Photo by Dylan Reid. Photo illustration by Crystall Simone
Pursuit of Happiness: How DC The Don Tunes Out Internet Noise
DC The Don gets real on how to tune out negativity from the internet.
In a career that stretches about seven years, DC The Don’s learned the virtue of using bad days to create. “That shit makes it lit,” he explains. “It makes it so much easier to make music.” If his output is any indication, DC’s made the most of emotional unrest.
Dating back to 2017, the Milwaukee rapper unloaded 15 projects on his way to becoming a veritable force in the world of hip-hop. Using colorful melodies to match his unfiltered emotions, he’s shown no signs of complacency on his path to infinitive level-ups. His new project, Rebirth, is just the latest step of his journey.“My only goal is to shine a light on this shit that we've been doing and the way that we've been impacting these kids' lives,” he explains. “A lot of people just don't know the story yet, so I'm just here to make sure my story spreads.”
Today, he tells a part of it. Chopping it up with Okayplayer, DC The Don walks us through just how he tries to keep a positive state of mind.
DC The Don: Every person in my life is my support system. My mom, my little brother, my friends, my management, my whole team; everybody that's around me. If there are some people around me that aren't part of my support system, then it's just business.
Staying in a good mindset is my biggest problem. I'm still trying to figure that out. I hate getting to a point where I'm in that good mindset and then I start getting bored. I'll be in a good-ass mindset as soon as I get bored of just life and everything that I'm doing. It just starts to spiral from there. I'm still trying to figure out how to stay positive. A part of that is letting go. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to let go of a lot of things. Certain things are not worth stressing over. There are so many better things that you can put your energy into. I’ve come to realize that a little more every year in a different way. Being an artist and having to hear the whole entire world's opinion on Twitter is crazy. There was one day I woke up and I was having a good little morning. And then I saw a tweet that said. ‘This n**** music ass.’ It had like 5,000 likes and I was like, ‘Oh fuck.’ We all have a negative bias in our brain where we just focus on the bad thing. If you read 10 positive comments about you, you're going to fly right past them and see the one negative comment. That’s just how our brain works. But you can reverse it.
It's just all this bad energy that doesn’t really exist. When it comes to negativity, I just get offline. I know it sounds super simple, but it is that simple. I just play video games — that Dragon Ball game just dropped, so I’ve been playing that. I go to the gym, play basketball, ping pong — anything to actually live in the real world. Sometimes you get trapped in the matrix of just being on your phone and online and you can feel like that's the real world. Then you go outside and you don't worry about it anymore.
