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ME: one of the interesting aspects about you is how you’ve had a presence without having a ton of stuff released. How were your early days in Detroit making music?
DAKIM: It was always just me and a small handful of homies in Detroit. We were pretty insulated. We weren’t really accepted by the elite of Detroit. People came from all over and congregated at spaces like St. Andrews or Hip-Hop Shop, Lush Lounge and Buddha Lounge a little bit later too. Everybody knew us because we were everywhere, but we were scrubs. We were doing our own thing. Maybe we were looked at as scrubs and felt ourselves as scrubs. But we kept at it, staying in our own bubble and developing our own little thing. Trying to push it or get it out there wasn’t even the mentality at the time. We just did it and it was for us. My whole thing with music since we started was therapy. I started making music at the same time I stopped going to school, around the age of 14. My brother left behind his turntables when he went away to school in 94. Within a year or so I started getting into his stuff and making tapes. My life fell apart at the time—I got super depressed and stopped going to school. I just focused on making tapes because that was the only thing I really could do at the time. I was making these little rinky-dink tapes and did that for a few years. Eventually, I met my homie Leaf and he was the first person to really hear me and support me. We linked and we’ve been cool ever since. That’s when we started kind of forming a crew but even still, it was just us. We never really got out of that doing-it-just-for-us feel.
MYSELF: Was that ever a point of conversation or was that just implicitly understood?
DAKIM: We had dreams of doing things. Leaf would call me up sometimes like, ‘I had this dream we were doing this show!’ But as far as putting a plan to it? We just made the music and that was it. Even still to this day, that’s how I am. I make the music and that’s it. All that extra shit? That’s not for me. It’s to the detriment because that’s not the way to get shit popping.
I: When did you first start to feel like your music was reaching outside your bubble?
DAKIM: That wasn’t until I lived in L.A. I only stayed in L.A. for three years but it feels like I was there for a lifetime. It was in L.A. that I started hearing from folks overseas, like Gus Sutherland in Ireland and my man Bun out of Japan. I had no idea people were listening. Gus is really the person to let me know people were listening. Before that, I just thought it was me and the homies.
ME: What brought you to L.A.?
DAKIM: My wife. We met on a hip-hop chatroom in AOL back in 96.
MYSELF: That’s amazing! What were the chat rooms like back then?
DAKIM: Just a lot of people grillin’ people. ‘What you know about Freestyle Fellowship?’ ‘You get that new 2MEX tape?’ That kind of shit. I was in Detroit so I didn’t know anything about that but I was intrigued by it. It was a place where like-minded people could come together and mostly just crack jokes on the new guys. My wife was in there and we had a few instant messages. Eventually we talked on the phone and eventually I came out to Orange County. I think that was 2000 or 2001. I kept going back and forth visiting and by 2007 it was clear something had to happen. So I moved out there and stayed with her and her two roommates in Highland Park. I stayed there for a few months and then got my own place in Cypress Park. I moved a few blocks down, then I moved to Glendale where I stayed for maybe a year. Then one of her roommates moved out and I ended up moving back to the house in Highland Park.
I: So it was a coincidence that you moved while there was this migration of Detroit people to Los Angeles at that particular time?
DAKIM: I moved for love, man! I wasn’t thinking about music at all until I started going to Project Blowed. I was on MySpace at the time and this cat in New Jersey named Macross sent me a message directing me to Dibia$e and this beat thing happening at Project Blowed. I hit up Dibia$e and he told me to come down and my mind was blown. Project Blowed for the first time… oh my God. From that point I was catching the bus from Highland Park to Leimert Park, which is a mission. There’s a couple of times when I missed the last bus home. I think that actually happened my first night going out there. The bus stops early but Project Blowed goes to late and I didn’t know that. So I was just out there walking on Crenshaw at 3 AM not knowing how I was going to get back. I had just got there and I knew nothing about the city. Luckily this random dude in a Cadillac just slid up to me like, ‘What you doing out here?’ He gave me a ride and I got home. That was a blessing because that could of turned out real bad. I got caught out there a few times, scrambling to get home, but I kept going back because the energy was just incredible. That’s where I met Dibiase, Ras_G, Sacred and we were rolling from there.
http://larecord.com/interviews/2019/10/07/dakim-interview-ddust-sweeney-kovar
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