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DVS Mindz

The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas
  • Geoff Harkness
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2023
View more publications by Columbia University Press

About this book

DVS Mindz might be the greatest rap group you’ve never heard of. 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.

Author / Editor information

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.

Reviews

Joseph Ewoodzie Jr., author of Break Beats in the Bronx: Revisiting Hip Hop's Early Years:
Weaving together compelling and absorbing stories, Harkness presents a vastly understudied aspect of aspirational culture in the U.S.—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.

Justin D. Burton, author of Posthuman Rap:
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.


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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
April 18, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9780231557573
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Other:
50 b&w photographs
Downloaded on 24.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7312/hark20872/html
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