Shoestring article I found.
When most rappers his age are either fighting to recover their ghetto credibility as part of hip-hop’s nobility and petit bourgeoisie or break out of ghetto celebrity as one of its peasants, Dayton Family’s 28-year-old chief homie seigneur Shoestring is settling into the relative life of a country squire.
He just moved into his second house, which unlike the first is in a pastoral, middle-class enclave of the rust belt Lower Peninsula Michigan city of Flint. After spending a childhood and most of his adult life in the straight-up hood, this shift to a pseudo-suburban comes as an extraordinary culture shock for Shoestring.
"It’s kinda away from everything, it’s quiet, and there’s more privacy," Shoestring says in a leisurely North Midlands brogue, reflecting a mixed sense of awe and relief, as if the idyllic domestic bliss is too good to be true beyond a dream. "Where I used to live in my other house, on Caldwell Street, was on the hooker stroll, in the heart of the ghetto. I used to get into it with my neighbors all the time.
"People were hanging in my yard with their friends or gambling under my window all times of night when I was trying to get some sleep. Or I’d have people knocking on my door mistaking my house for a drug house. My family and friends thought something bad was going to happen to me, like I was going to get robbed. Nobody bothered me, but friends and my girl was glad I moved out of there."
The move to a sane residential lifestyle coincides with the release of Shoestring’s second solo LP Cross Addicted through the partnership suburban Detroit record label Overture maintains with New York City-based TVT Records, which could be best described as the climax to his guest appearances in several Overture/TVT album releases for Dayton Family affiliates. Unlike work from the Dayton clan half a decade ago, Cross Addicted! is not a mere time bomb of frustrated, hands-on ghetto reporting. Shoestring retains Dayton Family’s common law Ghettopolitik, a down-by-lawness that takes a dim view of ostentatious wannabe thugs and faux players that’s reflected in such Cross Addicted! cuts as "Still A Killa" and "Dead Or Alive." The utter cynicism and fatalism of Dayton Family’s green salad days"no double-entendred pun intended"has given way to social commentary that’s balances urgent realities with shades of hope found in what can be gleaned from the hood that is more ghetto sacred than ghetto fabulous.
The skits are audio still lives of what is more colorful and depressing about the hood"a manchild kicking out gangsta verse, a smooth sneaker pimp whose game is shot down by clubbing and savvy hootchiemamas, recounting amusing gangbanging auld lang syne with the boys, a senior citizen with apparent southern roots telling a smoothly ribald anecdote about a man racing against the clock to have arattlers’ venom drawn out his penis, and Shoestring’s improv on jacking a genie who denies his final third wish for a bag weed. The beats are a blend of 1970s soul, medium bass, and a lush range of bass from the a la funky worm in the "Genie" skit to the more commercial tango in "Party."
In the rhymes, Shoestring’s flow can slide up the inflectional scale from smooth lowriding like a a maturing NWA to the scatty sangfroid of a Twista. In "Chevy," Shoestring places the vehicle of choice for more proletariat and spiritual mic-controllers on a lofty pedestal in providing a prime metaphorical example of what he sees as the hood’s most poetically real icons. In impressionist version of Dayton Family’s ‘91 pre-Relativity Records classic "Fuck Being Indicted" is characterized by loops and backspins of the title hook and slight scratching against a funky late 1960w to early ‘70s soul instrumental (the original named the some of the Flint cops whose brushes with Dayton Family’s members had glued them to the clan’s S-list). "I Can’t Take It No More" could be a metaphor for Shoestring’s refugeeing from the straight-up hood to the gilded ghetto.
"Back in the days in Dayton Street (the Flint enclave from which his clan derived its nom de mic), that was like hustlers in the alley making money," Shoestring says, explaining his evolution from the last of the angry gangbangers to a sort of Mark Twain from the congo for the hood. "Niggas got kids now, got a family now. Dayton Street is shut down, all the the drug houses the Feds shut down. So many guys from there got indicted and sent to jail.
"I come across from the respect of what blacks have come through. But I want to do everything, I don’t want to be stuck in one sound. I want to do something that older folks can understand, because I’m around a lot of older folks now like my uncles."
When the probation officers knew him in the early ‘90s as a drug trafficking beat boxer named Raheen Peterson, Shoestring was far younger, on fire, and virtually living for the moment as one of his block’s two holy terrors. The block’s other lead rogue Bootleg (Ira Dorsey) consolidated his talents with Shoestring’s and along with Backstabber (Matt Hinkle) began living and writing an undeniable page in Lower Peninsula Michigan’s hip-hop history. For hip-hop music collectors, the inexpensively produced and independently released five-song FBI cassette is the expurgated version of the bleached Relativity LP by the same name released in ‘95, with its rampant hoodcore paranoia and lust (for homicide, sex, and money). Although both versions became underground classics with respectable commercial sales, Dayton Family’s penchant for making their lives an integral part of their art limited their ability to grow beyond slightly better than ghetto celebrity. Because all of Dayton but Shoestring were in and out of prison at one time or another since signing with Relativity in ‘93, the pace of the group’s appearances and touring moved yards behind a slug.
Depending on how the story is told, Bootleg and his extraordinary mic-controlling gift either refugeed or was lured to a solo deal with Relativity, when Dayton Family’s contract with the former New York City label was up for renewal in ‘95, by A&R’s who were more interested in making quick cash via adding more of the group’s work to the label’s catalog than sharing in the wealth of helping Dayton achieve gold and platinum record sales. Coupled with mixed emotions about that divisiveness and Bootleg’s medium haul in prison half a decade ago, Backstabbers’ current long haul in prison, and 30 to 40 potentially classic Dayton cuts never seeing the light of day because the clan "jacked off" behind its collective legal issues, Shoestring sounds most confounded about Relativity’s offer to renew the clan’s deal after half-ass promoting their music for the first signing.
"Relativity would push 200,000 [units] and they’d stop pushing after that," Shoestring says. "Whatever it would take for the A&R’s there to undercut you, it was done."
Like Shoestring, the rest of Dayton Family has gotten on with their lives. Ghetto E (Bootleg’s brother Eric Dorsey) is taking up the slack for Bootleg as he navigates a gauntlet of collaborative and solo projects, and Shoestring has not completely written off his kinsmen from the old hood and eventually at the mic. Flint, however, is getting back to the aimless violence and divisiveness that characterized the close-knit town back to Shoestring’s days on Dayton Street. Despite a diverse pool of talent"from hoodcorish Dayton and top Authority, mid-coor G-funkateer MC Breed, The Last Poets’ Umar bin-Hassan, and purist B-boy palefaces Artfull Dodgers, even acts in the same hip-hop genres are operating in their own spheres of urban culture aloof from each other. More and more innocent bystanders are becoming cadivers behind gunshot licks at Flint clubs, despite frisking and metal detectors at the door. One victim Shoestring personally knew was the Herbert Cleaves, the brother of Detroit Piston rookie point guard Mateen Cleaves, killed in a Feb. 18 drive-by while standing in a group of friends.
Dayton Family and Breed have taken the message of peace to radio appearances and free concerts in Flint. Yet, an angrier crop of novice G’s and some prison-worsened original G’s picture Flint as nihilist and fatalist as when they began their stretches in the early 1980s have even visited both acts when the kind of funk they have sought to defuse. Retaining his ‘70s sense of family that was reared by the neighborhood, Shoestring is hardly ready to throw up his hands and surrender to the haterism that has returned to haunt Flint, when Michigan hip-hop is at its most critical stage of growth and growing pains. He can even find a spiritual fondness for rowdy old Caldwell Street.
"Everything Dayton Family rapped about, from (up to when) I moved out my house is there now
that Dayton Street is gone," Shoestring says with a chuckle. "Everything."
Article submitted by
MARK ARMSTRONG
When most rappers his age are either fighting to recover their ghetto credibility as part of hip-hop’s nobility and petit bourgeoisie or break out of ghetto celebrity as one of its peasants, Dayton Family’s 28-year-old chief homie seigneur Shoestring is settling into the relative life of a country squire.
He just moved into his second house, which unlike the first is in a pastoral, middle-class enclave of the rust belt Lower Peninsula Michigan city of Flint. After spending a childhood and most of his adult life in the straight-up hood, this shift to a pseudo-suburban comes as an extraordinary culture shock for Shoestring.
"It’s kinda away from everything, it’s quiet, and there’s more privacy," Shoestring says in a leisurely North Midlands brogue, reflecting a mixed sense of awe and relief, as if the idyllic domestic bliss is too good to be true beyond a dream. "Where I used to live in my other house, on Caldwell Street, was on the hooker stroll, in the heart of the ghetto. I used to get into it with my neighbors all the time.
"People were hanging in my yard with their friends or gambling under my window all times of night when I was trying to get some sleep. Or I’d have people knocking on my door mistaking my house for a drug house. My family and friends thought something bad was going to happen to me, like I was going to get robbed. Nobody bothered me, but friends and my girl was glad I moved out of there."
The move to a sane residential lifestyle coincides with the release of Shoestring’s second solo LP Cross Addicted through the partnership suburban Detroit record label Overture maintains with New York City-based TVT Records, which could be best described as the climax to his guest appearances in several Overture/TVT album releases for Dayton Family affiliates. Unlike work from the Dayton clan half a decade ago, Cross Addicted! is not a mere time bomb of frustrated, hands-on ghetto reporting. Shoestring retains Dayton Family’s common law Ghettopolitik, a down-by-lawness that takes a dim view of ostentatious wannabe thugs and faux players that’s reflected in such Cross Addicted! cuts as "Still A Killa" and "Dead Or Alive." The utter cynicism and fatalism of Dayton Family’s green salad days"no double-entendred pun intended"has given way to social commentary that’s balances urgent realities with shades of hope found in what can be gleaned from the hood that is more ghetto sacred than ghetto fabulous.
The skits are audio still lives of what is more colorful and depressing about the hood"a manchild kicking out gangsta verse, a smooth sneaker pimp whose game is shot down by clubbing and savvy hootchiemamas, recounting amusing gangbanging auld lang syne with the boys, a senior citizen with apparent southern roots telling a smoothly ribald anecdote about a man racing against the clock to have arattlers’ venom drawn out his penis, and Shoestring’s improv on jacking a genie who denies his final third wish for a bag weed. The beats are a blend of 1970s soul, medium bass, and a lush range of bass from the a la funky worm in the "Genie" skit to the more commercial tango in "Party."
In the rhymes, Shoestring’s flow can slide up the inflectional scale from smooth lowriding like a a maturing NWA to the scatty sangfroid of a Twista. In "Chevy," Shoestring places the vehicle of choice for more proletariat and spiritual mic-controllers on a lofty pedestal in providing a prime metaphorical example of what he sees as the hood’s most poetically real icons. In impressionist version of Dayton Family’s ‘91 pre-Relativity Records classic "Fuck Being Indicted" is characterized by loops and backspins of the title hook and slight scratching against a funky late 1960w to early ‘70s soul instrumental (the original named the some of the Flint cops whose brushes with Dayton Family’s members had glued them to the clan’s S-list). "I Can’t Take It No More" could be a metaphor for Shoestring’s refugeeing from the straight-up hood to the gilded ghetto.
"Back in the days in Dayton Street (the Flint enclave from which his clan derived its nom de mic), that was like hustlers in the alley making money," Shoestring says, explaining his evolution from the last of the angry gangbangers to a sort of Mark Twain from the congo for the hood. "Niggas got kids now, got a family now. Dayton Street is shut down, all the the drug houses the Feds shut down. So many guys from there got indicted and sent to jail.
"I come across from the respect of what blacks have come through. But I want to do everything, I don’t want to be stuck in one sound. I want to do something that older folks can understand, because I’m around a lot of older folks now like my uncles."
When the probation officers knew him in the early ‘90s as a drug trafficking beat boxer named Raheen Peterson, Shoestring was far younger, on fire, and virtually living for the moment as one of his block’s two holy terrors. The block’s other lead rogue Bootleg (Ira Dorsey) consolidated his talents with Shoestring’s and along with Backstabber (Matt Hinkle) began living and writing an undeniable page in Lower Peninsula Michigan’s hip-hop history. For hip-hop music collectors, the inexpensively produced and independently released five-song FBI cassette is the expurgated version of the bleached Relativity LP by the same name released in ‘95, with its rampant hoodcore paranoia and lust (for homicide, sex, and money). Although both versions became underground classics with respectable commercial sales, Dayton Family’s penchant for making their lives an integral part of their art limited their ability to grow beyond slightly better than ghetto celebrity. Because all of Dayton but Shoestring were in and out of prison at one time or another since signing with Relativity in ‘93, the pace of the group’s appearances and touring moved yards behind a slug.
Depending on how the story is told, Bootleg and his extraordinary mic-controlling gift either refugeed or was lured to a solo deal with Relativity, when Dayton Family’s contract with the former New York City label was up for renewal in ‘95, by A&R’s who were more interested in making quick cash via adding more of the group’s work to the label’s catalog than sharing in the wealth of helping Dayton achieve gold and platinum record sales. Coupled with mixed emotions about that divisiveness and Bootleg’s medium haul in prison half a decade ago, Backstabbers’ current long haul in prison, and 30 to 40 potentially classic Dayton cuts never seeing the light of day because the clan "jacked off" behind its collective legal issues, Shoestring sounds most confounded about Relativity’s offer to renew the clan’s deal after half-ass promoting their music for the first signing.
"Relativity would push 200,000 [units] and they’d stop pushing after that," Shoestring says. "Whatever it would take for the A&R’s there to undercut you, it was done."
Like Shoestring, the rest of Dayton Family has gotten on with their lives. Ghetto E (Bootleg’s brother Eric Dorsey) is taking up the slack for Bootleg as he navigates a gauntlet of collaborative and solo projects, and Shoestring has not completely written off his kinsmen from the old hood and eventually at the mic. Flint, however, is getting back to the aimless violence and divisiveness that characterized the close-knit town back to Shoestring’s days on Dayton Street. Despite a diverse pool of talent"from hoodcorish Dayton and top Authority, mid-coor G-funkateer MC Breed, The Last Poets’ Umar bin-Hassan, and purist B-boy palefaces Artfull Dodgers, even acts in the same hip-hop genres are operating in their own spheres of urban culture aloof from each other. More and more innocent bystanders are becoming cadivers behind gunshot licks at Flint clubs, despite frisking and metal detectors at the door. One victim Shoestring personally knew was the Herbert Cleaves, the brother of Detroit Piston rookie point guard Mateen Cleaves, killed in a Feb. 18 drive-by while standing in a group of friends.
Dayton Family and Breed have taken the message of peace to radio appearances and free concerts in Flint. Yet, an angrier crop of novice G’s and some prison-worsened original G’s picture Flint as nihilist and fatalist as when they began their stretches in the early 1980s have even visited both acts when the kind of funk they have sought to defuse. Retaining his ‘70s sense of family that was reared by the neighborhood, Shoestring is hardly ready to throw up his hands and surrender to the haterism that has returned to haunt Flint, when Michigan hip-hop is at its most critical stage of growth and growing pains. He can even find a spiritual fondness for rowdy old Caldwell Street.
"Everything Dayton Family rapped about, from (up to when) I moved out my house is there now
that Dayton Street is gone," Shoestring says with a chuckle. "Everything."
Article submitted by
MARK ARMSTRONG