“Blood on my dick ’cause I fucked a corpse”: when DMX rapped about necrophilia
DMX wasn’t one to shy away from the darkness during the early days of his rap career, but the second track of his second album was an extreme instance of his embrace of lyrical violence.
‘Bring Your Whole Crew’ follows the opening skit of Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Blood, his second album released in late 1998, the very same year that his first album, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, came out. ‘Bring Your Whole Crew’ essentially set the tone for the rest of Flesh Of My Flesh to follow, and it was decidedly bleak in nature.
The opening verse begins in the most gruesome manner imaginable, which finds DMX rapping, “I got blood on my hands, and there’s no remorse / I got blood on my dick ’cause I fucked a corpse”.
Invoking necrophilia is a shocking thing to do, especially at the very beginning of an album, but the song’s evocation of extreme violence does seem to serve a purpose. DMX is on the attack, aiming his vitriol at someone in the track.
At another point in the song, he raps, “Now if your heart was as big as your mouth, you’d be real / But it’s not, so I know if you get knocked, you’ll squeal / Like a bitch, ’cause you is a bitch and always been a bitch”. But who is he addressing?
There seems to be a consensus that he is, in fact, dissing Kurupt on ‘Bring Your Whole Crew’. The two had come to blows after Kurupt came to believe that DMX was engaged in a relationship with Foxy Brown, who was the former’s fiancée at the time, about which he expressed his displeasure on his song ‘Calling Out Names.’
DMX and Kurupt hated each other during these days, and it seems that ‘Bring Your Whole Crew’ was directed at him. Evidence of that can be discerned in lines like “Stickin’ you for yo’ dough while I’m fuckin yo’ broke ho,” which would appear to be a reference to DMX’s affair with Foxy.
Given the violence expressed in ‘Bring Your Whole Crew’, not to mention the extremely personal nature of their dispute, it seems remarkable that DMX and Kurupt ever managed to patch things up. But, somehow, they did do that about two decades after their conflict first flared up.
Kurupt explained on The Breakfast Club that the two rappers encountered each at an airport in 2017, where they ended up talking things through. Their conversation was “great”, apparently, and Kurupt came to realise that DMX was actually “real cool”. They buried the hatchet in time, four years before DMX’s death.