26-year-old Dominic Hunn represents his LA neighborhood—Leimert Park—whenever he has the opportunity. Leimert represents the burgeoning subculture of Cali rap. Just as the South Central neighborhood boasts culture, middle class living and aesthetic beauty, there’s a rougher side if visitors take a closer look. The rebirth of los angeles rap features artists from both sides of the tracks; all obviously influenced by their predecessors, but bold enough to grab the baton and take the music farther in either direction. Enter Dom Kennedy: an intriguingly cocky, yet intuitive rhymespitter with that easy flow indigenous to California hip hop. Dom has created quite a stir as a new artist, most recently dropping the critically acclaimed mixtape, From the Westside with Love. ozone had a conversation with Mr. Leimert Park about the changing face of LA rap, his place in it, and the exact definition of “choosing up.” What’s your background? I heard your dad raised you. I was raised by my mom and my dad. They lived in separate homes but I was back and forth with both of them equally. My mom is from Los Angeles and my dad’s family is originally from St. Louis. You rep hard for Leimert Park. What’s it like? Leimert Park is where I grew up. When my parents got divorced, my mom moved to Leimert and settled there. It’s been my home off and on since 1992. You know, living there, eating there, going to the barbershop, everything. So it’s home. You can live a lot of places but your heart is always at home. That’s why I always talk about it. When you read a good book about somebody, it always has a setting - somewhere where the story takes place. That’s just where my story takes place. That’s where I started out getting my confidence, on the living room floor in my apartment in Leimert Park. So I’m just paying homage, I guess. I heard it’s not a bad neighborhood, but not exactly a “good” one either.
Exactly. It’s not the best place but it’s definitely not the worst place. It’s mostly lower middle to middle-class families, single parent homes. There’s definitely a lot of art there. A lot of movies were filmed there. It just has a good vibe. It supports culture. When I was a kid I saw everything that was taking place and just became a part of it. Tell us about your journey from then up until now? I was just a regular kid. I went to school, but I wasn’t the best student. I played baseball; that was my first love. I rapped, you know, but all my homies used to rap at some point, just like most inner city kids. Kids listen to songs and have fun, but nobody says “I’m a rapper.” I was just freestyling or whatever like everybody else. After I got out of high school I did the junior college thing for a minute, but I always knew it wasn’t for me. Around that time I had a cousin, Jason Madison, who ended up producing a lot of the stuff on my first mixtape, 25th Hour. He was a DJ, so he had all this DJ equipment his dad had bought him. We used to go to his house and play instrumentals to whatever records were out at the time. We didn’t have laptops back then so he would get records or CDs or buy singles of songs that were on the radio. Whatever song was tight, he had it. Vinyl records used to always have the instrumental. I would rap over the instrumental and record it from there. If you messed up, you [ruined] your whole CD, you know? That’s how it started. But we weren’t tryin’ to come out with nothin’. We were just having fun. It was important to what I do now, but we didn’t know it back then. After years went by, I was like, “I’m not really a rapper.” I wasn’t getting paid from it. I was a student. Around 2005, the way I looked at the world really started to change. Something inside of me kept urging me to tell my story through Hip Hop. It was the thing I loved the most, so that was my outlet. That’s when I started getting the idea in my head and thinking, “Well, maybe I can do it.” So I started writing at night, and I’d come up with rhymes and they were getting better and better. In 2007, I started working on my first project, which would eventually become OZONE MAG // 57