When I learned Domino was coming out with a new single and I learned that an interview with the West Coast legend had fallen into my lap, I searched YouTube for his videos as memories of my 10th-grade year came flooding back with his song, Ghetto Jam, playing at every cookout, every picnic, every Juneteenth event came flooding back. This single and Sweet Potato Pie from his debut album “Domino” joined the soundtrack of my life in the summer of ‘94 at that point.
I remember Domino’s delivery as being closer to singing than rapping. I managed to find my fix but found his fans filling up the comment section reminiscing about the role Domino’s songs played in their youth, while others expressed a thirst to hear Domino’s music again, live in the here and now.
Domino noted it was fans like these that his videos were on Youtube in the first place. Not that the Def Jam artist had anything bad to say about the label that launched his career.
He said he was thankful for his fans.
“You know, I came out on a label, Outburst [Records], and Def Jam,” Domino explained. “They were distributed by Columbia records.
But when you go to YouTube, it’s not Universal who put up those songs or put up by any of those other companies. But the fans know. The fans are the reason for all this and for what’s about to happen. They kept all my “Ghetto jail” My “Sweet. Potato Pies,” all my “So Fly’s” all of my whatever it is that I did. The fans kept me relevant.”
Domino recently dropped a single entitled 4U which memorializes hip-hop artists who have died from different causes.
Domino isn’t the first to do a song like this. Every so often, clarions of the culture such as Complex, XXL, and Allhiphop.com have put out best-of lists. The top selections include Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s Tha Crossroads, the remixed version released four years after the album release honoring NWA’s Eazy E.
The Ghetto Jam artist’s 4U is interesting in that he name drops rappers past and present irrespective of the region or coast they were representing. In an interview with Random Lengths News, Domino explained that one reason he made this song was to erase the divisions within hip-hop whether it’s regional, generational, or even the kind of hip-hop being produced and instead treated as one culture as it was in the beginning.
He said this song was his way of honoring the artists who paved the way so that others could financially support their families while producing music that furthered the culture.
“The culture has been one-sided for a long time. You got your West Coast, East Coast, the South … It should be just viewed as culture. We’re losing a lot of people in the game,” Domino said.
This includes the deaths of rappers such as BizMarkie, DMX, TuPac, and Pimp C. Some of them were lost senselessly.
Domino was speaking about hip-hop culture overall, but he was specifically focused on those artists living out the violence they rap about in their songs.
“We don’t stop with East and West. The West is where we lace our shoelaces,” Domino said.
He noted that in Long Beach, regardless of what gang you were repping, regardless of which set you belonged, you were first a Long Beach resident with kinfolk who made sure you were suited and booted, hair pressed and dressed in church on Sundays.
“To keep it real with you, no matter where you’re from, there ain’t no one who don’t know about church,” Domino said.
Domino explained everyone at some point gets a moment of quiet and contemplation that allows for inspiration to come tapping on your shoulder. For him, that moment came in the mid-2000s while he was sitting on a San Diego beach. At this point, he was able to put out some good music, had a hit record that reached No. 7 on Billboard charts, and chill with some of the greatest legends in hip-hop. Domino was satisfied.
“But I was still in the streets. Even when I was nominated for a Billboard award, I was still in somebody’s hood, rather than where I was supposed to be,” Domino explained.
The Sweet Potato Pie rapper went home and wrote the hook for a new hip-hop gospel song and wrote a few of the verses before breaking away from it for about a week. Domino went to a lowrider show at an auditorium in San Diego, after which he was approached by Pastor Sergio De la Mora of San Diego’s Cornerstone Church who revealed he was a fan of Domino’s music. When Pastor Sergio learned that Domino was working on what became Get It Right, Pastor Sergio urged him to finish making it into a CD that could be sold. The single wasn’t officially released until 2014.
Domino explained that the reason folks stateside haven’t seen much of him is that he’s been out there on every road in Europe doing the international thing.
“Sometimes in the states, when you do music and time goes by, it’s like a car. It depreciates,” he said. He noted the all too familiar phenomenon of having to chase event promoters, and whoever else to pay what they are owed, and even then the price negotiated pales in comparison to what he could get overseas.
“So,I’ve just been tiptoeing over there keeping my life right and taking care of my family, and doing it in a real way,” Domino said.
Between 4U and Get it Right, Domino collabed with Snoop Dogg on Baby So West Coast in 2020, the sound of which is so nostalgic, it’s like it could have been produced in the early ’90s and been a hit.
Over the years music writers, or rather, people just didn’t know, would often try to say that the styles and sounds of Domino and Snoop Dogg were similar, while in the same breath act as if the two were rivals.
Domino explained that they were like brothers who met while they were attending John Marshall Middle School, along with Warren G, Nate Dog and the Twinz, consisting of twin brothers, Trip Locc and Wayniac. Domino described Snoop as a young talented battle rapper while he was the one gifted with the pen. He explained that back in the day, before the fame, he used to write songs for Snoop.
In all, I interviewed Domino for about two hours. Some of those interviews ended in the story while the rest is on our YouTube Channel: https://tinyurl.com/channel-rlnews