For Brady Gozza, Every Beat Leads Back to Flint

Long before Flint hip hop artist Brady Gozza headlined Buckham Alley Fest on July 11, the alley itself was a formative part of his career.

“It (performing at Alley Fest) is like a real homecoming for me,” Gozza said. “I really got my musical start in Buckham Alley, hanging out on the stoops, going to the Local (Flint Local 432) when it was in the alley, at the Back Room before it was The Loft, it was all just a great experience. This is a magical area for me, so to be able to play outdoors with the bass echoing off the buildings in the alley.”

Gozza is a Saginaw native, but he’s called Flint home since 1995 and has been a fixture in the city’s music scene since, as a performer and artist, a DJ, and even as an organizer of annual record shows in the area that bring collectors from all over in search of rare finds. He wrote his first rhyme in 1987 when he was just 11-years-old, and has been hooked on hip hop and rap music ever since. 

He began performing with his first group, DLP, in 1991, when he was just 15. They joined forces with Triple Chaos to form the Juggernaut in 1993 and released their first single, Act Like You Know, in 1995. That led to opportunities to tour and perform all over the Midwest before the group broke up in 1996. 

After that, Gozza and Rex ‘Jackpot’ Demski formed the Artfull Dodgers. That group would go on to become one of the most influential Flint underground acts of the 1990s, performing with several big names at venues in Flint and beyond. Gozza’s stories on social media and on his longtime show on WKUF, Gozza Strip Radio, are legendary. They include the time that the Artfull Dodgers accidentally headlined a show at Bugsy’s Night Club in Flint in 2001 when headliner Too Short prematurely took the stage and performed his set before them, or in 2002 when Petey Pablo – who is incidentally performing at this year’s Genesee County Fair with Chingy – showed up at 2 a.m., right as Bugsy’s was closing, for a performance that was supposed to start at 9:30 p.m. Gozza and the Artfull Dodgers were a fixture during what he calls a “golden era” of Flint music.

“I’m very happy to be coming from the golden era,” Gozza said. “I always tell people, it would be amazing to be able to go live on the internet and social media for your show, but at that time it was pretty cool that we just would do this hand-billing with flyers and get people to come to an area with no social media at all. It was all just hand-to-hand promotion. And coming from that era, it really feels special to me because there was just a handful of us. Everybody knew everybody. It was a real close community. We really got embraced when we first started playing in Flint. We played a lot of rock and roll venues. The Local was like straight punk rock. When we played Churchill’s or The Back Room, we were the very first hip hop acts to play these places. Even groups like Dayton Family and MC Breed weren’t even playing these. They were playing The Copa, The Capitol. But all these smaller venues gave us a shot, an underground hip hop group, and it really went great. I’m just so blessed to come out of that ’90s era, it really inspired me and crafted me to be the person I am and the artist I am now.”

Gozza said the Artfull Dodgers often played in venues in Flint that weren’t typically spaces that had hip hop acts, and they worked hard to win over crowds in spaces like The Local and Metropolis. And that was vital, because if they didn’t win them over, they would’ve been clowned. 

“It was all about skills in them days,” Gozza said. “It wasn’t about being viral or just being popular. If you were wack, you would get laughed out of the cypher in those days. A silly, corny rapper in them days wouldn’t get no shine. Nobody would even give him a chance. So it was cool to be honored in those days and be accepted because I knew we had the skill. We brought something to the table, and people recognized that and embraced us because of that. I know when we first played The Local, we were the only hip hop group with a whole lineup of punk rock acts, and they were ready to boo us. They were ready to throw stuff at us, kick us out. And we won them over with our passion and our talent and our skill and our energy, and we became a regular there. We played a few shows with us as the only hip hop act, and that kind of went on to Metropolis once we started playing there, where we’d be the only act doing hip hop on these rock and roll bills. We went up there with our hard-hitting beats and spit our hearts out, and it was really embraced by that scene. It means a lot to me that we opened the doors for other acts.”

In addition to his work with the Artfull Dodgers, Gozza has also had several solo projects. His latest, Flinstrumentals, came out earlier this year and is a passion project he describes as his “love letter to Flint.” Each instrumental track features hard-hitting beats, DJs scratching, and is named after different Flint landmarks that have been important parts of Gozza’s career.

“Flint has really shaped me as an individual, as a person, inspired me a lot, and basically gave me my entire musical career,” he said. “I didn’t really start getting serious about music until I started playing in Flint at The Local 432, Churchill’s, The Back Room, Metropolis, and this album is my love letter to all those experiences and all those venues. I chose to use names of the venues I performed at that were special to me, all the recording studios in Flint that I performed at, Lighter Touch Studio, Boomin Records, Bangtown Studios. So basically that was my theme, and every one of the instrumental hip hop beats is a dedication to these landmarks and venues in Flint that were special to me in my life growing up.”

The project is slightly different for Gozza since it is just an instrumental album, but he said that is something he has always wanted to do. 

“I always loved the concept of using my love for Flint for the titles,” Gozza said. “I slowly started making new beats. And the key to it was I used dope beats and no throwaway beats. All the beats on Flintstrumentals are beats that I would do songs to that I love. These are great beats. And then I got my man DJ V1rus scratching on three of the songs, absolutely killing it. He was all over my last two albums, the greatest DJ I ever worked with. I got tons of obscure, weird sounds and really went to town on this, got really creative with it, and it tells a story. It honors the beautiful city of Flint, and I hope everybody gets to check it out. Bump it loud.”

Gozza’s dedication to music extends beyond his own career. On his platforms, whether it’s his own music, his radio show, or his record shows, he has become a historian and curator of the city’s sound. That’s a responsibility he takes seriously.

“I’m crazy for music,” Gozza said. “Music’s my life, whether it’s showering, driving, working out, meditating. I gotta have music. And then when I came to Flint, the music scene here just inspired me so much. There were so many great bands, like Power On Hold, Lack of Afro, all these amazing groups. I really fell in love with the scene, and I felt like I was part of it. When we started doing shows with the other hip hop acts, they really embraced us and invited us to more, and that camaraderie really is kind of what kept me showing love to Flint after all these years. I wanna show that same love to upcoming artists that they showed to us, you know? I went to college here and moved here permanently and the hip hop scene showed Artfull Dodgers love and embraced us and claimed us as one of their own, and that meant a lot to me. And I wanna keep showing that love. There’s such a great energy to the Flint scene.”

Gozza’s music is available through his website and all streaming platforms. He’s also on Facebook and Instagram. He frequently shares his music, promotes his radio and record shows, and shares stories from Flint’s music history on those channels. He also shares news about any upcoming performances. His experience at Buckham Alley Fest was exciting because it was part of recent efforts to tie Flint’s different generations of rap and hip hop together on the same stages. Before the event was postponed, the Dayton Family had been scheduled to headline Carriage Town’s Porchfest. Jon Connor, another Flint rapper who has had national success, headlined the event last year. Several up-and-coming acts from Flint’s music scene have been a part of those lineups and had the opportunity to connect with some of the important musicians who put the city’s sound on the map.

“It’s great to see these cats that we came up liking, that inspired us, getting embraced by the younger generation,” Gozza said. “I love seeing Dayton Family play all these festivals and to see all the younger cats gravitate towards them and honor their legacy. I mean, they’re Flint Town’s finest. I always say they were like the NWA of Flint. They blew the doors open and got recognized by the world, and it’s great to see them and cats like Jon Connor throwing down with the younger generation. And I love throwing down with the younger generation too. It’s a big reason I did Alley Fest, and it’s the reason I would do that Studio on the Go program with Pharlon Randle. We would go straight to classrooms after school and teach these kids about making beats, writing songs. It’s great to see the generations come together. I really love that, and that’s what hip hop needs. There’s too much in hip hop where people act like, ‘Oh, that’s played out, that’s old school.’ It doesn’t have to be that way. It can be just like rock and roll, where we honor the legends and keep them in the mix where they stay relevant. I’d love to see that for Flint and for the hip hop scene around here.”

Through all of his projects and work, the main theme for Gozza is simply wanting to highlight and honor Flint’s music scene, of which he’s proud to be a part of.

“I want to show love and give back to this area,” Gozza said. “That’s why I do the radio show. I want to give back and play the local artists that the mainstream stations won’t show any love to. I used to go to all the mainstream stations around Flint, do everything I could do to get them to play Artfull Dodgers, and they wouldn’t do it. They would straight refuse. They wouldn’t even play Dayton Family or Breed. And so I basically started the radio show to take matters into my own hands and to show love to all the amazing talent in Flint. And so in the kinda same way with the record shows, I wanted to show love to the local DJs that are amazing in the area and all the great record stores. I came up going Rock-A-Rolla, Wyatt Earp’s Records, Pete Flanders Musical Memories, and now there’s a bunch of new great ones like Totem Buds, Electric Crown. I want to keep that tradition going. There’s a great musical history here in Flint. MC Breed’s the first national hip hop artist from Michigan and put the Midwest scene on the map. I want to keep that tradition going of amazing artists like him and just keep it building for the future and let all these new cats that are coming up experience that same magic I felt, let them be part of the community and hopefully it’ll be a snowball effect that’ll keep going for the future.”