Debut album by the Dayton Family group, a trio from Flint, Michigan, whose name derives from Dayton Avenue, at the time famous for being the main street of crime in the city. The group consists of three rappers, Raheen "Shoestring" Peterson, Ira "Bootleg" Dorsey, and Matt "Backstabba" Hinkle. The production is done entirely by Steve Pitts.
The album is a kind of random mess, it swoops into your brain like an unmade puzzle of a thousand pieces and it's up to you to put it together. There's a bit of everything, the lyricism is mainly gangsta, ranging from women to horrorcore songs to lyrics dedicated to the streets of the hometown, amidst bragging and thug excerpts: it's nothing new and it's simple enough to live with. Music, on the other hand, is a problem. Pitts jumps on the g-funk bandwagon. It's a great bandwagon, there's room for everyone. With "g-funk" though, it seems that everyone who's not named Andre Young has understood that the word is a synonym for random synthesizers that sound as shrill, as annoying and as cheap as possible: there's no melody, there's no vocal accompaniment, there are no weighted samples, they're not conceived, the only essential thing is to place these shrill synthesizers until your brain explodes. They're too annoying and cheap production doesn't help, there are tight, heavy, dry drums and samples at their best decent.
The album starts badly. When it seems to be worse, the guys find the right things and spit hardcore on a production that, I have no idea how, improves by the minute and becomes more and more accessible and acceptable, managing to save the project. In any case, it's quite long, with almost an hour of listening divided into fourteen songs, but it's not as bad as it seems to be after the first few moments. There's confusion about the date of formation and date of product releases. Bootleg and Shoestring met in 1993 and Backstabba joined them shortly thereafter. Jason Birchmeier for AllMusic writes that this CD is released locally in the same year, however, the "discogs" site reports that the project came out in 1994, on CD. "Dope Dayton Ave" is definitely from '93, it's one of the first things you hear from the guys on the song. Perhaps another couple of tracks are originally recorded, conceived and realized in 1993, but the others are certainly later, and therefore made in '94, the year to which the performers refer several times.
In 1995, the group made an agreement with the independent Atlanta label Po' Broke Records and later the album was distributed nationally by Relativity, entering the top 40 among rap albums. 1995 was a very good year. What do I say? It was excellent. Definitely, one of the best years in hip-hop history and for many fans, the best. It can be a curious listen if you want to discover the origins of the Flint scene (I also recommend the pioneer MC Breed, at this point), nonetheless, it's a record that goes well below the seasonal radars and standards, ending up being a tape not strictly essential for casual listeners.
Rating: 6/10.
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