It Was Depressing to Compete With DMX

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2026

Twenty-five years ago this week, on October 23, 2001, DMX released his fourth album in three and a half years and did the thing he always did: he opened at No. 1. The Great Depression sold 440,000 copies in its first week, went platinum by December, and extended a streak that had stopped being a hot run and started being history. It was his fourth straight album to debut on top of the Billboard 200. Two years later, Grand Champ made it five — and DMX became the first artist ever to see his first five albums all debut at No. 1.

Put the run in plain terms, because it still doesn’t sound real. In May 1998, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot debuted at No. 1. That December, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood did it again — two No. 1 debuts in a single calendar year, something no artist had done before. In 1999, …And Then There Was X became his biggest album of all, five times platinum, the one with “Party Up (Up in Here)” on it. Three albums, three years, three coronations — and the fourth was supposed to be where the streak went to die. Instead it put up the biggest first week of his career to that point.

He knew exactly what he was doing with the title, too. Asked about it at the time, X explained that The Great Depression wasn’t about his mood — it was about everybody else’s. It was depressing, he said, to have to compete with DMX. That is a level of confidence you can only sell when the receipts are sitting right there, and in the fall of 2001, they were: four albums deep, every single one of them opening at the top, with the Ruff Ryders machine — Swizz Beatz, Dame Grease, PK — behind him and Def Jam printing the results.

The album itself is the hinge of his catalog, and it plays like one. The attack records are here: “We Right Here,” the lead single, all bark and forward motion. And then there’s “Who We Be,” the record that outlived everything else on the album — four and a half minutes of X listing the world as he saw it, the names and the streets and the struggle, barked over a stripped-down Black Key beat until it stops sounding like a rap song and starts sounding like a census of pain. It only reached No. 60 on the Hot 100. It was also nominated for the Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance. Both of those things are true, and together they explain DMX’s whole career: the charts never fully measured what the culture already knew.

And the other side of him is here, too — the side that made him more than a hardcore rapper. “I Miss You,” his duet with Faith Evans, is a letter to his grandmother, Mary Ella Holloway, who had died in 1994 and who was, by every account including his own, the most important person in his life. It’s one of the most tender records he ever made, and it lands differently now: when DMX died in April 2021, it was Faith Evans who sang at his homegoing service. The album closes the way his albums closed, with a prayer — “A Minute for Your Son,” which stretches out to nearly seventeen minutes, less a song than a man talking to God while the tape runs.

Not everybody was convinced at the time. Reviews landed in the middle — Metacritic’s tally sits at 62 — and The Great Depression has spent twenty-five years in the shadow of the two albums before it, the “transitional” one between the classic and the victory lap. Some of that is fair. It’s longer than it needs to be, and it doesn’t have a “Party Up.” But listen to what it actually documents: an artist four albums into the most dominant opening run in Billboard history, making a record in the shadow of fresh grief — Aaliyah, his Romeo Must Die co-star and close friend, had been killed that August, weeks before the album arrived — and still putting up 440,000 in a week while half of rap was aiming at his spot.

The anniversary is being marked properly this year. The album is getting its first-ever color vinyl pressing for the 25th — a green-and-black marble edition, twenty-five years after the CD did those numbers in a single week. That’s the part that would have made him smile: the streak was the story then, but the staying power is the story now. Plenty of rappers have had a year. Nobody else has had that first five years.

Four straight No. 1 debuts when this album landed. Five by the time he was done. The title was a joke at the competition’s expense — and the charts spent three years proving it wasn’t really a joke.

More anniversaries live in The Rewind collection — the most recent edition chased the Drake chorus lawsuit that folded in eleven days — and the rest of the day’s tape lives with Previously’s music coverage.

— Previously Staff