DVS Mindz

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.

In DVS Mindz, Harkness tells the birth, life, and afterlife of a musical group in a way that is uncommon in hip hop studies, touching on some of the same narrative arcs that animate the biographies of successful musicians, but from the perspective of a group who was poised for a kind of success that never came. It's a remarkable project., Weaving together compelling and absorbing stories, Harkness presents a vastly understudied aspect of aspirational culture in the United States—the idea that hard work, in and of itself, does not guarantee or lead to success. And failure isn't always a step towards success, as it is often pitched., Readers interested in Midwest hip-hop should enjoy this book., The moments that happen pre- and post-band — stories of family, heartache, substance abuse and redemption — prove just as compelling as the backstage antics.

Geoff Harkness is associate professor of sociology at Rhode Island College. His previous books are Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class (2014) and Changing Qatar: Culture, Citizenship, and Rapid Modernization (2020). He first met the members of DVS Mindz in 1999 as a music journalist in Lawrence, Kansas, and went on to direct their early music videos and a documentary film about the group.