Make Music Day 2020: "Damien," by Dominick Brown
Video of Dominick Brown speaking with DJ Craig Mitchell as a part of Make Music Day’s This American Song event, in which Brown submitted his song “Damien.”
Text by Thomas Shimmield.
I’m not breaking any new ground by saying that 2020 has been one heck of a year. Every month, as of writing this, something seems to pop up that destabilizes people. Sometimes it’s something warranted like the pandemic, sometimes it’s something absurd like murder hornets. Recently, we’ve all borne witness to 2020’s surging of protests and tensions with police. In just a short few weeks, people went from sheltering indoors out of fear of infection to holding up signs and risking infection for the advancement of social and racial justice. I’d like to take this time to make a case that this is a movement that would have happened regardless of the year. Furthermore, it's one that we needed to happen. Because without it we won’t have youth that are equipped to understand and speak against these issues and go on to one day move us to a time in history when racial inequity has been dissolved and repaired by our humanity and conviction.
I hereby submit my case in the form of seventeen year old Dominick Brown, an aspiring rap artist from Burlington, Vermont. For those unfamiliar, Dominick made an appearance at this year’s Make Music Day event as the final guest in a long lineup of Vermont musicians, where he was interviewed live by DJ Craig Mitchell. The Make Music Day project is a world-encompassing musical event that happens each year in more than a hundred different countries and all fifty states. Usually the day encourages people to go outside in large groups and play music together, but seeing as we are smack dab in the middle of COVID season still, this year’s Make Music Day went virtual. There, Dominick shone some light on a recent project of his that’s directly related to the protests, as well as the movement at large. He spoke about an encounter he had with someone who had attended a Black Lives Matter rally, and specifically how it had motivated him to work on a new song.
“I got in touch with this kid named Damien (Garcia), who went to the Montpelier Black Lives Matter rally that happened last week or the week before,” he said during the Make Music Day live stream. “Basically I touched base with him and talked with him about his experiences as a biracial kid in Vermont, in society, and just overall what it’s like to grow up being black. And from there I worked on a song about his experiences… a takeaway from our conversation. What he really wanted was it to not be a personal thing about him, but more so about everyone’s story. So from there I went on and tried to figure out a way to make it about him but also make it about everyone in the same sense.” The song, titled “Damien,” does exactly that, speaking to the black experience in America with both Damien and Dominick’s experiences fueling the lyrics. Perhaps it’s put best in what I, personally, think is the best line from the song: “In a coffin there’s a million of us, 400 years we’re not given enough, 400 years we’ve been told to be tough, the revolution’s coming now enough is enough.”
The song was made as a part of the “This American Song” project coordinated this year by Make Music Day. The project, as the name “American” implies, centers around fifty people of all ages, one from each state, and fifty professional songwriters (one of which being Dominick) also from each state. The idea is to pair up one artist and one person for an electronic conversation together, from which the artist writes a song based on the conversation. The process completes with the artist and person reconvening, and with a live performance of the newly created song. It’s through this that the song we now know as “Damien” came to be. The radio-safe version of the song and lyrics are available below, and the song is currently in rotation on 105.9FM The Radiator.
Dominick, who grew up as a black child in a white household, admits that he: “didn’t really realize what it was like growing up as a black person in Burlington, Vermont until a couple of years ago.” He describes a childhood in which his great grandmother (also white) was best friends with the local police station. As he put it: “for me growing up I didn’t learn to hate cops, I learned to love cops, since they were the ones who were helping me and being there to protect and serve.” It really is a pretty picture being painted, the thought of a black child being raised without the nearly-ingrained fear or distrust of police that so many have. But that shouldn’t be a picture only fit for the few like Dominick. It should be here and now for everyone. But once again, I’m not breaking any new ground by saying that.
Every good story has an inciting event, and here we are at the inciting event for Dominick’s. At least, the inciting event for his view on police and police behavior in America. What I personally paid attention to, and what you should probably take a look at as well, is Dominick’s choice of words when describing it. As he said during the interview, “It was interesting, because a couple years ago I was living with my mom, and she has her own issues. She has an addiction issue so she battles herself and her own demons a lot, and she tends to get herself in situations that affect me. I ended up getting stopped and searched by the FBI, and it was this whole situation. That’s kind of what made me realize that police look at you as different, because her boyfriend, who was white, walked out of the house at the same time that I did, yet I was the one who was stopped and searched, you know? So it was interesting to me to kind of look at the bigger picture and realize Vermont isn’t the safe little bubble we think it is.”
Now I don’t know about any of you, but if I were unjustifiably pulled aside by the FBI and searched up and down for no other reason than my skin color, then lord knows I would have more colorful words for it than “interesting.” Stupid, racist, illogical, unfit, these are some of the more PG words that would go through my head. During the interview Dominick was surprisingly very calm and down to earth.
Like most talented artists, Dominick’s career began young. Seven years young, to be exact. He credits his inspirations at that time as two individuals: well-known artist Lil Wayne, and Dominick’s own father. “My dad initially showed me some old school artists,” he said on the topic, “growing up I listened heavily to Lil Wayne, so I guess the inspiration came from him and his music. And growing up, seeing my dad rap, and seeing the influence that other artists had on him, kind of like inspired me a little bit to become a rapper.” But even beyond those two, there was a third influence that Dominick believes is really what drove him down this path. During his senior year of high school, he did a tech program in which: “each week we would get assigned a new project. It was for beat making, producing, all of that.”
Dominick talked about his teacher in the class and how he pushed the young artists into trying new things. Each week, Dominick would do a “singing project” in which he would simply sing a song. Until one week he discovered a beat he liked. Rather, the words he used were: “connected with.” It was around this one beat that Dominick wrote his first rap song, titled “Do or Die.” And after having listened to it, his reaction was: “dude, I love rapping, why haven’t I been doing this the entire time?”
An artist’s roadmap is impossible to predict, but it’s something every artist must traverse in their own time. Currently, Dominick’s roadmap is taking him on a move away from Vermont and toward finding a producer for his work. But while he’s on the hunt, Dominick has more than enough work cut out for him through his passion alone.
“The thing is I haven’t fully found myself as an artist, I haven’t found my lane yet, I haven’t found what sub-genre of rap and/or what genre of music in general I want to make. My biggest thing as an artist is that I don’t ever wanna be anybody else. I don’t ever wanna follow anybody else’s path or lane, and I just always wanna create my own. I feel like each song that I make is a path off of me, it’s something I’ve created within my life. So overall, I want them to look at my music and be like: ‘wow, this is what he chose to do, he struggled but this is how he chooses to change that.’”
Aside from his ventures with Make Music Day and Black Lives Matter, Dominick has been working on music long enough to have compiled over 200 songs over his career, finished and unfinished. Currently he uses Soundcloud as his primary release platform with considerations to move onto YouTube, and is in the market for a producer to help his career along. Even so, the resumé built up by him is more than impressive for any starting-off artist.
Dominick continues to put his musical passion and skill to work whenever he can, most notably in his recent work as discussed several paragraphs above. You can support him by listening to his songs online, and the movement at large by spreading inclusiveness and understanding, and by educating yourself through one of the links below. With more educated, aware, and skillful youth like Dominick, progress is truly not as far off as it sometimes feels.
Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Vermont
NAACP – Rutland Area Chapter
Champlain Area ChapterVermont Racial Justice Alliance
Vermont Coalition for Ethnic and Social Equity in Schools
I knew a li’l boy name Damien,
This is the state of mind he was reigning in,
Why do I have to wake up and be black,
Why do I have to wake up like that,
Why do I have to wake up and be black,
Why do I have to wake up like that,
Black is beautiful and I am black and I am proud,
Sometimes I wake up and I’m black and I am loud,
Sometimes I wake up and I’m black and I am proud,
Sometimes I wake up and I’m black and I am loud,
You don’t know what it’s like to struggle everyday,
My mama’s white she can’t relate,
My daddy’s black it’s DNA,
I fear they’ll kill him everyday,
I fear they’ll kill him everyday,
I wake up same days and I’m so afraid but it’s okay I’ll be okay,
I’ll be okay which is so f***ed up,
That’s not to say I won’t get f***ed up,
My pain is deep, I am so fed up,
Counting my sheep,
Deep sleep it creeps,
In a coffin there’s a million of us,
400 years we’re not given enough,
400 years we’ve been told to be tough,
The revolution’s coming now enough is enough,
Say it with me:
Black is beautiful and I am black and I’m proud,
Walking through the crowd I am feeling proud,
Highest in the room I am in the clouds,
Daddy always told me he’d be proud,
(Why do I) x3
Why do I have to wake up and be black,
Why do I have to wake up like that,
Why do I have to wake up and be black,
Why do I have to wake up like that,
Black is beautiful and I am black and I am proud,
Sometimes I wake up and I am black and I am loud,
Sometimes I wake up and I am black and I am proud,
Sometimes I wake up and I am black and I am loud,
I feel like I’ll never be enough so I have to be tough,
Everyday I wake up in a new skin a new face in a new haze ‘cause,
Somebody told me I’ll never be enough,
You’re not dark enough to be black,
You’re not white enough to be white,
Where do you fit in in this dark night,
So respect ya privilege respect ya hustle
I wanna grow old, but my life is a threat,
I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe they said,
I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe they said,
Strapped up we’re ready for war,
We’re knocking we’re at your door,
Do you fight for the ones you swore?
Is it love, love galore?
(Sing it with me now)
(I’m black and beautiful and proud)