DOMINIQUE YOUNG UNIQUE
When Dominique Young Unique speaks in the third person—blurting out things like “Dominique Young Unique gets respect” or “Dominique Young Unique gonna be real big”—it’s not because she’s crazy or somehow detached from reality. It’s because she’d very much like for you to believe her hype. The 19-year-old Tampa rapper, who began gaining acclaim in both hip hop and indie circles following the release of her Domination mixtape last year, is at that still-delicate point in her career where people are paying attention, but not enough for her to be satisfied yet.
On a hot, humid day in the last week of June, she has just returned to Tampa from a début Glastonbury performance. “It was a really big crowd. A lot of people was relating to me; they were dancing, partying,” she says. “After the show, I was walking down the street, and everybody was hugging me and kissing me on my forehead. They wouldn’t let me go. I was getting all the attention,” she boasts, almost as if to remind herself that, despite never having ventured outside of her home state until she was well into her teens, she had, in fact, just performed at the world’s largest music festival, on a bill that also included the likes of U2, Morrissey, and Beyoncé (whom she lists as one of the three female artists she’d most like to work with, the other two being Rihanna and Miami rapstress Trina).
Unique grew up in Tampa’s notorious Robles Park projects and, along with her family, faced a spell of poverty and homelessness at an age at which most American teenagers’ biggest concern is SAT prep. But those experiences, enough to embitter someone much older, have had a different impact on Unique: they’ve made her more determined to make something out of herself. So much so that her enthusiasm is endearingly childlike, her confidence infectious, and her optimism refreshing. “I’m doing this for my family. I’m grinding hard because I wanna move my momma into a real big house. And one day, I’m gonna be on MTV Cribs like, ‘I did it guys!’” says Unique.
Her unlikely rags-to-blogs trajectory was the result of a chance meeting. After Unique began rhyming at age eleven and developed a local reputation by rapping for anyone in the neighborhood who would listen, Shunda K of queer-Christian electro-rap group Yo! Majesty—likely the only other Tampa-based hip hop act anyone outside of the Sunshine State has ever heard of—introduced Unique to producer David Alexander, who has since steered her career rather effectively. And she knows it, too. “If I never met David, I promise you, I don’t know where I’d be right now. I’d probably be pregnant or something,” says Unique, with a mix of disbelief and gratitude.
Under his guidance, she has churned out a couple of EP’s and three mixtapes, with work on a fourth already underway. Over Alexander’s club-ready electro beats, Unique offers up hyperactive verses and catchy hooks that make for fantastic party anthems.
“Dominique Young Unique just wanted to try something different and something new. Something y’all never thought Dominique Young Unique would do,” she says, explaining how she and Alexander stumbled upon the sound that eventually worked for her. “When David says, ‘Dominique, I think you should write a song to this,’ I’m like, ‘Ok, let’s try it, let’s do it, if it sounds good, we gon’ put it on the mixtape.’”
But Unique is more than just a party spitter with a rapid-fire flow. On songs like “CEO Girl” and “Follow the Leader,” off of her Domination and Glamorous Touch mixtapes, respectively, she varies between her trademark upbeat delivery and a more agile rhyme pattern in the vein of traditional Dirty South rap. And that’s part of why she bristles at the endless comparisons to other female alt-hip hop artists like Rye Rye, Santigold, and M.I.A. “Why they keep comparing me? Everybody got their own fucking sound. Just because we artists and we rap, don’t mean we’re together,” she says, clearly upset. “Ugh,” she says at the mention of Nicki Minaj. “Fuck her. I don’t like her. I don’t have no fucking fake ass and fake tits. I don’t sound like her. I have my own sound.”
The comparisons hit especially hard because, to Unique, they are symptomatic of the difficulties of being a female rapper in the first place. “No one compares the male rappers to each other, and there are so many of them,” she points out. Being a woman in any male-dominated industry is tough enough, but in hip hop, where sex, aggression, and masculinity have long been the norm, it can be even more difficult. Take Unique’s early attempts at finding collaborators, for instance. “Every producer tried to talk to me, even though I was a little youngie. They was trynna talk to me, trynna get in my clothes. And I was like, ‘Oh, no no no, that’s not gonna happen. I’m here for one thing, and that’s to record,’” she says. “I knew my dad and uncles would fuck them bitches up, but it was scary. I was only fifteen.”
Nowadays, though, the same producers who saw her as nothing more than a young body have no choice but to buy her hype. As she puts it herself, “Everybody love Dominique Young Unique now.”
Dominique Young Unique’s third mixtape Stupid Pretty is out now.
Styling and makeup by Melissa Arango. Photographer’s assistant: Claude Gasser. Retouching by Dippin’ Sauce.
