Worth It

FREEBASE FREESTYLE (PROD. TAHJ)

100 or Nun (feat. Tony Shhnow)

5 O'Clock

KELLY

Gotta go
She’s on my mind
Big ole globe
@odmongrel

These are the prophetic words of Dasan Broadnax, AKA O.D. Mongrel, a supremely talented and visionary poet and writer of many things who felt and witnessed in his 26 short years of physical life what most of us could only hope to imagine. He felt love. He felt peace. He felt pain. He felt joy and pleasure. He felt bottomless possibilities. And he felt and saw himself, his fully free self.

Persona is a posthumous musical experience by O.D. Mongrel. We had to piece together this project from notes and files due to his unexpected passing.  He kept a journal with instructions, as if he knew he wouldn’t be the one to finish this project. This is what O.D. Mongrel was working on before he passed. 

Dasan adopted the moniker O.D. Mongrel as a display of pride for his African-American and Afro-Latino roots. Mongrel was a foul description of Black folks, because the definition is an undefinable dog. Flipping words the way his two communities have done forever, Dasan sat in a space outside of perceived normalcy. He would claim Mongrel for himself, make it mean something—something new, different, and so so dope. 

Him, a kid raised on hip-hop and salsa as well as gospel and soul. Him, a proud man-child in his own private promised land raised by his Puerto Rican mother and his Black father, just like Jean-Michel Basquiat, another dreamer without a pause, another product of multiple cultures.

Because Dasan and his alias, O.D. Mongrel, believed in dreams. That is why Dasan landed on creating electronic music because it allowed him those visions, that freedom. There were no rules, no boundaries. He could hear an organic sound and turn it into art.  Literally, footsteps, a bird chirping, or a bubbling stream. 

Without question, it is the spirit of O.D. Mongrel, our beloved Dasan, who is presenting this musical experience to you as a gift—a spirit that remains alive and is still writing and creating and soaring and questioning, like everywhere:


“When Now vs. Now asked me to describe my music I told them it was Proto-Apocalypse Post-Rap. I make all of my own beats, I like to sing, I like to rap and I like to write as well as spoken word—poetry and stuff like that. I’m informed by many genres, I like soul and ballads from Motown and Benton Wood; but also dancehall. I was a music kid, because of my mom, I grew up around a lot of music. My favorite artists growing up were Eminem and 50Cent. I’m heavily informed by rap but also heavily informed by rock, electro, and also, you know, soul. I think I do a lot of different things and sometimes I don’t like to be categorized as only doing rap. You can listen to the first AC/DC album and hear Bon Scott, he has these cadences and flows that sound like he could be rapping. So is it really rap what I am doing? You know sometimes it is like rap but other times is more melodic and futuristic beats. And I really like the idea of post-rap. But ultimately when you listen to it you make your own decision of what it’s really like.” 

—Dasan Broadnax, AKA O.D. Mongrel

Conscious Rappers

Athame (ft. Zach The Inhaler)

Scarlett Johansson (dlc)

Untitled 4 [prod. KNS]

Joey Purp Kami - PACK

Technically

The unknown has always been the primordial slime of the imagination

soundcloud:tracks:706116781

Conscious Rappers

O.D. Mongrel

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