50 Cent, Jadakiss and DMXG-Unit/Getty

EXCLUSIVE: Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s G-Unit Audio is teaming with Narratively on a new podcast series to explore the early life and rise of the late rapper and actor DMX. In collaboration with iHeartPodcasts, Look Thru My Eyes: Becoming DMX will be available everywhere podcasts are heard later this year.

Hosted by Jadakiss, the series will take listeners back to a time before the world knew DMX — when Earl Simmons was a young, fiercely talented artist hustling, battling, and surviving his way through Yonkers, New York. Family members, childhood friends, collaborators, rivals, and cultural icons will share intimate, firsthand insight into DMX’s formative years across the series’ first season.

Plans for the project begin with DMX, with later seasons to focus on the origin stories of other notable artists.

“DMX’s story is bigger than the music — it’s about survival, faith, pain, and purpose,” shared Jackson. “Look Thru My Eyes: Becoming DMX gives people a chance to understand where X came from, before the fame, through the voices of the people who were really there. This is the story that shaped the legend.”

Executive producers Bruce Miller and Justin Baez are fellow Yonkers natives, like DMX and Jadakiss, who have deep personal ties to DMX and his family. A release for the projects touts how Miller and Baez’s “lived connection to the city — and to DMX’s impact on it — grounds the series in the community that shaped him long before fame.”

“DMX’s story is inseparable from Yonkers, and his legacy is the lifeblood of hip hop,” Miller noted.

DMX performing in 2019Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Veteran audio producer Drew Nelles (Crimetown, The Binge Crimes: Finding Mom’s Killer) will serve as the project’s showrunner. In addition to Jackson, Miller, and Baez, the series is executive produced by Noah Rosenberg and Paul Anderson of Workhorse Media, the latter of whom negotiated the deal on behalf of Jackson and Narratively in partnership with IAG. Narratively, G-Unit Audio, Blue Light Media, and 1982 Media, in association with Workhouse Media, produce Look Thru My Eyes: Becoming DMX.

Jackson is riding the wave of success with this newly announced non-fiction project, following the release of his hugely popular Netflix docuseries, Sean Combs: The Reckoning, which debuted at No. 1 and drew an estimated 22 million views in its opening weekend. Additionally, his podcast Surviving El Chapo: The Twins Who Brought Down a Drug Lord, produced with iHeartPodcasts, was a breakout hit.

Deadline recently announced Jackson’s G-Unit Film & Television is developing the new true-crime series Gang Wars (working title), exploring America’s most infamous gang rivalries at A&E. This project is among multiple others in various stages of production, including the expansion of his wildly popular Power Universe franchise with Starz. Jackson is repped by IAG and attorney Steve Savva.