When most people bring up the city of Flint in hip-hop, it’s pretty much guaranteed the first thing you’ll hear come from their mouth is “MC Breed”. Outside of that, not too many people know much about the city’s hip-hop scene.   Back in the day I remember going to the local record joints and picking up all kinds of music by local dudes and remembering how different their sound was from anyone else in the U.S. let alone Detroit. I remember going to my favorite tape spots (thats cassette tapes for all you young’ns) Nick’s Records and Tapes and Boomin’ Records (my buddy D can probably recall I few others I can’t remember at the moment) and seeing albums upon albums of local talent. We’d just flip through countless tapes deciding which ones we wanted to stick in our pockets and which ones we would actually pay for. It was shocking how many of these artists there were who never got exposure on a national level which is mostly why we started the HoodHype show.
Any time I get a chance to listen to some old Flint hip-hop joints, I think about rolling down I-69 at dusk, chillin’ with a few old coworkers over on DuPont St. (what up Antwan and Charles!?) and driving up and down the streets with nasty ass Buick City in the background churning out smoke and kicking out cars you rarely saw in the city that actually produced them. Long nights of ball with friends (my boy D and our other friends would school the shit outta me religiously) and the summer. Rollin’ up and down James P. Cole Ave when the “Cruise” was lit up in my 84′ Cutlass Supreme (Brougham bitches).  Cars with dayton and LA wires and neon lights were the hot shit of the moment. Summer nights like that people would park and pop their trunks on the side of the road and just chill. Everyone would crowd around who was bumpin’ the hottest shit at the moment…. damn I miss being a kid…..
So, today I was poking around in my collection and came across a few albums from one of my favorite groups out of Flint, Michigan, Top Authority which inspired me to put this together. So if you have a few minutes, check out some local talent you may have never heard out of the city of FL-I-N-T after the cut. And make sure you drop by their sites and show em some love.
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Top Authority
One of, if not my biggest, favorite group out of Flint. The trio consisted (and still does) of Shotgun, Dalo and Flex. Check em out here. By far my favorite album they dropped was Somethin’ To Blaze To. They are supposed to be dropping an album this summer, so I’m interested to see what they sound like this time around.
How Much (remix) (notice how the words “white man” were censored, thanks C. Delores Tucker, gotta love the 90s)
93 [Things Ain't How They Should Be]
Top Authority – Voices
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The Dayton Family
TDF consisted of three members, Bootleg, Shoestring and Backstabber. Word is these days the group consists of Bootleg, Shoestring and another local Flint artist by the name of Jake The Flake. Jake had a run in Flint for a while bakc then too. I remember you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing someone spittin’ the hook to his track “Jake….the mothafuckin’ Flake…..” Although they never really made it huge, they managed to get a little national recognition and big following over the years for their raw lyrics and production. TDF repped an area, specifically a street called Dayton Ave…which personally… I didn’t fuck with. That was not an area to be messed with back then, not sure what it’s like now. You’ll still hear people bumpin’ their first albums Dope Dayton Ave. and What’s On My Mind if you roll through. Check out what they are up to here. If you can get it, make sure you cop that Whats On My Mind? album…. to this day it’s still a banger and never gets old, it wasn’t their first but in my opinion it was their best. Trust me.
Thru a Thang
The Dayton Family – DOA
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The Dayton Family – Flint Town (this joint was the anthem back in the day no matter who you were, Flint Central High School STAND UP!!)
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These are just a few. Today there are tons out there, too many to mention. Others back in the day were MC Breed (obviously), DFC, Project Born, Raw Deal and a couple of newer dudes off the top of my head are Coinz and Bill Smokes.
What up Flint?!
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