DMX - Get At Me Dog (Dirty) Official Music Video

JUL 01 1998 · 12:00

DMX - Get At Me Dog (Dirty) Official Music Video (1998) Director: Hype Williams Era: Late-90s East Coast Hip-Hop Ascendancy (1998) - DMX's major-label debut single, signaling a raw, gritty counter-movement to the dominant Shiny Suits era and launching one of rap's most explosive commercial runs. Exceptionally high. This video is the originating visual document for one of hip-hop's most commercially and culturally dominant artists of the late 1990s and 2000s. It captures DMX at the precise moment of emergence, live, unpolished, in the exact venue that validated his underground reputation. As a Hype Williams directorial outlier (black-and-white, verité, minimal effects), it serves as both a primary historical artifact and a counter-example to dominant assumptions about the director's aesthetic. The combination of cultural weight, directorial significance, and documented production context places this at the apex of 1990s hip-hop video preservation priorities. Context: Released February 10, 1998, 'Get at Me Dog' arrived as East Coast hip-hop was polarizing between Bad Boy's polished Shiny Suits era and a resurgent street-hardened underground. The single was DMX's major-label debut and the lead single for It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, which debuted at No. 1, marking a seismic cultural pivot. Producer Dame Grease built the beat around a slowed disco sample from B.T. Express, inverting the era's euphoric sonic palette into something confrontational and raw. Shooting the video live at The Tunnel, New York's most notorious underground hip-hop club, was a deliberate authenticity signal, placing DMX inside the very community infrastructure that had made him a word-of-mouth phenomenon. The video's black-and-white rawness, directed by Hype Williams in a pronounced stylistic pivot from his maximalist norm, gave the debut a visceral legitimacy that pure studio production could not have conveyed. Director notes: Confirmed as DMX's first-ever music video. Shot live at The Tunnel nightclub in New York City, capturing a raw, crowd-energy performance. The video was produced by Honey Lathan (per IMVDb). The black-and-white, verité aesthetic represents a deliberate departure from Williams's signature fish-eye, high-saturation, maximalist style, a choice that mirrored the song's gritty, anti-opulence ethos and amplified DMX's street credibility. The extreme editing pace (avg shot length 0.35s; 590 scene changes in ~3.5 minutes) is consistent with Williams's rhythm-synced editing philosophy applied to a hardcore live-performance context. The single was officially released on February 10, 1998, and the video's exposure helped it peak at No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100, serving as the lead-off for DMX's debut album It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, which debuted at No. 1.