Mr. Simmons’s music was often menacing and dark, with the occasional nod to Christian spirituality. He committed crimes, served time in different correctional institutions and battled addiction long before he released an album, and his troubled past informed the gritty content and inimitable delivery of his rhymes.He barked over the chorus of “Get at Me Dog,” the breakout single from his 1998 debut album, “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot.”“His throat seems to hold a fuzzbox and a foghorn, and between songs he growled and barked,” Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote of a Simmons concert performance in 2000. “In his raps, the gangsta life is a living hell, a constant test of loyalty and resolve.”He rapped with an explosive cadence on “Party Up (Up in Here),” the big hit from his 1999 album “ … And Then There Was X”; raw braggadocio on “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” a tribute to his record label on his 1998 debut album, “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot”; and a more introspective, brooding delivery on “Damien,” a story about making a murderous bargain with a demonic benefactor.“Why is it every move I make turns out to be a bad one?” Mr. Simmons asks in “Damien.” “Where’s my guardian angel? Need one, wish I had one.”Mr. Simmons, who sold millions of records and was nominated for three Grammy Awards, was the first musician whose first five albums reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. He was the standout artist on the Ruff Ryders label, often rapping over tracks by the star D.J. and producer Swizz Beatz. Rappers like Eve, Drag-On and the Lox, a group made up of Jadakiss, Styles P and Sheek Louch, also recorded on the label.Mr. Simmons was known for electrifying concert audiences. In 2000, the critic Elvis Mitchell wrote in The Times about his “remarkable and combative stage presence” in the concert documentary “Backstage,” which followed him and rappers like Jay-Z and Redman on the 1999 “Hard Knock Life” tour.“Bombastic and hot-blooded, he holds court in a singular fashion, exercising sheer force of will to pull the spotlight down on himself and demanding the crowd’s attention,” Mr. Mitchell wrote.Mr. Simmons starred with the rappers Nas and Method Man in Hype Williams’s 1998 gangster film, “Belly”; appeared in the 2000 action movie “Romeo Must Die” with Jet Li and the R&B singer Aaliyah; and starred with Steven Seagal in the 2001 action film “Exit Wounds.” The BET cable channel provided a closer look at his personal life with the 2006 reality series “DMX: Soul of a Man.”The macho, streetwise persona Mr. Simmons projected in his music was reinforced by repeated arrests on charges including fraud, assault, weapons possession, narcotics possession and driving under the influence.He served jail time after pleading guilty in 2008 to animal cruelty, drug possession and theft; in 2018 he was sentenced to a year in prison for tax evasion.He released several more albums over the years, including “Grand Champ” (2003) and “Undisputed” (2012). But with his frequent run-ins with the law, he never regained the success of his earlier days.DMX performing in New York in 2012. His long struggle with drugs, the bleak circumstances of his childhood and their impact on his life informed his music.Chad Batka for The New York TimesBorn in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on Dec. 18, 1970, Earl Simmons was the first and only child of Arnett Simmons and Joe Barker. He grew up in Yonkers, a city just north of the Bronx that became a hotbed of racial tension in the 1980s.His father was an itinerant artist whom he rarely saw, and his mother struggled to raise him and his half sister Bonita in a violent neighborhood. In his memoir, “E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX” (2002, with Smokey D. Fontaine), he wrote that there was often little food at home while he was growing up and that as a precocious, hot-tempered and disobedient child, he was often beaten by his mother and her lovers. (Information on his survivors was not immediately available.)Mr. Simmons turned to street crime as he grew older, spending much of his childhood and teenage years in group homes or juvenile detention facilities, where, he wrote, he sometimes faced solitary confinement. He became an adept car thief and robber, he said, often using vicious dogs to intimidate victims.“I was straight stickup,” Mr. Simmons wrote. “I’d rob three times a day: before school, after school and on the late night.”In the late 1980s he started performing as a beatboxer, creating beats using only his mouth, with a local rapper named Ready Ron. (He took the name DMX from the Oberheim DMX drum machine, a model popular in the 1980s.) He said he was 14 when Ready Ron introduced him to crack cocaine by passing him what Mr. Simmons thought was marijuana.“I later found out that he laced the blunt with crack,” Mr. Simmons told the rapper Talib Kweli in an interview last year. “Why would you do that to a child?” He became addicted to it.His long struggle with drugs, his bleak childhood and their impact on his life informed his music — he titled a 2001 album “The Great Depression” — and many of his most swaggering songs conveyed hints of lingering trauma.“All I know is pain/All I feel is rain/How can I maintain?” he raps near the start of “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem.”In 1997 he was featured, along with Method Man, Redman, Master P and Canibus, on the LL Cool J song “4, 3, 2, 1.” He was also on Mase’s “24 Hrs. to Live” and, with Lil’ Kim, the Lox’s “Money, Power, Respect.” Those high-profile guest appearances led to a contract with Def Jam, Ruff Ryders’ parent company; his first two albums came out in 1998.Before breaking through as a rap star, Mr. Simmons made a name for himself as a nasty battle rapper in the early 1990s.“I always made it personal,” he wrote in his memoir. “Nothing was too rude or vicious for me because I didn’t care.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. 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      Prince’s Unearthed, Disillusioned Funk, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Doja Cat featuring SZA, Twenty One Pilots and Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Prince, ‘Welcome 2 America’Prince recorded an album called “Welcome 2 America” in 2010, but shelved it before his death in 2016; his estate will release it in July. Maybe Prince decided the album was too bleak. Its title song is ominous, funky, seemingly improvisational and deeply cynical about an era of misinformation, exploitation and distraction. A pithy, stop-start bass line leaves space for dissonant little solos, while Prince’s vocals are deadpan spoken words: “Truth is a new minority.” He’s answered by women singing precise, jazzy harmonies and layering on more messages: “Land of the free, home of the brave,” they sing with a swinging lilt. “Oops, I mean, land of the free, home of the slave.” JON PARELESDoja Cat featuring SZA, ‘Kiss Me More’The first single from the forthcoming Doja Cat album “Planet Her” features SZA and mixes the breeze of lite 1980s funk with the bawdiness of 2020s hip-hop, a juggling act that Doja Cat has pioneered, if not trademarked, by now. JON CARAMANICAMajid Jordan, ‘Waves of Blue’Crisply ecstatic new-wave R&B from the Toronto duo Majid Jordan. What’s most impressive about “Waves of Blue,” besides its spot on texture, is its modesty — the singer Majid Al Maskati doesn’t over-sing to emphasize his point, and the producer Jordan Ullman builds synths like pillars, unostentatiously building a whole world. CARAMANICATwenty One Pilots, ‘Shy Away’“Shy Away,” the first song from a May album called “Scaled and Icy” from the genre-agnostic Ohio duo Twenty One Pilots, starts off as jittery electro before expanding into the dreamy, arms-outstretched pop that keeps arenas and hearts full. There’s a Strokesian energy to the track, but the lyrics don’t bristle with angst; they (not so gently) nudge a loved one to start on a new path. CARYN GANZMiguel, ‘So I Lie’Over the last decade, Miguel has placed his darkest thoughts and most experimental music on his series of “Art Dealer Chic” EPs; he released “Art Dealer Chic Vol. 4” on Friday. In “So I Lie,” he sings, in a soulful falsetto, about fear, pressure, and alienation from himself: “I can barely breathe, treading water/Smile on my face while I’m turning blue/Nobody cares, just work harder/I do what I can to avoid the truth.” The chorus, repeating, “Lie, lie, lie,” would almost be jaunty if it weren’t surrounded in swampy rhythms, wordless voices and hollow echoes, like all the anxieties he can’t evade. PARELESCoultrain, ‘The Essentials’A singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist hailing from St. Louis, Aaron Michael Frison has been making music as Coultrain for well over a decade, pulling together what sounds like a hybrid of the early 2000s Soulquarian scene, the spiritual jazz of Lonnie Liston Smith and the kind of dusty old Southern soul records that you’d find hiding in the dollar bin. On “The Essentials,” from his new album, “Phantasmagoria,” over a glutinous backing of synths, vocal overdubs, bass and drums, he professes his commitment (“’Cause there’s no other for me/It ain’t no coincidence that you reflect my eyes”) before dipping into a wily rap verse and capping things with a mystical choral passage that sounds a note of uncertainty: “I wish I could promise forever/If I could promise forever/I would promise forever to you,” he sings, the layers of his voice all in a conversation with each other. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi, ‘Calling Me Home’Looming mortality becomes a refuge in “Calling Me Home,” written by the celebrated old-timey singer Alice Gerrard. It’s the sentiment of a man on his deathbed: “I miss my friends of yesterday.” The song provides the title for “They’re Calling Me Home,” the new album by the opera-trained singer, fiddler, banjo player and traditional-music explorer (and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient) Rhiannon Giddens with her partner, the early music expert Francesco Turrisi. She sings it in long-breathed lines, sometimes ended in Appalachian yips, accompanied by stark, unyielding drones, as if she’s a lone voice making itself heard before eternity. PARELESKat & Alex, ‘Heartbreak Tour’An earnest power country slow-burner from the new duo Kat & Alex, who competed on “American Idol” last year, and who sing in both Spanish and English (though not here), “Heartbreak Tour” is delivered with soul music conviction and just the right touch of melodrama. CARAMANICAMon Laferte featuring Gloria Trevi, ‘La Mujer’The Chilean singer Mon Laferte infuses vintage styles with up-to-date sentiments and fierce attitude. Her new album, “Seis,” looks toward Mexican music, and she shares “La Mujer” (“The Woman”) with one of her idols: the Mexican singer and songwriter Gloria Trevi. They trade verses and share choruses in a bolero with punchy organ chords and rowdy horns, escalating from sultry self-confidence to unbridled fury at a man who’s getting decisively dumped: “Goodbye, sad coward,” is Laferte’s final sneer. PARELESQueen Naija featuring Ari Lennox, ‘Set Him Up’Over a slow-motion strut of a bass line and a glass of chardonnay in the lyrics, Queen Naija and Ari Lennox sweetly intertwine their voices, enjoying each other’s explicit details about their latest hookups. Then they realize it’s the same guy — and the conversation turns into a conspiracy to “Set Him Up.” Female solidarity reigns. PARELESSteve Slagle, ‘We Release’Riding a slick, whipsaw groove, “We Release” casually calls back to a mainstream jazz sound from the 1970s, while serving as a proud opening shot for the saxophonist Steve Slagle’s new album, “Nascentia.” Now 69, he composed and recorded all the material during the coronavirus pandemic, providing him a project and a jolt of energy amid trying times. An unerring optimism of spirit is palpable throughout, as he’s joined here by a number of fellow jazz veterans: Jeremy Pelt on trumpet, Clark Gayton on trombone, Bruce Barth on piano, Ugonna Okegwo on bass and Jason Tiemann on drums. RUSSONELLO More

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      DMX Songs: Hear 10 Songs That Showed His Range

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      The gruff, evocative Yonkers rapper was a singular talent in hip-hop. He died on Friday after suffering what his family called “a catastrophic cardiac arrest” a week earlier.Earl Simmons, the gruff, evocative rapper from Yonkers, N.Y., better known as DMX, died on Friday at 50. He spent his final days on life support at White Plains Hospital in Westchester County after suffering a heart attack on April 2.DMX was one of the most recognizable M.C.s in the late 1990s and early 2000s, years when hardcore New York rap could still stake a claim as hip-hop’s central concern.Signed to Def Jam Recordings, his first five albums all debuted at No. 1, a feat no rapper has matched before or since. DMX cut a unique figure for a superstar rapper: He’d battle his inner demons using the horror-centric imagery beloved by heavy metal bands, but his albums reliably offered heartfelt, often a cappella, prayers to God. He made giant pop crossover hits, but they bubbled with wildly vivid threats better suited for a grindhouse theater. His shout-rap energy made him a favorite in the outwardly angsty era of Woodstock ’99 and the nü-metal band Korn’s Family Values Tour, but he was also a shirtless sex symbol moonlighting as an actor.Here’s a small sampling of an artist with a range that encompassed the shocking, the sincere and the simply incredible. (Listen on Spotify here.)‘Born Loser’ (1993)After years spent as a ruthless battle rapper, mixtape hustler and early beneficiary of The Source magazine’s Unsigned Hype column, DMX and the nascent Ruff Ryders label released the rarely heard “Born Loser” on a handful of 12-inch records. Soon after, “Born Loser” became the lone song released as part of DMX’s false start with Columbia Records. Both DMX and the rapper K-Solo had claimed a rhyme style where individual words in bars are spelled out. For example, on his 1990 hit “Spellbound,” K-Solo raps “I s-p-e-l-l very w-e-l-l/I only spell so all can t-e-l-l.” After the success of “Spellbound,” DMX wrote this track while fuming in a Westchester prison cell. “Born Loser” was not a hit, but as a punchline rap where DMX makes himself the punchline, it would foreshadow the self-eviscerating rhymes of rappers like Eminem and Fatlip: “They kicked me out the shelter because they said I smelled a/Little like the living dead and looked like Helter Skelter.”LL Cool J featuring Redman, Method Man, Canibus and DMX, ‘4, 3, 2, 1’ (1997)This single would be epochal for multiple reasons. It sparked the lyrical war between LL Cool J and Canibus, perhaps the last consequential wax battle held on actual vinyl — soon such things were fought in the fields of mixtapes and MP3s. And “4, 3, 2, 1” was the breakout single for DMX, then a new Def Jam signee, who holds his own against members of an elite tier of M.C.s. Here, he raps death threats with a filmmaker’s eye for detail: “Believe what I say when I tell you/Don’t make me put you somewhere where nobody can smell you.”DMX featuring Sheek Louch, ‘Get at Me Dog’ (1998)DMX recorded his debut Def Jam solo single amid the era of ’80s pop samples, big-budget videos and a general sentiment of getting “jiggy.” “I wasn’t down with all that pretty, happy-go-lucky [expletive],” DMX said in “E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX.” He added that Sean “Puffy” Combs “had the radio on lock, the clubs on fire, had people thinking that hip-hop was all about bright lights and shiny suits and smiled all the way to the bank — X, on the other hand, still lived in the dark.” “Get at Me Dog” is pure, unfiltered rhyming over a loop of the disco-funk band B.T. Express. If it sounds like a mixtape rap, that’s how it started: The beat and hook were part of a freestyle for DJ Clue. The song not only introduced DMX the solo artist, but introduced his trademark barking and growling, sounds inspired by his beloved pitbulls. The video — a black-and-white affair directed by Hype Williams — was filmed at New York’s hip-hop meeting ground the Tunnel, where Funkmaster Flex held court on Sunday nights. The song became one of the most beloved “Tunnel bangers.”‘Ruff Ryders’ Anthem’ (1998)The third single from DMX’s debut album, “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot,” gleamed a little brighter than its predecessors. His rhymes were no less uncompromising and violent — “Had it, shoulda shot it/Now you’re dearly departed,” he raps. But the song heralded the blipping, pixelated debut of the producer Swizz Beatz, whose sound would ultimately define the next few years of the Ruff Ryders orbit: DMX, Eve, the Lox, Drag-On and Swizz Beatz’s own solo work. Swizz Beatz told Vibe it took a week to convince DMX to do the song: “He was like, ‘I don’t want those white-boy beats.’” Swizz would go on to produce Top 10 singles for Beyoncé, Lil Wayne, T.I. and Busta Rhymes, and to co-found the popular quarantine-era streaming battle Verzuz.‘Damien’ (1998)The rapper’s most famous storytelling rhyme involves him having a conversation with the devil — a play about fighting his own temptations. “At the time, X was in a really dark place as he was in and out of jail,” the producer Dame Grease told Okayplayer. “He told me he thought he was in hell, mentally, and could hear the devil speaking to him. He wanted to find a way to recreate that feeling.” Two sequels followed, including “The Omen (Damien II),” also in 1998, which featured a guest appearance from the shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, who would go on to have a notable impact on hip-hop, influencing modern goth-tinged artists like Travis Scott and Lil Uzi Vert, among others. The second sequel is “Damien III” (2001).‘Slippin’’ (1998)On this bloodletting, emotionally raw track, DMX confronts his troubled upbringing, his time in various institutions and his addictions with a sober eye. It was a personal and vulnerable look at his life and his struggles in the vein of diarist rappers like Tupac Shakur and Scarface. “X was writing ‘Slippin’’ for a while — six months, a year,” the Ruff Ryders founder Joaquin “Waah” Dean told The Fader. “He wanted this song to be impacting people’s lives.”‘Party Up (Up in Here)’ (2000)Perhaps the most indelible DMX song, “Party Up (Up in Here)” has a chantable, giddy chorus that belies the nimble, severe trash talk in the verses. (“Listen, your ass is about to be missin’/You know who gon’ find you? Some old man fishin’.”) “It’s called ‘Party Up,’ but it’s very disrespectful,” DMX told GQ, adding, “The beat is for the club, I just spit some real [expletive] to it.” The durable track has had a long life thanks to its use in movies like “Gone in 60 Seconds” and TV shows like “The Mindy Project.” Earl Simmons even has a writing credit in the era-defining musical “Hamilton” because of an interpolation used in “Meet Me Inside,” a song that details a conversation between Alexander Hamilton and George Washington.Aaliyah featuring DMX, ‘Come Back in One Piece’ (2000)The 2000 film “Romeo Must Die” was the first film for the R&B superstar Aaliyah and the second for DMX. Though they do not play love interests in the movie, they did team up for this song from the soundtrack, a tune in the mold of hip-hop-soul duets like Method Man and Mary J. Blige’s “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By.” However, it is almost like DMX refuses to meet R&B halfway: He rhymes an unapologetic full-throated street narrative while Aaliyah plays a beleaguered partner who just wants him to be safe.‘Who We Be’ (2001)“Who We Be” is a plain-spoken list of ills both political and personal, delivered with the thudding fire of an AC/DC song. It was the third and final DMX song to be nominated for a Grammy, but he never ended up taking one home.‘X Gon’ Give It to Ya’ (2003)Though it was a moderate hit when released as a single from the “Cradle 2 the Grave” soundtrack in 2003, “X Gon’ Give It to Ya” has ultimately emerged as the most popular DMX song of the streaming era thanks to its use in the “Deadpool” films and on television’s “Rick and Morty.” DMX intended it for his fifth album, “Grand Champ,” but, seeing its potential, the “Cradle 2 the Grave” producer Joel Silver intervened. It was certified platinum in 2017, nearly 15 years after its release. More

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      DMX's Music Was a Profound Vessel for His Pain

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      The rapper, who died Friday, had no imitators because there was no way to falsify the life that forged him. He was a colossus, a fire-starter and a healer.Even when DMX was the most popular rapper on the planet, he was a genre of one: a gruff, motivational, agitated and poignant fire-starter. Pure vigor and pure heart. A drill sergeant and a healer.In 1998 and 1999, he released three majestic, bombastic albums: “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot,” “Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood” and “… And Then There Was X.” Each one debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and has been certified platinum several times over. He performed at Woodstock ’99 for hundreds of thousands of people. He starred in “Belly,” the seminal 1998 hip-hop noir film. In his songs, he growled like a dog, credibly and often.And yet there were no DMX clones in his wake because there was no way to falsify the life that forged him. For DMX — who died Friday at 50 after suffering a heart attack on April 2 — hip-hop superstardom came on the heels of a devastating childhood marked by abuse, drug use, crime and other traumas. His successes felt more like catharsis than triumphalism. Even at his rowdiest and most celebrated, he was a vessel for profound pain.Especially as he got older, and his public struggles — countless arrests, stints in jail, continuing problems with drugs — threatened to overshadow his musical legacy, he never hid his hurt, never let shame overshadow his truth. The potency of his humanity was as heroic as any of his songs.From the release of his debut Def Jam single, “Get at Me Dog,” in 1998, DMX was an immediate titanic presence in hip-hop. Just as the genre was moving toward polished sheen, he preferred iron and concrete — rapping with a muscular throatiness that conveyed an excitable kind of mayhem. The staccato bursts on “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” — an early Swizz Beatz masterpiece — matched DMX’s jabs of melancholy: “All I know is pain/All I feel is rain.”His voice was unrelentingly coarse, and in his peak era, between 1998 and 2003, he used it for one chest-puffed anthem after another: “Party Up (Up in Here),” “What’s My Name?,” “Who We Be,” “X Gon’ Give It to Ya,” “Where the Hood At?” Often, he rapped as if he were trying to win an argument, with repetitive emphasis and terse phrasing designed for maximum impact. Even when he dipped into flirtation, like on “What These Bitches Want,” he didn’t change his approach.But when he took on his own troubled past on “Slippin’,” he tempered himself just a bit, as if showing himself some grace:They put me in a situation forcing me to be a manWhen I was just learning to stand without a helping hand, damnWas it my fault, something I didTo make a father leave his first kid? At 7 doing my first bidEven though DMX’s time at the top of the genre was relatively brief, just a few ferocious years, he was never erased from its collective memory. That’s partly because the tumult of his personal life constantly landed him in the spotlight — he was arrested dozens of times, for charges including drug possession, aggravated assault, driving without a license and tax evasion. He rescued stray dogs, and tattooed a tribute to one of his dogs, Boomer, across the whole of his back, but also pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges.But he remained a subject of sympathy: DMX was a wild man, and a broken one, too. Physically abused by his mother as a child, he spent significant stretches of time in group homes. He took to crime young, specializing in robbery. Many of the stories contained in his 2002 book, “E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX,” are matter of fact and harrowing.In a devastating interview last year, he explained that the person who first encouraged him to rap was also the one who first exposed him to crack, forever intertwining the art that was his salvation with the addiction that constantly threatened to undo him.DMX’s life became a tug of war between his musical gift and his traumas. Beginning in the mid-2000s, he began to fade from the charts. His turns on the big screen, in “Belly,” “Romeo Must Die” and “Exit Wounds,” gave way to turns on sometimes voyeuristic reality television programs like “Couples Therapy,” “Dr. Drew’s Lifechangers” and “Iyanla: Fix My Life.” His search for healing — his need for it — became central to his public narrative.DMX HAD ALREADY learned to tame arenas on the Hard Knock Life and Survival of the Illest tours by the time I first saw him live, in 2000, on the Cash Money/Ruff Ryders tour. It was as jolting as any performance I’ve ever seen — a frantic yet controlled display of raw charisma and might. Toward the end of his set, he stopped cold to offer a prayer. His body was covered in sweat, his voice was gruff, and thousands of people in the room went from boisterous to silent, sideswiped by DMX’s gospel. I saw the tour again a few weeks later — the scene was no less vivid.He’d been doing this for a while by then, startling audiences with his religious fervor. “It damn near brings me to tears every night because I get nothing but love. It’s like I’m taking them to church,” he told the Source in 1999. “I just love ’em to death. I can’t even explain it. Just seeing them look at me the way they do. I can’t help but to love them. And I’m not going to take them to the wrong place.”Every time I’ve seen DMX in the two decades since — from a tiny comeback show at S.O.B.’s in New York to an Easter Sunday convocation with Kanye West at Coachella — he did a version of the prayer, bringing a conflagration of a performance to a halt. On the surface, it seemed like a gift, a way to spread a message about mercy and hope in the unlikeliest of settings. But in those moments, he was also a supplicant laid bare — praying for us, and asking all of us to cover him in return. More

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      Lil Nas X Is No. 1 Again With 'Montero (Call Me by Your Name)'

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      The rapper’s “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart following a dust-up on social media over the song’s video and a lawsuit from Nike.Exactly two years ago, a young rapper with buzz on TikTok released a remix with Billy Ray Cyrus, and a pop-culture juggernaut was born.That song, “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X — a “country-trap” hybrid that mixed a booming bass line with an acoustic sample from Nine Inch Nails, and featured winking lyrics about the outlaw cowboy life — became a phenomenon, holding at No. 1 for a record-breaking 19 weeks and minting Lil Nas X as a master of music marketing and character sculpting in the age social media.This week, Lil Nas X, now 21, is back at No. 1 with a new song and a fresh online sensation. “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” with a video set partly in hell and a corporate brouhaha over online sales of “Satan Shoes” (modified Nike Air Max 97s, supposedly with a drop of blood in the soles — drawing a lawsuit from Nike), is in some sense a 21st-century re-creation of the controversy over Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video from 1989. As was the case with Madonna’s song, which drew condemnation from the right and panic from Pepsi, the furor mainly serves to drum up even more attention for Lil Nas X. (This time, a whip-smart Twitter feed from the star adds another dimension of entertainment and self-expression.)“Montero” opened at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart with 47 million streams in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking service.On this week’s album chart, the rapper and singer Rod Wave started at No. 1 with “SoulFly,” which had the equivalent of 130,000 sales, including 189 million streams and 4,000 copies sold as a complete package.Two other new albums landed high on the chart. The Michigan rapper NF is No. 3 with “Clouds (The Mixtape),” with the equivalent of 86,000 sales, and Carrie Underwood’s “My Savior” — with versions of hymns like “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art,” in time for Easter — starts at No. 4 with 73,000.Last week’s top album, Justin Bieber’s “Justice,” fell to No. 2, and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which dominated the album chart for 10 weeks at the start of the year, fell two spots to No. 5 in its 12th week out. More

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      Olivia Rodrigo’s Emotional Road Trip, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Westside Gunn, Rosanne Cash, Dry Cleaning and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Deja Vu’OK, now that she’s got her license, here comes the road trip. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” opens in the car, with the singer recalling fonder times with an ex. As on “Drivers License,” there are three parties — Rodrigo, that former beau and the specter of that person’s new love, and it’s unclear which of the other two causes Rodrigo more anguish. The lyrics are plain and pinpoint pained: “That was our place, I found it first/I made the jokes you tell to her.” About halfway through, “Deja Vu” turns severely Swiftian, with lyrical asides about listening to music, a yelping section almost directly cribbed from Swift’s “Cruel Summer’” and a familiar power struggle over who taught who about cool music. Rodrigo would like to make it clear, though, that she is no mere student: “Play her piano but she doesn’t know/That I was the one who taught you Billy Joel.” JON CARAMANICAWestside Gunn, ‘Julia Lang’Hazy, pugnacious and glowering, the latest from Westside Gunn is ragged in the best early ’90s way, so convincing in its fuzz and stagger that it’s almost like a recovered memory. CARAMANICARosanne Cash featuring John Leventhal, ‘The Killing Fields’Rosanne Cash considers her own past, her family’s Southern roots, and the South’s history of lynchings and injustice in “The Killing Fields.” She sings, “The blood that runs on cypress trees cannot be washed away/by mothers’ tears and gasoline.” The melody is mournful and minor-key; a lone, lightly strummed guitar supplies most of the accompaniment. And at the end, Cash resolves, “All that came before us/is not who we are now.” JON PARELESHalf Waif, ‘Take Away the Ache’Half Waif — the songwriter Nandi Rose — lets herself be buffeted by the paradoxes of love in “Take Away the Ache.” She sings, “I know that I’m asking for more than you can give/but isn’t love just living like that?” It’s a dizzying three-and-a-half minutes, veering amid minimal electronic abstractions, piano ballad and dance-floor thumper, all held together by passionate yearning. PARELESNaomi Cowan, ‘Energy’The Jamaican singer Naomi Cowan sets her usual reggae aside in “Energy,” an ingenious, multi-leveled mesh of syncopations and silences produced by Izy Beats. Plucked strings, sporadic bass tones, finger snaps, flickering electronic hi-hats and teasing, elusive backup vocals poke in and out of the mix as Cowan chides an ex who ghosted her before declaring, “Love and war, baby, I’m no casualty.” PARELESDry Cleaning, ‘Unsmart Lady’“If you like a girl, be nice — it’s not rocket science,” Florence Shaw deadpans on “Unsmart Lady,” a new single from the London four-piece Dry Cleaning that plays out almost like a psych-rock update of Nada Surf’s “Popular.” On Dry Cleaning’s excellent debut album “New Long Leg,” out on Friday, Shaw is equal parts frontwoman and spoken-word poet, weaving the random linguistic detritus of modern life into loose, surreal narratives. (She used to collect snippets of overheard conversations and intriguing phrases in her phone’s Notes app; when her friends asked her to join their band, she mined that found material for lyrics.) “Unsmart Lady” begins as a kind of curt, one-sided conversation, but by the end it has transformed into an imagistic meditation on the absurdities of femininity, like a “foot squeezed hopefully into a short boot.” Around her, the band unleashes its fury, but Shaw’s delivery stays steady — the gimlet eye of a storm. LINDSAY ZOLADZMdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’Mdou Moctar, a guitarist, singer and bandleader from Niger, deploys everything he has drawn from Saharan traditions and Western rock in the calm-to-storm buildup of “Afrique Victime,” the title song of an album due May 21. He warns, “Africa is a victim of so many crimes/If we stay silent it will be the end of us,” while the beat gallops ahead. Soon, his electric guitar leaps up from the band’s rhythmic core to trill, twirl, swoop and scream. PARELESAG Club featuring Icecoldbishop, ‘Noho’The excellent “Noho,” from the new album by the consistently refreshing AG Club, features a frictionless collision of Bay Area hip-hop traditions: the slow-and-low and the loopily exuberant. CARAMANICADopolarians, ‘The Bond’Dopolarians began in 2018 as a project uniting free-jazz musicians based in Arkansas with elder luminaries from the free-jazz world: the bassist William Parker, the drummer Alvin Fielder Jr. and the saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Their debut album, “Garden Party,” seesawed between singsong lyricism and reckless entanglement. The group has just released a new LP, “The Bond,” and while the lineup has changed — Brian Blade now fills the drum chair after Fielder died in 2019 at 83; Jordan, now 85, is no longer in the group — the loose but intense feel remains the same. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      A Rapper, Hitting His 30s, Reinvents Himself as a Scion of Spanish Pop

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      C. Tangana was a provocative star of trap music. Now, his songs are played in supermarkets and praised by 50- and 60-somethings on YouTube.LONDON — C. Tangana, one of Spain’s biggest rap stars, two years ago hit “a little bit of a crisis.”He was riding a wave of fame, known for provocative songs and equally provocative interviews. But he was fast approaching his 30s, he said in a recent Zoom interview, and risked becoming one of those “cringe-y, embarrassing” rappers who act a decade younger than they are.So C. Tangana — real name Antón Álvarez Alfaro — did a U-turn and decided to try his hand at other styles of music that he had loved since childhood, like flamenco and rumba, even Spanish folk.“I was opening a window I’d kept closed,” he said, adding, “I assumed it would go wrong.”Álvarez’s experiment appears to have paid off. In February, he released “El Madrileño,” an album that mixes traditional Spanish and Latin American styles, including rock, with electronic sounds and beats more familiar to his trap and reggaeton fans. It’s turned him from Spain’s biggest rapper into one of its biggest pop stars.One of the album’s early tracks, “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”), has over 100 million views on YouTube.“You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop” Pablo Gil, a music journalist at El Mundo, a Spanish daily newspaper, said in a telephone interview.Some of the musical styles it features were last popular in Spain in the 1970s, when the country was under Franco’s dictatorship, Gil added. Álvarez, he said, was taking old-fashioned sounds, “subverting their meaning and making them modern.”In a review for the newspaper El País, the music critic Carlos Marcos wrote, “It remains to be seen whether this is the birth of a new Spanish pop, or something that we will forget in a few years.”“But who cares?” he added. “Let’s enjoy it today, and we’ll see tomorrow.”On YouTube, C. Tangana’s videos now attract comments from older music fans who would presumably never have gone near his records before. “I thought the music my son listened to was for landfill,” wrote Felix Guinnot, who said he was in his 50s, “but this boy is changing my musical perception.”On the set for the music video of “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”).Javier RuizÁlvarez’s road to fame has been winding, with multiple changes of name to reflect new musical personas. Born in Madrid, he started rapping in his teens, he said, but twice gave up on music entirely. When the 2008 global financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard — its lingering effects are still felt by the country’s youth — he stopped rapping to work in a fast-food restaurant. Later, he got a job in a call center selling cellphones.He started rapping again after falling in love with a colleague. It was a toxic relationship, Álvarez said, but it inspired him to get back into the studio. “I said, ‘It must be possible for me to make money doing this rather than selling phones or cleaning,’” he recalled. “It changed my whole mentality. I started to think I had to sell myself. I started to do things to get attention.”In 2017, Álvarez had his first major hit with “Mala Mujer,” a track about his longing for a “bad woman” whose “gel nails have left scars all over my body.” But he was soon known more for his relationship with Rosalía, a Spanish pop star (he co-wrote much of “El Mal Querer,” or “Bad Love,” her breakthrough album, although they have since broken up) and for getting into political controversies.Álvarez with the team filming a video for the song “Comerte Entera.” “You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop,” one music journalist said.Javier RuizÁlvarez used a derogatory term to refer to King Felipe VI at a 2018 news conference after being asked about the fate of another rapper who had been given a jail term for insulting the royal family. He also described the monarchy as “a robbery” and called for an end to “representative democracy,” arguing that it prevented the public from being directly involved in important decisions.The next year, the northern Spanish city of Bilbao threw C. Tangana off a concert lineup, saying that his lyrics were degrading to women.More recently, he called for people to reclaim Spain’s flag from fascists, a potentially contentious endorsement in a country where some associate it with Franco’s dictatorship.Ana Iris Simón, a music journalist and author who has written about the reaction to “El Madrileño,” praised Álvarez’s outspoken nature. “He’s not afraid of getting involved or giving his opinion,” she said in an email.Some critics still accuse him of being overly macho, Simón said. They point out that only one of the new album’s 15 guests is a woman (La Húngara, a flamenco singer). But Simón said those comments were out of touch with how Spaniards viewed him. “Public opinion and published opinion have never been as far apart as they are now,” she noted.Álvarez’s with the director Santos Bacana in Cuba, where they recorded a song with the guitarist Eliades Ochoa.Javier RuizThe new album also plays to Spain’s class divides, Simón said. It involves artists and musical styles “reviled by the cool cultural scene for years for being music typical of the common people,” she said. Álvarez uses those styles without irony, Iris added, instead embracing them as would an heir.Álvarez said his choice of collaborators — who include the Gypsy Kings, the flamenco band that was hugely popular in the 1980s; Ed Maverick, a “Mexican folk romantic”; and Jorge Drexler, a Uruguayan singer-songwriter — was driven by his love of artists who’ve taken their own distinct musical paths. But he also hoped the collaborations with Latin American musicians might change some Spaniards’ view of the region.“In Spain, we have this problem that a lot of people still have this colonial mentality,” Álvarez said. “They think that our culture is better than their culture, and that’s so stupid.”During the interview, Álvarez said he was overjoyed that his experiment had paid off. He talked a lot about the joy of being seen as a good songwriter. But he seemed happiest when asked about the album’s impact on one specific person. His mother had “always been super proud” of him, he said, “but now she can sing my songs.”Comments on his YouTube tracks suggest that is mother is not the only member of another generation doing that. Antonio Remacha, in Madrid, wrote a long message beneath one track saying that his daughter had forced him to listen to the record against his better judgment, but that he had loved it.“I have to admit that at 62 years of age, he’s managed to impress me,” Remacha wrote of Álvarez, before politely and formally signing off: “Congratulations and all of my praise.” More

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      Lil Nas X, Clapback Champ

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      The rapper’s new single, video and sneaker were merely the prelude to a brilliantly orchestrated main event: a virtuosic performance on Twitter.One after another, they came with venom for Lil Nas X. The basketball star Nick Young. The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem. The rapper Joyner Lucas. Candace Owens and various right-wing Twitter personalities. Greg Locke, a Tennessee pastor. Fox News. Nike.They were clueless. Blissful, almost — lambs blind to the slaughter they were hurtling toward.Lil Nas X was waiting for them all, barbs at his fingertips. For the last four days — since the release of his new single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” its masterfully absurdist erotica video and then limited-edition sneakers called Satan Shoes — the 21-year-old rapper and digital prodigy has been using his Twitter account as a fly swatter, flattening one irritant after the next in a loud and uproarious display of internet-speed celebrity, executing a series of flawless pirouette dunks on the heads of his willing but bumbling antagonists.After Noem tweeted about his Satan Shoes, he groaned, “ur a whole governor and u on here tweeting about some damn shoes. do ur job!” Lucas suggested that the “Montero” video might not be appropriate for children, and Lil Nas X eye-rolled back, “i literally sing about lean & adultery in old town road. u decided to let your child listen. blame yourself.”In between target practice, Lil Nas X was reflective, too. “i spent my entire teenage years hating myself,” because of what Christianity taught about homosexuality, he wrote. “so i hope u are mad, stay mad, feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves.”What “Montero” has caused — or rather, what Lil Nas X has engineered — is a good old-fashioned moral panic (or at least the performance of one), the sort of thing that had largely been left behind in the 1980s, but is tragically well-suited to the country’s current cultural discourse polarization. The song, the video, the shoes — they are bait.And “Montero” anticipates the kerfuffles it would cause. The true art here isn’t the music (that said, it’s one of Lil Nas X’s better songs) or the video (more on that below): it’s the effortlessness, the ease, the joy of his reactions to the reactions. It’s the sense that he is playing chess to everyone else’s lame checkers moves — he is simply faster, funnier and on firmer, more principled ground than his adversaries, who are at best, comically flimsy.No famous person is as adept as Lil Nas X at casually but thoroughly smacking down the ream of Twitter churls inevitably awakened by something like this — maybe Cardi B, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is a grade-A internet manipulator and, provided all the tools and resources typically reserved for long-established pop superstars, he is perfectly suited to dominate the moment. “Montero” may or may not top the Billboard Hot 100 next week, but it will be unrivaled in conversations started.“Montero” is a frisky song about lust; Lil Nas X has said it was inspired by a man he met and fell for. The video, which pivots from pastel pastoral to CGI gothic, is a wild, kaleidoscope romp of sexual self-acceptance, in which Lil Nas X pole dances his way down to hell, where he gives Satan a lap dance before killing him, stealing his horns and claiming them for himself.It is knowing and camp, and knowing about its campiness, meshing the testing-the-format provocations of the late-1980s video era with the big-budget pop-machine clips of the early 2000s. That it has awakened culture warriors uncomfortable with displays of gay male desire, or with playful representations of sin, means the video has done what it was meant to do.The same is true of the Satan Shoes he released in partnership with the company MSCHF — a Nike Air Max 97 customized with some lightly provocative references to Satan, priced at $1,018 a pair in a nod to Luke 10:18, a Bible passage about the fall of Satan from heaven. The shoes include, allegedly, a drop of human blood in the liquid that fills the soles.Lil Nas partnered with MSCHF to release Satan Shoes — a Nike Air Max 97 customized with some lightly provocative references to Satan.MSCHFSatanic iconography is perhaps the lowest hanging fruit of transgression, especially in a consumer product. But here, again, this was chum in the water — the discourse started by the shoes has been far more important than the shoes themselves. Nike disavowed them, and sued MSCHF for trademark infringement (but notably not Lil Nas X, a celebrity it might end up one day actually wanting to collaborate with). A sneaker YouTuber who was provided a pair of the shoes filmed himself throwing them down the trash chute in his apartment building. Lil Nas X, meanwhile, was posting uproarious memes about pleading for Nike’s forgiveness.Twitter is a performance space like any other, with an almost limitless audience: stans, enthusiasts, haters, trolls, skeptics, newbies. Lil Nas X has something for all of them. In his pre-“Old Town Road” life, he was an active Nicki Minaj stan, which meant he was a maestro of steering online conversation.And though he is now one of the most successful new pop stars of the past few years, that fundamental skill set remains. In recent days, he’s taunted the fast food chain Chick-fil-A (which is owned by religious conservatives); poked fun at the campaign Justin Bieber attempted to boost streams of his single “Yummy”; posted endless memes about his flirtations with the dark side, mock apologies for his transgressions and even headfake statements of anxiety that end as reminders to stream “Montero.”All of it is memorable — not simply because of the expert skill on display, but because it’s clear that Lil Nas X is not simply the performer of “Montero,” nor simply the star of its video, nor simply the inspiration for a sneaker. He’s the conductor of a symphony of thousands, maybe even millions. It’s Lil Nas X’s conversation, we’re all just talking in it. More