Who Is: ApolloNightLA ‘Artist of the Week’ Young Dynasty Clique

ApolloNightLA is gaining ground as a major presence in the music scene. With recent in-studio guests like Jamie Foxx (via Skype), En Vogue, Faith Evans and Jackie Christie, the platform continues to stay true to its foundational roots…give unsigned artists a legitimate chance to be heard. ApolloNightLA streams live every Monday night at 7pm Pacific / 9 Central / 10 Eastern so make sure you tune in and join a global audience.

This interview is from their winners a couple weeks back, Young Dynasty Clique, whose story is told by faceman LO, who also is responsible for the group’s sound.

From the outside looking in, who is Young Dynasty Clique?

YDC is a group that contains 4 original members:

LO (@D9_NastyCliQ_LO); Chanzie (@PrynceCharles__); Jbo (@richcityj); and Jozy (@JozyTheGreat_)

I am LO and I make the beats, mix and master the tracks and I rap also. From the outside looking in, I’d say YDC is a group of friends who want to bring their music to everyone’s ears, not sounding like everyone else.

What brought you to the entertainment industry, music specifically?

Me personally, I’ve had this dream to rap at a very young age scrolling through the channels on the TV at my house when I was about 5 and I came across the rap channel on Music Choice, and everything changed. My mom only allowed me to listen to Baha Men and a lot of old school R&B such as Earth Wind and Fire, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, etc. However, listening to rap just simply opened doors of creativity in my brain that even to this day I can’t explain. And after that day, the dream just manifested until I made it reality.

I met the rest go the crew when I attended hell, (LOL) Oakland Military Institute. By my freshman year of 2010,Ionly got to meet Jozy, and we would just talk about the music because he was into basketball and didn’t really have that much time to dedicate to the music. However, I recorded my first song there with the music teacher, Mr. Jimmie Adams. He showed me how to use Garage Band to record myself over beats with no microphone. I just used the iMac built in microphone and on a good day, someone brought their apple headphones and we would record with that.

I met the rest of the crew my sophomore year. I grew up with Jbo, that’s my cousin, but he went to my school for a year. So he was already down with the music. But my boy Chanzie, I met him in my geometry class back when he was a singer.

We had other members but they came and went, but all of us stuck together through all these years making songs. The reason we started making music as a whole, was because our school was so dry and the only way we could have fun was doing what we love, which is making music, and entertaining our peers with those big ass cyphers we used to do.

Tell us about your current project and your ApolloNightLA “Artist of the Week” winning single “Fallacy.”

My current project is school. I’m attending Ex’pression College of the Digital Arts in Emeryville, CA. I will be receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Sound Arts in May of 2017.

But I still find time to work on some projects in-between terms and holidays. I’m currently working on a beat, its still a loop as of right now. I haven’t decided how I want to arrange it, but its go[nna] be another banger for sure.

Now the ApolloNightLA submission, that’s my everything right there. I had just got done making another banger and I was at the stage of creativity where I was wondering how am I going to top off this one? So I sat down did some music theory exercises, found the key I wanted to play in and I just started layering arpeggios in Maschine. I did some in key, some to the fifth degree of the key to give it some life. Now, every thing was done and I just needed a hard a** 808 to finish the loop. The type of 808s I hear in my head, I can never find. So I just use one 808. I change it up entirely, so I guess you can say I make my own 808s LOL.

So now the beat is done, and I show it to Jbo and he was like the beat [fiyah] so he laid his verse first. I processed it the way it needed to be and by this point, I didn’t even know what the hook was gon[nna] be yet. It was just one of them beats I thought should have stayed beats.

Finally I just sit down, and think of some simple but catchy lyrics for a hook that will match the energy of this song and it just came to me. They got me fu**ed up, yeah they got us fu**ed up. But I don’t give a fu**, Lo Jbo gone fu** em up. I laid down the hook and laid my verse down the day after and my mama heard me recording and she thought I was dissing somebody because I was putting that much emotion into it and just being myself and not trying to sound like no one else to get famous. But that’s how the track was made. Once I was done mixing it to how I thought it should be, I sent it into ApolloNightLA and by the time they got back to me saying that I’ll be on the show, I had already revised the mix because I showed it to one of my teachers at my the college and they said it was way too much bass. I didn’t want that mix to be on the show so I sent the new one to their email and crossed my fingers hoping they would see it in time enough.

For new listeners, what song of yours would you pick as an introduction to you?

It’s not really a song yet, but it’s a beat I made that reflects me a lot. I feel I put all my passion and ambition into that beat and I feel like it’s downloading all my passion into the listener’s spirit.

Last but not least, HYPE wants to know…What’s your CRAZIEST “Where they do that at?!” moment…

It was this special needs kid at my school that wanted to rap with all my friends and me but he wasn’t really that good. I would encourage him to do what he want[ed] to, but if he was gone rap with us, I was at least gon[na] show him how to write some metaphors and similes and other literary devices to make him sound good.

I wasn’t there but I heard he battled one of the nicest rappers at the school and the special needs boy was white and called my friend the ‘n’ word and my friend picked him up and threw him in the garbage can after everyone had lunch

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About the Author

Dr. Jerry Doby Editor-in-Chief of The Hype Magazine, Media and SEO Consultant, Journalist, Ph.D. and retired combat vet. 2023 recipient of The President's Lifetime Achievement Award. Partner at THM Media Group. Member of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, the United States Press Agency and ForbesBLK.