DMX: Year Of The Dog...Again (Explicit) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Coming off a thirty-day stint last year at Rikers relating to his impersonation of an FBI agent -- and an uncharacteristic three-year break from recording -- the only artist in history to have his first five albums debut at Number One returns to tear apart a rap game gone soft from bling. Year of the Dog . . . Again thrives on a classic formula: Swizz Beatz's compressed, head-drilling fanfares and DMX's adrenalized, gland-chewing rhymes. "If you gots the whip, you better get on/'Cuz if I pull up it won't be for Grey Poupon," X greets us on "We in Here." (To hear him bark his trademark "What!" remains a thrill on par with Iggy Pop's "Huh!") The Busta Rhymes co-feature "Come Thru (Move)" sports a club-savvy chorus, and "Baby Motha" mines some Isley Brothers-style soul as X laments, "Nigga, 'cuz we got a kid together I'm stuck with her." The atrocious, heavy-metal-driven "Wrong or Right (I'm Tired)" could be a Gitmo torture jam, and "Blown Away" ("Went to jail a few times, but that didn't stop me/All it taught me was not to be sloppy") is undermined by saxophone drivel. "Goodbye" veers close to comedy when X shouts out, "Jesus!" and growls like a pit bull in the same breath, but he's obviously so serious the laugh gets stifled. The unwritten message of Dog: Darkman X can still kick all y'all asses. And who are we to argue?