After X’s passing, there was at least nominal discussion of the ways in which the rap industry fails some of its biggest stars it’s hard to listen to a posthumous record from a rapper whose first five albums debuted at No.1 but still died with a slew of legal troubles and debt, where Jay-Z and Nas can’t find anything else to talk about except their own success. Most of the collaborations on Exodus came before X’s passing, which softens the dissonance of Jay and Nas’s obsessive boasting only slightly. For example, it’s hard to listen to a song like “Bath Salt” - featuring Jay-Z and Nas rapping about being successful billionaires or whatever - and not feel a tinge of despair. It’s unfortunate that an album like Exodus, released so close to X’s tragic death, can’t escape the reality it exists in. When his time comes, towards the track’s end, he sounds as enlivened as he does at any other point on the album. X plays the role of an elder statesman while the Buffalo, New York crew offer the kind of street-level bars that X himself built a career on. The album shines when X seems genuinely energized, as he does on the Griselda-assisted “Hood Blues.” It’s a moment of mutual exchange. Though listening to the track knowing he battled many of the same demons his whole life, right up until his death, gives it a heavier weight.
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It’s a song about faith and in any context would have been a major moment for X. He growls and gurgles through his verse while simultaneously matching the tenderness of Keys’s chorus. The Alicia Keys-assisted “Hold Me Down” highlights X’s unique power to exist at polar ends of an emotional spectrum all at once. Fellow Yonkers MC The Lox offers as tough a verse as ever, retaining the thorough grit of the city that created DMX. It’s a bittersweet reminder of the deep history the two share. On album opener “That’s My Dog,” X’s longtime friend and collaborator applies a sputtering drum pattern to a marauding piano loop, vividly conjuring a different era. Swizz Beatz, for one, offers up some of the most dynamic production of his career.
![youtube dmx albums youtube dmx albums](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/goRLfr0_PwU/maxresdefault.jpg)
Though reverence does indeed run deeply through the record. Landing somewhere between a posthumous tribute and a completed album, Exodus feels like a view of DMX as a product instead of DMX as an artist. Still, the final result feels cold in its new context.