Kid Doms, in his backyard
The major minor
Local rapper Kid Doms wrecks every show he plays — as long as he’s old enough to get in
by MAX PLENKE / mplenke@lvcitylife.com
Published: Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 12:06 am
KID DOMS CAN’T DRINK, DRIVE OR BUY CIGARETTES. Late on a Sunday night, the 17-year-old rapper’s sister drops him off at a Starbucks on Flamingo Road. He sticks out like a sore thumb staring up at the overwhelming menu of coffee and coffee-based products. He’s never contemplated the intricacies of a skinny caramel macchiato. Which is fine. It would probably contradict the philosophy of his baggy, all-brown outfit that makes him look like a thug life Boo-Boo Bear. Drinking creamy foam-design drinks on a Sunday night isn’t really the modus operandi of an undefeated Las Vegas battle rapper — which Doms is.
But that’s not common knowledge for people who don’t frequent the monthly after-hours battle rap sessions at Johhny Tocco’s boxing gym on East Charleston Boulevard. Because of his age — he could get carded taking out the trash — Doms (don’t pronounce it any way but “domes”) is confined to the one or two all-ages venues with hip-hop nights.
“There’s a lot of shows I can’t play because I can’t get into the venue,” he says. “I played a 21-plus show once because the guy just let me in. But before that we used to just play back yard shows with shitty DJs and horrible microphones.”
It’s part of the reason he got into All Hip-Hop All the Time, Las Vegas’s battle rap league that’s been gaining some hood Internet respect for its YouTube battle posts (a recent championship bout has just under two million views). According to AHAT’s founder, Omar “OD” Davis (who, like most people, hadn’t heard of Doms before his debut battle), the league served the purpose Doms was seeking: exposure. OD’s monthly event gives aspiring rappers and battlers a venue to be seen from home, building a rapper’s reputation and fan base to bolster sales for upcoming albums.
Battle rapping was never the end-game goal. But after watching some of the battles AHAT posted on YouTube, Doms found a quick way to get some recognition — despite being too young to play most local hip-hop shows. “In battles I was seeing a lot of people getting publicity, but not a lot of them were the greatest,” he says. “I figured if I can get that much publicity, instead of being just a random dude dropping a CD, I’ll be Doms from AHAT dropping a CD. So it’s for that big buzz.”
The plan worked. He’s only been in the league for a year and already Doms regularly gets between 30,000 and 60,000 views per YouTube battle post, offering him a successful medium outside trying to get 100 kids to come to a struggling all-ages venue — and a way to get some publicity for his debut mixtape, something he’s aiming to release in late February.
And the album’s probably going to do just fine, if the young rapper’s fan raves are any indication. He’s built a reputation as a vicious battler, targeting his opponent’s shortcomings in a way that would probably get him clocked if he said them outside the verbal ring. “[If I know who I’m battling], I can pick out their flaws and make them feel bad about it,” he says. “I have to come up with something the dude just can’t come back from. The stuff you gotta make has to talk about the person in a way that makes the crowd react. You want those Ooohhh! reactions.”
Since his first three battles that were admittedly heavy on the homophobic attacks, he’s graduated from sewing together elaborate gay jokes into brutal, graphic, almost horror-rap depictions of murder. They’re the kinds of lines you respect while you wince thinking about how much something like getting chopped up with a butcher knife and getting eaten in a stir fry would really mess up your whole day. It’s perpetual grindhouse comedy, describing the kinds of pulpy violence you might see in a Quentin Tarantino film. Watching him live, you can’t help but laugh. With every punchline, he brushes his ultra-long, Swedish metal band hair away from the massive shades on his baby face, a goofy high school kid in a room full of 20-somethings — and slays them.
To say Doms is a high school kid is misleading. He dropped out of high school his freshman year — and he’s been doing almost nothing but music since then. “I don’t go to high school, I don’t have a job,” he says. “I’m gonna get my GED and when I’m 18 I’ll hopefully get a good job, but other than that, I write raps, make beats and work on rap battles.” He’s replaced traditional academia and entered the YouTube classroom, watching as many rap battles as he can and waiting for inspiration to strike. “When you listen to music you want to make music,” he says. “So when you watch a lot of rap battles, it makes you want to do more rap battles.”
According to OD, Doms is on the right path to graduating his self-imposed curriculum. “The things that make him one of the best are his flow, lyrical ability, his age and his look,” OD says. “But a lot of it is his personality. He might be the most humble MC in our league, which is really rare with rappers. His demeanor makes people like him. Plus, he’s got flow.”
With his debut piece of tangible production in the works — and toeing dangerously close to the No. 1 ranking in his league — we’ll see how much longer that will last. It’s a funny coincidence, since Doms never set out to become Las Vegas’s Muhammad Ali of the spit circle. “I make music,” he says, eyeing the empty Italian soda bottle that’s neither skinny nor caramel. “I do battles and they get good exposure. But my music is my priority.” MAX PLENKE