DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas
- Author: Harkness, Geoff
Readers interested in Midwest hip-hop should enjoy this book
DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas
- Author: Harkness, Geoff
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Readers interested in Midwest hip-hop should enjoy this book
About
99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do?
DVS Mindz might be the greatest rap group you’ve never heard of. Formed in Topeka, Kansas, in the mid-1990s, they developed a reputation for ferocious rhyming and frenetic live performances. In their heyday, DVS Mindz released a critically acclaimed CD, received nominations for prestigious awards, and opened for legends such as Wu-Tang Clan, Run-DMC, and De La Soul as well as KC icon Tech N9ne. But the group struggled with creative differences, substance abuse, ego battles, and money issues, and they split up in 2003.
Geoff Harkness takes readers on a unique two-decade journey alongside the members of DVS Mindz, chronicling their childhoods, their brush with success, and what became of them in the years that followed. Based on more than one hundred hours of video and audio recordings from 1999 to 2022, this fly-on-the-wall account offers a backstage pass into the recording studios and radio stations, video shoots and house parties, nightclubs and concert halls of the Kansas City-Lawrence-Topeka music scene circa 2000.
DVS Mindz is at once a compulsively readable group biography of four talented MCs, a vibrant voyage through the forgotten history of local hip hop, and a breathtakingly real story of struggling to achieve big dreams.
Contents
- Cast of Characters
- Preface
- Introduction: “U-God Outshined by Topeka Group”
- Part I. 1970–1999
- 1. The Genesis
- 2. A Pirate Poet
- 3. Daymond Pulling Chains
- 4. 1137 Washburn Avenue
- 5. Unsigned Hype
- 6. Dark Thoughts, Lovely Lyrics
- Part II. 2000–2003
- 7. Real MCs
- 8. The Crew
- 9. Heat
- 10. Killa Bees
- 11. Hatersville
- Part III. 2004–2020
- 12. The DVS Story
- 13. United States of America versus De’Juan Knight
- 14. Dallas
- 15. A Pirate Looks at 40
- 16. Respect
- 17. Modern Warfare
- Conclusion: 5105 Virginia Avenue
- Acknowledgments
- Where Are They Now?
- Research Methods
- A Beginner’s Guide to DVS Mindz
- Discography
- Notes
- References
- Index
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Readers interested in Midwest hip-hop should enjoy this book
