Rocking a faded, grey T-shirt and a black “Don’t Tread On Me” cap, Domo Genesis offered effortless charm and wit-heavy rap as Sunday’s Miller Lite stage programming plugged into speakers.
Domo Genesis plays the Miller Lite Stage at ACL Fest weekend on Sunday October 2, 2016. Dave Creaney/AMERICAN-STATESMAN
“What else do we got on the menu?” he’d ask his DJ between cuts. “I like dancing. Do y’all like dancing? A fun fact about me is: I like dancing,” the Inglewood, Calif. rapper deadpanned before “X.”
He’d juice the set with familiar West Coast rap staples like Dr. Dre’s “Xxplosive.” Instead of hands in the air, Genesis borrowed a gag from ’90s teen comedy “Bring It On” and asked us to show him “spirit fingers.”
In the age of SoundCloud and do-it-yourself hip-hop, the Odd Future member born Dominique Cole attributed his producers and collaborators between razor-sharp verses. One must hat tip the digital content. He plowed through his Tyler the Creator guest spot, “Rusty,” and shouted out producer the Alchemist before performing marijuana ode “Me and My B*tch.” Name-dropping an affection for Japanese anime “Dragonball Z,” Genesis scorched on “SS4.” (Again, shouting out the song’s producer: Erick Arc Elliott of Flatbush Zombies.)
After 26 minutes of delightfully warped call-and-response rapping, Genesis brought out five musicians he dubbed his “Stevie Wonder” band. They smoothly covered Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.”
“Did you guys have a good breakfast today?” Genesis asked his flash musicians.
The end of the vibrant jam turned clunky and raw, losing its hip-hop identify. He also didn’t perform “Coming Back,” the strongest, most in-the-pocket track from this year’s “Genesis” record. But the experiment was worth it for “Dapper,” an Anderson Paak collaboration overrun with twisted, fast-paced antics about courting lovers. “You can be my Marilyn Monroe, I’m John Kennedy,” goes his pick-up line.
That’s the thing about Domo Genesis: He’s a motor-mouthed smartass at heart. The 25-year-old rapper behaves like a spitball-flinging kid who gets in trouble because he’s bored by the coursework. And with note-perfect similes like “watch me in the street like it’s roller hockey,” he has the writing chops to pen an epic.
