Entertainment

DMX, Long a Voice of the Community, Was the News

The New York Times is not where you turn to get the Black experience in America. But they couldn’t ignore the passing of one of American pop culture’s leading Black voices of a generation.

Published

5 years ago

April 15, 2021

Mia Lane

DMX performance at the BET awards, photo credits: BET.com

The narrative of the Black Man in America continues with Daunte Wright, 20, gunned down by a white, female cop in a Minneapolis suburb who thought she was using a Taser.

Does it sound like Fruitvale Station 2009, when Oscar Grant was face down on the ground and shot by an officer who thought he was firing a Taser? And all of this just 10 miles from where another white officer is on trial for excessive force that resulted in the killing of George Floyd.

Earl Simmons would have had a lot to rap about. But the mic has already dropped for the icon known as DMX.

On April 9, I got a news flash at 4:11 a.m. Oakland time. Britain’s Prince Philip died. I slept through it.

Five hours later at 9:35 a.m. the New York Times flashed the real breaking news: “DMX, the snarling yet soulful rapper whose string of No.1 albums electrified audiences and reflected his gritty past, is dead at 50.”

This time, I paid attention. You probably did, too.

DMX sold more records than the Queen’s Duke. And now DMX was pronounced dead from that heart attack he suffered on April 2.

To be honest, I didn’t know the difference between DMX and my old Reeboks.

I grew up with the Temptations, the Stylistics, and Tower of Power. When hip/hop and rap emerged, I was more prone to KRS-1.

By the time DMX hit, I was raising kids and playing “Barney” songs.

I missed out. But when he made Page one of the Times, I listened to all the music of Earl Simmons a/k/a DMX over the weekend.

I got it.

I use the moniker “Emil Amok” when I write my columns, because “amok” described the explosion of the pent-up anger in me. It’s my “rap” name.

But my columns are practically the Queen’s English compared to DMX.

A major voice of Black America, he sang the real headlines of the community.

With multiple arrests for fraud, assault, weapons possession, drugs, DUI, Simmons knew a part of the Black experience well. He did jail time for animal cruelty, drug possession and theft, and then again for tax evasion. It all came out in his defiant music, where he put into rhymes and a back beat what it meant to be Black in America.

After listening to his “Ruff Ryder’s Anthem,” his macho calling card, and his other songs like his hit “Party Up (Up in Here),” you notice he’s in the world that doesn’t use the euphemistic phrase “n-word.”

I live and work in a white supremacists’ world that wants to hide racism and pretend it doesn’t exist. DMX lived in the world where the word is real and exists as a source of agony and identity.

He wasn’t pretending.

He just says the word in full. A lot.

No one censored DMX. His music was raw and ready for a rap battle at the drop of a hat. In his memoir, he said he always made it personal. “Nothing was too rude or vicious for me because I didn’t care.”

That’s what made him a winner. It’s the kind of “nothing to lose” confidence you take to a fight. But he was also known for his introspective songs, like “Damien,” where he wonders “Where’s my guardian angel? Need one, wish I had one.” In concert, he could show a commanding spiritual sense, switching from the profane to the profound, often heard preaching and praying to his audiences.

Simmons was born on Dec. 18, 1970, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y. He rarely saw his father and lived with a single mother who beat him. He turned to street crime and ended up in group homes or detention facilities. Or on crack. He found love in fighting dogs– ironic because he spent jail time in 2008 for animal cruelty.

In “A Yo’Kato,” (a dog named after a Bruce Lee character? It’s our common ground. I love dogs and Bruce), DMX sings to a favorite dog who died.

“I need you to save me a spot, next to you and the Lord. I don’t know when I’m coming but keep checking the door.”

The angel Gabriel had a dog looking out for DMX.

The New York Times is not where you turn to get the Black experience in America. But they couldn’t ignore the passing of one of American pop culture’s leading Black voices of a generation. Nor can I.

Let the world mourn the Queen’s prince. Where DMX was king, he spoke the news and told the truth.

Emil Guillermo is an award-winning Bay Area journalist and commentator. See his vlog at www.amok.com

Mia Lane

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Arts and Culture

IN MEMORIAM: Oakland Dance Legend Reginald Ray-Savage, 67

Savage lived his life as tribute to the teachers who had shared their wisdom on art and life with him. With a palpably genuine enthusiasm and desire to bring out the best in people, and pass the torch to the next generation, he poured into his students, as his teachers and mentors had into him. His infectious energy, love of life, and generosity of spirit inspired countless souls, both inside and outside the dance studio.

Published

1 week ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Reginald Ray-Savage brought the old-school teaching techniques he learned in the Katherine Dunham Dance Company to the youth at the Oakland School for the Arts in 2003. Courtesy photo.

Special to The Post

Reginald Ray-Savage – dancer, choreographer, and beloved teacher, mentor, and inspiration to many – passed away on May 17. The Oakland School for the Arts dance instructor was 67.

Born Reginald Ray, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sept. 5, 1958, he formally adopted the name ‘Savage,’ to honor the great Archie Savage, his mentor at Katherine Dunham’s Performing Arts Training Center where his dance training journey began in East St. Louis, Illinois.

He soon started dancing professionally with Katherine Dunham Dance Company, making dance a way of life. His grit, tenacity, and notorious work ethic brought him scholarships to train at multiple prestigious dance institutions, including The Ailey School (NYC) and Ruth Page School of Dance (Chicago), under the direction of acclaimed ballet instructor Larry Long and Dolores Lipinski-Long.

He danced with several companies including Joel Hall Dance Company, Ruth Page Ballet Chicago, Lyric Opera, Chicago City Ballet, American Festival Ballet, and touring productions of “Music Man” and “A Chorus Line”.

In 1989, Savage moved to Oakland where he started teaching seven days a week, amassing a devoted following that was attracted to his no-nonsense, impassioned, and effective old-school teaching style.

In 1992, at the insistence of his committed core of students, he founded Savage Jazz Dance Company (SJDC). Over a span of 30 years, Savage produced more than 100 original works, and tour SJDC nationally and internationally, performing at Casa del Jazz in Rome to a packed house and rave reviews—the first dance company to receive such an invitation.

Savage built SJDC into one of the Bay Area’s most respected dance companies, creating a signature style known for its combination of disciplined training, blended with rich artistic musical expression, and raw energy.

In 2003, Savage joined the Oakland School for the Arts as chair of the School of Dance. Over the next two decades, he created, built, and maintained a strong dance program, recognized, and respected by other dance institutions for forging well-trained and resilient dancers and human beings.

The depth of Savage’s tough love and care, and the skill of his teaching and mentoring are reflected in the careers of his students who have gone on to dance with the San Francisco Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, Janet Jackson, Ariana Grande, and companies across the globe.

Mark Kitaoka, a photographer hired by Savage in 2016, posted a living eulogy on the dance instructor.

“When I see the self-pride he builds in his students I am constantly impressed that people like Savage still exist in our ‘meme’ society,” Kitaoka wrote. “The kids he mentors are fiercely loyal to one another and I’m certain his methods teach each of those kids to put aside social status, race and gender and is replaced by solid loyalty for other souls.

“What Savage contributes to our world cannot be completely summed up in a few meager paragraphs but can be seen in the countless lives of those he has touched. Because of him, our world, and the world of the future is both a richer and better place.

Reginald Ray-Savage will forever be missed, remembered, and lovingly quoted. He is survived by his beloved wife, Alison Hurley, his sister, Sonia, and his brothers, Pierre, and Andre. May his inextinguishable spirit and impact live on in all the lives he touched.

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Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

Published

1 week ago

June 20, 2026

Oakland Post

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Books

Book Review: Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me

Though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

Published

2 weeks ago

June 17, 2026

bpusa-syndication

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Simon & Schuster, SRP: $29.00, Page Count: 304 pages

Sticks and stones may break my bones.

You know the rest of that childhood rhyme, and you know it’s not true: words have meaning, and they can cut like a knife. And yet, though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

The college lecture was supposed to have been about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

It was supposed to be a lively discussion, but unintentionally it quickly veered off course. When a White student quoted a movie line featuring the “n-word,” the room went quiet, and Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor panicked.

She’d grown up hearing that word, and seeing it, and she’d experienced the painful feelings attached to it. She knew who wrote that movie line. It was her father, Richard Pryor.

In her first few years, Pryor spent most of her time in a White world, hearing her mother’s tales of her larger-than-life father, and trying to grasp meaning in her father’s albums, peppered as they were with a word that was off-limits to her.

When she was six, she met her father for the first time. She began to visit him regularly.

It was fun at her Dad’s house; though he was sometimes moody, he taught her to fish and play dominoes. She became close with her siblings, fearful of her great-grandmother, and confused about a word that her father’s uncles threw around like a beach ball. It was a forbidden word at her mother’s house, but her father used it. Differently. Often.

The word hurt. She knew first-hand that it did.

“The word became a degrading slur that shackled all Black people together into a single, inescapable tribe,” she says.

So why was it okay for certain people to say it?

Knowing that, in the years since Richard Pryor’s accident and his death from multiple sclerosis, he’s become somewhat of a legend. It is a very satisfying thing, isn’t it? So is reading about him, especially from the viewpoint of one of his seven children. But his is not the only story you get inside “Something We Said.”

Wrapped around the life of Richard Pryor is the life of a word that straddles a line between danger and provocation, a word that author Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor refuses to say or even print. As she tells readers about her father and her loving-but-difficult relationship with him, she warily circles that word, as if it might bite. You may cringe, but she weighs it carefully, helping readers see it as a chameleon before always bringing us back to her father, his work, and his life before and after her and that word.

It’s a push-pull balance that holds readers fast, and keeps them there. It’s perfect for fans of this genre, or Richard Pryor, or of language – and it’s going to make you think. If you want a good memoir this week, one that may send you to your old album collection, “Something We Said” is rock-solid.