TOWN LOVE is an online art museum dedicated to celebrating the vibrant past and present of Northwest Hip-Hop. You can browse by artist or browse by year.

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Artist: Oldominion

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Make Happy

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Don't Kill Your Radio

Oldominion was a giant crew of hip-hop affiliated artists that assembled into a colossal rap group in the late ’90s. The group’s first single, Don’t Kill Your Radio appeared in 1999 on both CD and wax format.

The A-side of the vinyl starts with the vocal version of “Don’t Kill Your Radio,” and Oldominion immediately moves to capture wordy, thesaurus-rap territory in a literary land grab. These are very atypical rap lyrics here. “With bloody Carrie walking down the path of a pet cemetary,” is a good example, dropping a couple of Stephen King references. You won’t hear raps about blunts, cars, sex, jewelry, and the typical materialism found in a lot of hip-hop. Instead, these MCs spin colorful yarns and mini-vignettes which keep your ear wondering what they will say next. “Don’t Kill Your Radio” ends with a very metaphysical quote about positivity and negativity, wait for it. Instrumental and acapella mixes are included here for the DJs.

Side B features “Understand This,” maybe the smoothest of the three tracks here, but like all of Oldominion’s material it’s still a bit harsh-sounding. The group embraces paradoxes, “The closer you come, the further away you get,” is one of many examples found here. The last cut, “Ego System” contains more of the same out-there, conceptual lyrics like, “I wrote this song with the world on my back, because I took it back from Atlas and destroyed the Zodiac.” The beat on “Ego System” arrives suddenly with tense violins, eventually adding drums and finding a chaotic equilibrium. Instrumental versions of both songs are included here adding value to the twelve-inch.

Don’t Kill Your Radio features many of the rappers in Oldominion, including Destro, Nyqwil, Onry Ozzborn, Pale Soul, Sleep, and Snafu. Just like Wu Tang Clan, Oldominion built a solid foundation as a huge crew, and then various members and groups broke off and recorded numerous side projects over the next decade. Written by Novocaine132

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Parallel To Hell

Oldominion dropped their first single “Don’t Kill Your Radio” in 1999. The song and its two B-sides introduced the group as full of relentless literary angst, intent on capturing wide swaths of thesaurus-rap territory. In 2000, they put out an underground CDr album titled Book Of Fury, and also dropped this vinyl single, “Parallel To Hell.” Compelling jacket art was created by Barfly, and the front depicts a ghostly woman in a red dress. The way the record label has a punched out hole in the middle of the Oldominion logo’s “d” is a nice touch.

The A-side “Parallel To Hell” features performances by JFK, Pale Soul, Sleep, and Smoke, who alternate filling in the lines of a conceptual dialogue. One highlight of “Parallel To Hell” is Portland rapper Syndel with her needle-sharp verbal style. The chorus refers to the woman in the red dress seen on the cover, “pretending she’s a damsel in distress.” Is it all symbolism and metaphor? Oldominion isn’t going to tell you, they are too deeply invested in their art for the listener’s interpretation to matter.

Side B is “Serenade To Silence,” which includes the four rappers from “Parallel To Hell” and adds Destro, L’Swhere, Mako, and Onry Ozzborn for a total of eight artists. The gentle production on “Serenade To Silence” belies the dark, introspective imagery that accompanies the song’s lyrics. For example, “Now that I’m over the worst part of the pain, the sanctuary crumbles, I brace myself for the secondary tumble, down a black cavity, depravity…” Oldominion was among the most purely artistic and non-commercial rap groups that I can remember, and they deserve credit for doing the actual heavy lifting required for universe-building. “Don’t Kill Your Radio” and “Parallel To Hell” don’t really sound like anything else.

Just as this single was spreading through the country, Oldominion was putting the finishing touches on their massive proper debut album titled One. With so many members in the crew, and so many cities included in their grasp, Oldominion capitalized on their position and infiltrated every nook and cranny of the Washington and Oregon rap game. Even today in 2023, their name lives on among the major crews to ever come from the Northwest. Written by Novocaine132

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One

Oldominion dropped their first single in 1999, “Don’t Kill Your Radio,” which established the group as angst ridden and wickedly intelligent. The following year, the group put out its second twelve-inch, “Parallel To Hell,” b/w “Serenade To Silence.” These two songs showed growth, not only artistically but also numerically, as “Silence” boldly featured eight rappers on the same cut. Then Oldominion put out a short lo-fi CD titled Book Of Fury, also in 2000.

Oldominion’s proper debut album, titled One, includes “Radio,” “Hell,” and “Silence,” plus eleven new tracks. Track one “Ezmerelda” showcases rapper Syndel and her densely-packed style. Despite having so many voices, “Serenade To Silence” is probably my favorite track on the album. The simple repeated guitar notes in the composition remind me of a meditative Om chant, which grounds the song for me. At the start of the CD an interviewer asks, “How would you describe Oldominion?” I laugh out loud every time I hear the reply, “Haven’t heard of them.”

By the release of One the various members were already embarking on side-projects. Onry Ozzborn would go on to collaborate with JFK and Rob Castro to make Grayskul. Destro Destucto and Nightclubber Lang would become Boom Bap Project. If the One album was a talk-radio program it would be the conspiracy-laden Coast To Coast AM show, hosted by the paranormal-obsessed weirdo Art Bell until his passing in 2018. Listening to Oldominion is like playing Scrabble with Hannibal Lecter, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Bukowski, imagination runs amok in a torrent of bizarre, fantasy-filled, and sometimes mundane lyrics. Take the ride. Written by Novocaine132

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