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.
