Preview: Tino, Doxcity / Casa Nueva
By Marc Blanc, Contributor
Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014 / Casa Nueva
Four hip-hop fans travel the wave of an Appalachian road. They stop at a filling station. “Where can we hear some rap music?” one asks the gas boy.
“None for miles,” the boy replies. “I’d say yer safest bet is Athens.”
So goes my fantasy of how fans of the artists will arrive at Casa Nueva’s hip-hop night on Saturday. In reality, the emotionally lyrical Tino is traveling from his Dayton home to take the stage after Athens duo Doxcity shellacs Casa with weird rapid-fire rhymes alongside affiliate Vitamin E.
Based off of his July EP Forget Me Not, one can assume Tino is going to leave his heart on Casa’s modest stage. The nine-track release opens with the emcee immortalizing his murdered cousin through a dedication, and is followed with diaristic looks into Tino’s mindstate after the shooting.
“I was dealing with his death, my own mortality and a rising senseless violence movement,” he said about writing the EP. The 20-something named Chicago’s “Drill” scene, known for rappers like Chief Keef and Lil Durk, as an example of the latter part of his statement. “I was looking to voice what I was experiencing, which was a darker place than I had been previously.”
Lyrically, Tino is a bit of a populist. He’s accessible as the proletarian poet of the people in songs like “Time Clock Blues,” second track on Forget Me Not:
“Now I’m about to be late / Bet I have to hear it from that manager that I hate / Hate’s a strong word, prob’ly why I use it / I hate that they’re in power and all they do is abuse it.”
True to his writing, Tino booked most of the underway Forget Me Not Tour on his own.
“As an independent artist I believe you have to take on many roles, whether it be graphic design, booking, marketing or PR,” he said.
Casa asked Doxcity to open soon after Tino secured the venue, not a surprise, considering the duo’s history in Athens. Selfish Presley said he met Tito, Doxcity’s other half, in 2002 at OU’s Hip Hop Congress and has been recording with him since 2005. Such establishment has allocated the group a Wu-Tang-esque “extended family,” which includes Vitamin E.
Doxcity’s mixtape-heavy discography is like an E.E. Cummings book: listening to the cadence of the poems is nice, but you have to go back a few times to absorb the metaphors, references and connotations. With a stop-for-no one flow reminiscent of Rhymesayers artists and a slight accent from Presley repping southern Ohio, Doxcity likes to wax social and political. In this sense they are the macro to Tino’s micro, the public rhetoric to Tino’s personal journal. (Not to say Tino is socially unconscious. His last show was a benefit for a declined neighborhood in Springfield, OH, held at an elementary school.)
OU’s Brick City Dance Crew will also be performing. Admission is $5 for those 21 and older, $7 for the underage. The show begins at 10:30 p.m.
