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A Meeting of the Mindz
A Meeting of the Mindz
A NEW BOOK BY GEOFF HARKNESS COVERS THE GREATEST RAP GROUP YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF
By Tyler Schneider
In the fall of 1999, Geoff Harkness—a former Pitch writer and current sociology professor at Rhode Island College with three books under his belt—was still fresh out of his undergraduate years at KU and had just been hired to cover music for the alternative-weekly arts and entertainment magazine, The Mag, a then-sub pub of The Lawrence Journal-World
On his first day, Harkness had already managed to secure an interview with The Roots’ Questlove. He was also set to review a number of notable acts, both national and up-and-coming, in LFK’s then-thriving live music scene, including a solo stop by the Wu-Tang Clan member U-God at The Bottleneck on Tuesday, Dec. 7, 1999.
Before U-God could even start his set that night, a sharp and infectiously cohesive-yet-multifarious lyrical quartet with minimalistic, lo-fi beats known as DVS Mindz (pronounced ‘devious minds’) had taken control of the crowd with a stage presence that U-God apparently couldn’t later match on his own.
“The opening group was this incredible band, I assumed they were on the road touring from New York. They were a really professional group. The songs were great, the look was great—I thought they couldn’t possibly be a local act. Somebody told me, ‘Yeah, this is DVS Mindz, they’re from Topeka,’ which just blew me away,” Harkness says.
Two days after the show, Harkness’ review came out with the headline “U-God Outshined by Topeka Group.”
That fateful day at The Bottleneck would spur a two-decade journey culminating in Harkness’ third book, DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas—a 376-page treasure trove of regional rap storytelling published in April by Columbia University Press that centers on the before, during, and after of Harkness’ time spent with the collective.
“There was literally no way to hear their music, they didn’t have a CD out. It wasn’t like today, where you could just instantly stream anything. And so, you know, in part, it started as a quest for me to just get a hold of some of their music,” Harkness says.
Harkness Hears A Stu
On Dec. 31, 1999, as the imminent threat of Y2K approached, Harkness was sitting in a Topeka apartment for his first interview with the MCs themselves: Stuart “Str8jakkett” Tidwell, Barry “Killa The Hun” Rice, Daymond “D.O.P.E” Douglas, and De’Juan “DL” Knight.
Harkness would later write that he’d asked three total questions in a session that went on for over 90 minutes.
“I met these four writers who were very particular about their words and who thought that words mattered. The amount of work and effort that they put into it, how seriously they took their writing—I think that was very inspiring to me as a writer,” Harkness says.
In a short time, Harkness had been initiated into “The Crew”—a collection of the band’s closest family, friends, admirers, and so forth. He also accepted a new gig at an established alt-weekly magazine, The Pitch
By March of 2000, Harkness had dabbled enough in early A/V production to suggest filming the group’s first music video for the song “Tired of Talking.” The relative success of that production, which had been stylistically inspired by scenes from the Bond franchise and gangster films, led to many more multimedia projects.
“Over time, their story became more and more interesting to me. I spent a couple of years hanging out with them, going to the shows, and sitting in on recording sessions with the guys. I amassed a whole bunch of footage in that time—something like 100 hours of video and audio that I shot over three years and just kind of stuck in a shoebox. That was the beginning of it,” Harkness says.
He chronicled all that came before him, as well, learning firsthand how DVS Mindz (Dope Versatile Styles Manifested IN a Direction to Zucceed) was first formed by Tidwell (Str8jakkett) and Rice (Killa The Hun)—childhood friends who met as students at Lowman Hill Elementary while growing up in Topeka.
In 1993, DVS Mindz performed for the first time, with Douglas (D.O.P.E.) having joined the fold to make it a trio. Years later saw the addition of Knight (DL)—Douglas’cousin and a key member of the crew.
With their missing link and secret weapon onboard, DVS Mindz would go on a career tear that included opening for acts including sometimes-rival Tech N9ne, Run-DMC, De La Soul, Digital Underground, Das EFX, Black Sheep, Goodie Mob, and—most memorably for all involved—the Wu-Tang Clan at LFK’s Liberty Hall in August 2000.
Like Wu-Tang, DVS was well known for live acapella performances. They would make it a staple of their arsenal as they built towards their lone full-length release of that period: Million Dolla Broke Niggaz, an 18-track collection of highlights recorded between 1993-2000.
Of those songs, “Niggaz (1137)” and “Tired of Talking” were both nominated for song of the year at the 2001 edition of the Klammies, The Pitch’s former local music awards ceremony, but would eventually lose (as was tradition) to perennial favorite Tech N9ne. In 2000, they’d lost the “Best Local Release” category to Shiner’s Starless.
It was during this two-year run that DVS Mindz also began to unfurl onstage, with several incidents of the group lambasting the still-prominent local journalist, Shawn Edwards. They felt that Edwards had slighted them by spotlighting the group in a review of a show that had, by many accounts, gotten out of control.
Right, wrong, or more likely somewhere in the middle, this rally against The Pitch and the local media signified a crucial point in the band’s trajectory, serving as a prelude to the unofficial split of DVS Mindz in the mid-2000s.
100 Years of DVS
On July 30, 2022, Harkness conducted his final series of interviews with the band for the book. He says the best part “was how honest they were, and how much they trusted me to tell their story” throughout the process.
“They didn’t hold back and could have. There were some points where I even sat down with them, and I said, ‘Look, if you want me to take this out, I will. Because this is going to be here for 100 years—your grandchildren will read this book and read this about you. It’s not worth it to me to have this in the air if it’s going to somehow be harmful to you,” Harkness says. “They said, ‘No, you know what, this is the truth, we want it to stay in.’ Not everybody would do that.”
The final product (available via Amazon, Target, and Barnes & Noble, and preserved in the Library of Congress) was pointedly inspired by Harkness’ work throughout his many years spent in Chicago, where he moved in 2003. In 2013, he published his first book, Chicago Hustle & Flow, about the city’s rap and gang culture.
The time Harkness spent writing for The Pitch, and in particular in his coverage of DVS Mindz, “absolutely influenced what I did when I went to Chicago,” Harkness says. “There is no way that I would have written Chicago Hustle & Flow without that experience.”
The author would also meet and marry his wife, Laura Harkness, in the Windy City before the couple moved to the Middle East for three years. The latter experience brought about Harkness’ second book, Changing Qatar, published in 2020 under the NYU Press.
A New Era
One of the quirks of Harkness’ storytelling that makes his depiction of the Mindz so memorable lies in his tendency to provide detailed descriptions of the styles each band member was rocking as he set a scene. He says that there were two reasons behind this creative decision.
“One is that there is a sort of sociological tradition of this highly descriptive analysis of looking at everything,” Harkness says. “Some of that also very much comes from the idea that fashion is really an important part of hip-hop culture. And since we’re looking back to 20 years ago, I wanted the FUBUs, those kinds of names, those brands, to be taking you back in the day. Everybody’s wearing the baggy jeans, not the tight jeans—it’s a different era.”
Even beyond the music and the rise and eventual fall of the group, Harkness’ work is about the people, personalities, and stakeholders who’d lived through the experiences he’d chronicled.
By the time Harkness was following them, DVS Mindz seemed to be perennially on the verge of making it big.
For so many other reasons—including having to balance “their musical ambitions with the realities of single fatherhood,” financial concerns, substance abuse issues, a dash of classic mid-to-late 20s self-sabotage, and being a group of Black men expected to sign record deals that they were justifiably skeptical of—the guys ultimately fell just short of achieving their wildest dreams.
“We definitely created situations that we’ve had to deal with as men—with our children, girlfriends, our wives, houses, bills, and everything else,” Tidwell says. “I think one thing that we connected on was hip-hop. That’s what brought us together. We were able to create and use it as a release. Hip-hop is a key part of our culture, and I think the reason why we gelled was because we had that outlet.”
It’s also pretty easy to see how some of the technological and sociological restrictions of the era—in part, but not wholly—may have contributed to DVS’ failure to garner the exposure they deserved. Internet access was, by modern standards, quite atrocious and still in its infancy.
“Not one person had a camera. Nobody was taking selfies. Nobody was looking at a phone. People were smoking cigarettes inside a bar. If you wanted to hear their music, you had to be at the show paying attention,” Harkness says.
Would the guys have fared any differently in the modern age of hip-hop?
“It’s always hard to speculate. Obviously, it’s easier to get your stuff out there now, but there’s so much more competition. But they spent a long time trying to get a major label deal, and in some ways, groups today don’t have to take that path,” Harkness says. “At the time, that was kind of the only road to success, but now there are many other ways to get there. I do think it would be different for them today. They think so, too.”
While Tidwell agrees, the still-active recording artist, producer, owner of his own lawncare business in Grandview, father of seven, and grandfather of two has also come around to see the positive aspects of the digital takeover.
“It’s a whole new world. Everybody gets caught up in [social media] at some point in time, but once you get a grasp on it, it’s like, ‘Okay, this is a great networking tool,’” Tidwell says. “There’s a reason why I was able to put out two international projects. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without social media.”
Rhyme and Reason
In the time of DVS Mindz—long before their subsequent 2020 reunion, which produced Modern Warfare 2020 and the top-notch compilation album, The Genesis—hip-hop was already well on its way to dominating the world beyond any reasonable debate. But it wasn’t there just yet.
“It’s easier now that Kendrick Lamar has won a Pulitzer Prize and with the success of Hamilton. People are beginning to recognize that rap music and hip-hop culture are incredibly significant and important. It was largely dismissed up until a point, but I think people understand that now. It’s much easier to talk about [the genre] in a way that people take seriously,” Harkness says.
For Harkness—and the many fans gained by DVS Mindz over the years—the group, straight out of Topeka, represented some of the best rap music the region had to offer at the time. The author himself teases in his book description that they “might be the greatest rap group you’ve never heard of.”
The experiences with DVS Mindz and The Pitch came at a time of Harkness’ young career when he was at a “formidable stage.”
“I met them at a time where, you know, I was just starting out as a writer and a journalist. So you can kind of appreciate what that’s like—the exhilaration, but also the anxiety—that comes along with that, as you’re just starting to get your stories out there,” Harkness says. “The Pitch was so important to me as a writer, thinker, and music scholar. I’ll never forget it.”
Harkness’ own concluding comments of his book are perhaps a fitting way to wrap our tale of his tale of a tale:
“This book represents not only what I learned about DVS Mindz but what they taught me. I did not spend 22 years studying an obscure band because it was lucrative, I did it because DVS Mindz taught me that the craft is more important than catchy hooks, that it’s okay to go an extra 16 bars if you’re speaking from the heart,” Harkness writes. “In that sense, this book is my version of a DVS Mindz song, with verses that sometimes go on a little longer than they’re supposed to and with slim chances of topping the charts. I’m okay with that. As I learned from DVS Mindz, in the end, you might not make a dollar, but at least you get respect.”
