Where Do We Go From Here? #15 - Dom McLennon

After a hiatus that was longer than I’d hoped, I’m back with an episode of Where Do We Go From Here? that represents a true full circle moment for me. My guest is Dom McLennon. Dom is a rapper, producer, DJ, visual artist, avid gamer, deep thinker, and founding member of Brockhampton, one of the defining digital native collectives of the waning years of hip-hop’s blog era.

I’ve known Dom as long as I’ve been in music, which improbably ticks towards 14 years. We recount our origin story and so many other aspects of our relationship like characters in an internet rap Rashomon, two lives that ran in parallel and intersected at seemingly random moments. Dom is such a thoughtful person, a world builder and experimenter with as deep a commitment to his community as his creative process. This ended up being a far more personal episode of the show because of our deep history. At times Dom even flipped things on me, leading me to shed more light on my journey than I typically might. We also live streamed the taping on Dom’s Twitch, so you’ll hear some references to that throughout. So many gems in this episode. You’ll see I had trouble trying to narrow them down below.

A few key takeaways from the conversation…

Digital native world building. So much of Dom’s story (and, by extension, the story of Brockhampton) intersects with the story of the digital revolution in creative and communicative capacities over the last decade and a half. “I learned how to compose digitally in Fruity Loops and I was making classical music in that first,” he said to me while live-streaming a conversation with me that I was recording on a web-browser based podcasting software, a series of words and thoughts that would have seemed like absolute science fiction nonsense to my mother, classically trained on piano in the 1960s at a time when the people she studied had already been dead for hundreds of years in some instances. Dom’s entire artistic practice is a testament to the infinite composability of digital tools and spaces, from his forward thinking 2013 album and web experience Thesis, to his current forays into live music and art making on Twitch. By the very nature of being born into a world of video games and virtual avatars, Dom operates in an artistic idiom that often allows digital spaces to enhance physical ones. “I wanted to have a space on this boulevard that almost felt like a speakeasy,” he says of his work. “the vending machine is actually a door… a portal.”

The virtual boulevard. When Dom speaks about past ages of the internet, you can almost see it. “I looked at the internet like it was a never-ending boulevard…parks are forums and message boards.” Each page was a storefront, a hangout, or a park bench where subcultures met. Then came the gentrifiers. “It’s gentrified, bro. It is the giant X building. It’s the giant Reddit building. It’s the giant open AI building now. It’s the giant chat GPT building. It’s the giant Google building and the giant Apple building.” What was once a sprawl of eccentric mom-and-pop sites is now a handful of corporate skyscrapers. While the internet certainly has plenty of space for lone weirdos doing cool shit, anyone creating anything cool increasingly funnels their output through platforms controlled by powerfully consolidated entities.

The question of independence. As any follower of Applied Science or the podcast might imagine, we inevitably landed on the topic of independence in music. “Independent means nothing anymore,” Dom says, echoing a point I have tried to hammer home ad nauseam over the last few years. “People tried to sell me on the fact that Kanye is an independent artist now.” Once, independence meant physical control. Pressing your own vinyl, developing relationships with vendors to distribute your records, selling your records directly to fans without any intermediaries. In a digital ecosystem owned by an increasingly consolidated corporate consortium, those possibilities erode. As I’ve espoused and as we touch on, independence now means autonomy above all else.

The Attention Economy Is Broken for Artists. Particularly at a moment when both human and AI generated content reach an absolutely overwhelming volume, Dom’s approach is positively refreshing. “I’m not upset that 2,000 people are not in this stream,” he says of the live broadcast of our conversation. “I’m speaking to who’s here.” There’s a discipline in that, a refusal to swing for the masses and miss actual audience members who will not only connect with certain content, but endure. He grounds the whole thing in numbers: “It requires 800,000 streams on Spotify to make a living wage monthly. That’s one month. That’s not practical.” His math doubles as protest. If the system’s unlivable, one must build for sustenance outside of the elements that get positioned as the fastest paths to success. “In the chase for everybody, you ignore the people that matter the most that are right in front of you.”

Hope Through Community, Practice, and Local Power. Since Dom and I reconnected in 2020, he has been fiercely focused on building within his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut and providing creative resources for a historically under supported community of largely Black and hispanic people. This work is hard, it is daunting, it requires government buy-in, years of prolonged exertion and unerring focus. Dom moved from L.A. back to Hartford to live the things he spoke on. Through the challenges both of his locality and a larger political climate in America that has seen a return to outspoken hostility to programmatic support of Black and brown people, Dom holds hope. “Not only hope, but right now freedom,” he says. “the freedom from my own expectations.” That’s not resignation, it’s recalibration. Scaling back to lived reality. His vision of artistry now continues a greater sense of civic duty and connectivity. “You’re a working artist. You’re a teaching artist. You’re involved in your community, active in your world physically and digitally.” Since moving back home, he’s done exactly that, joining the Hartford Working Families Party, helping build a community center with a free art library, a studio, and childcare. “Advocate for municipally owned art spaces and creative spaces, municipally owned studios,” he says. “If we’re gonna be independent artists, we gotta be together.” Dom defines independence not as isolated agency, but rather strength in numbers.

Special thanks to Anna Kasper for producing, Will Grogan for providing our music, and Hugh Huntingford for designing the Applied Science logo and podcast cover image (and for the recent facelift to both the site and the pod).