Dominique Young Unique takes two steps backward with mixtape

On June 11, 2010

The Fader just reported about the release of Domination, and you can download the whole thing for free at Toast PR’s SoundCloud — although you have to tediously download each of the twelve tracks individually. Why not zip that shit?

Anyway, that’s negligible compared to the low quality mp3s on offer. Although the files are marked at 192 kbps, they are audibly much more compressed, probably 128, which in 2010 is rather primitive. Several of the mixtape’s tracks have already been floating around the blogal village in the past months, noticeably louder and clearer, and fans who’ve signed up for Dominique’s email newsletter were offered CD-quality wav files for a couple tracks. And it’s not like this free mixtape is a try-some-buy-some loss leader pointing toward a paid product (à la In Rainbows); it is the product. So why the downgrade in quality?

Of course Dominique herself can’t be blamed for those missteps. What she can take responsibility for, though, is the lyrical content. In a recent Q&A, I asked her how she can be sure that, in a song like “Show my Ass”, that her body parts wouldn’t overshadow her skill. She said it’s just a catchphrase, not literal, meaning simply “Dominique Young Unique is doing her thing”. OK, fair enough, but can the same defense apply to the new Ludacris-aping track “Pussy Popping”?

What I found most appalling was her usage of “no homo”, in two different songs. For those unacquainted with the hip-hop vernacular, it’s a defensive term rappers use within their lyrics to disambiguate anything that could potentially be perceived as homosexual. It’s homophobic, and it’s bad enough on its own, but it’s especially baffling coming from the mouth of someone who has gained so much mileage from her connections to openly lesbian duo Yo Majesty.

To be fair, I don’t necessarily think Dominique is truly homophobic. She probably just said “no homo” because it’s an easy rhyme. Hopefully she’ll grow up one day and use her powers for good, and not just parrot the status quo.

That may depend on the length of her contract with producer David Alexander and his Art Jam Records. Jessica Hopper, author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, first started writing about Dominique over a year ago (before everyone else), and she pointed out to me that this whole thing reeks of “Svengali shit”. Her skepticism echoed in my head when I saw Ms. Unique perform last month at Revolution № 5 in Berlin, as she remained level with the dancefloor while Alexander and another white male, elevated above the crowd, went buck wild behind their laptops, distracting away from who should have been the master of ceremonies.

Kudos to Alexander for his playful party-inciting beats, and it’s nice to see a forward-thinking approach in distributing music freely online. He has undoubtedly helped develop Dominique Young Unique’s name. But is this in any way empowering for her? Or is she just a puppet?

Aside from that, is there anything “unique” in her rapping about money, guns, hoes and a priori superiority? At first I naïvely thought there might be a subversive element to her lyrics, but now I doubt whether Dominique even knows what “subversive” means.

Dominique Young Unique – Domination