Daniel Gines, who performs under the name DG Deep, doesn’t shy away from his rocky past in his music. Rapping about it has helped him work through his experiences — and make sure that others don’t fall into similar traps.
On his forthcoming song “Free 'Em All,” Gines issues a warning to the younger generation: “Youngins don’t care about honor they just do it for clout / Prisons easy to get in no guarantee you make it out.”
“Life isn't all goody gumdrops. I feel like the problem with some people is that when they try to get the youth to do good, they only show them the good,” Gines tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “You know, but I think you got to meet them where they're at and show them that you also had bad.”
Gines will perform “Free 'Em All” and other songs during the 1Hood-produced Next Level Stanzas spoken word event on Sat., March 11 at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater. The songs will be a part of his debut album, The Book of Daniel, which he hopes to release by the end of September. The single “One Love” from the new album is currently available on streaming platforms. Listen via YouTube below:
Gines may tell stories in his songs with effortless flow, but he’ll be the first to tell you that living through the experiences was a whole different matter. Originally from, Brooklyn, N.Y., Gines moved to Pittsburgh six years ago. He traces his musical influences back to the Pentecostal gospel music of his parents and the hard-hitting, SMACK DVD-era gangster rap battles of NYC, though he now prefers more “conscious rap” styles.
As he got older, he started getting involved in gang culture and drugs. “We seen the people that we should have been looking up to: my grandfather, hard worker — all my friend’s fathers and grandfathers were pretty much real hard workers, you know, but we looked at the guys that was on the block with the chains with all the woman, with all the nice cars, like, that's what we wanted,” Gines says.
It came to a head in 2004 when, at 19, Gines began serving a five-year sentence in Georgia's Smith State Prison. Gines was kept in one of the prison’s most notorious dormitories, known by its inmates as the “thunder dorm.” He raps about this experience in the song “Tale of Two Prisons”: “People always judge off your glory but they don’t care to know about your story / Locked up in the chain gang tryna maintain where the scenes are gory / Smith State back in G2 in the thunder dorm call it gang land / In the hole for not snitching now I’m eating mustard packs to kill the hunger pains.”
Serving time in prison was a wake-up call, Gines explains. “In a situation like that, when you see people getting stabbed all the time and robbed, and you're like, on constant alert, it puts you in a situation where it's like, I don't want this to be my life, I want to do better. I want more out of life than just sitting in this prison,” Gines says.
Since moving to Pittsburgh, Gines has started to make his lifelong passion for hip hop a reality, putting the verses that he notes on his iPhone during the day to music in the studio. He handles mouthfuls of rhymes with skill, like on “Real Deep,” where he raps, “As a young MC I understand my influence / I could corrupt the innocent or lead them to the limitless / Infinite, omnipotent, omniscient / Brooklyn flow stay efficient.”
The response to the songs has been validating, Gines says. In April, he will perform in NYC as a follow-up to winning a rap competition at Twentyfourpgh in Duquesne, Pa.
For Gines, making music is a community effort. When crafting the new album at ID Labs in Etna, his producer JD, long-time high-school friend King C, and fiancée, London, were all in the studio helping with the production process, he says.
Outside of music, Gines also works on writing letters to parole boards to try to free his friends who are still in prison. He hopes his music has a similar effect. “I just told myself that I never want to put myself in a situation like that again, you know, and I never want to see nobody else in a situation like that,” Gines says. “And I call that, you know, like the spirit of Harriet Tubman. Like, okay, I escaped. But I want to bring people with me, too.”
Next Level Stanzas. 6 p.m. Doors at 5 p.m. Sat., March 11. Kelly Strayhorn Theater. 5941 Penn Ave., East Liberty. $33. kelly-strayhorn.org
Pittsburgh rapper DG Deep combines cautionary lyrics with effortless flow
