This best way to demonstrate the difference between hard core rap and horror rap groups would be to compare different lyrical samplings of each side by side. However, it’s smarter to start with the difference in backgrounds and mentalities of hard core rap groups like Dayton Family and horror rap groups like Dark Lotus.

Dayton Family is a hard core rap group from Flint, Michigan, who named their group after one of the most crime-ridden streets in their crime-ridden city, Dayton street. That should say enough about the attitude of these hard core rappers. It’s not often that an environment such as the one Dayton Family originates from breeds anything other than gritty, honest, street-heavy rap. You won’t hear anything lighthearted in Dayton Family’s rhymes, and when they talk tough, they’re not kidding around.

If there was ever any doubt about Dayton Family’s cred, said doubt vanished once founding members Bootleg (Ira Dorsey) and Backstabba (Matt Hinkle) were each incarcerated separately during the turning point in the band’s short career. These two imprisonments undoubtedly hindered the quality and quantity Dayton Family was able to produce as a hard core rap group throughout its career.

Now Dark Lotus, on the other hand, is different in many respects. For one, Dark Lotus is a horror rap super group, so each one of Dark Lotus’s members was an established horror rap artist in his own right before joining up with Dark Lotus. That said, the themes present in Dark Lotus’s horror rap music really is not far off each of its individual member’s own horror rap music.

For those unfamiliar, horror rap themes usually include but are not limited to death, suicide, murder, violence, Satanism, and other terrifying themes. Unlike Dayton Family, you will not see Dark Lotus rapping about the hood, drug dealing on street corners, or about cops in a derogatory fashion (at least not often). 

Dark Lotus’s horror rap, in contrary, is much more personal, introspective, and spiritual. Often times you can find Dark Lotus’s horror rap artists bemoaning the fact that they are still alive and wishing to die, thoughts that often travel into the supernatural with talk of souls traveling to different destinations.

One common link between Dayton Family’s hard core rap music and Dark Lotus’s horror rap music is their origin. Members in both groups come from impoverished, street-centric adolescenses, and thus have much of the same fodder for their rhymes. Though they may approach these topics from two different angles in horror rap and hard core rap, when you boil it down, Dark Lotus and Dayton Family are the way they are for very similar reasons!

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The Dayton Family, one of hard core rap’s most notorious Midwestern groups, and Dark Lotus, arguably the largest horror rap super group of its kind in the world (definitely in the Midwest), may write different styles of music, but they come from similar backgrounds. To learn more about  Dark Lotus and their music, please visit http://hatchetgear.com/bands/darklotus.html. 

Underground hip hop group Dayton Family is often associated with horror rap outfit Insane Clown Posse because they are signed to ICP’s Hatchet House Records. Although Hatchet House is really nothing more than a holding stall for artists Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope think will be the next big thing in underground hip hop, many old Dayton Family fans take this to mean the ICP has faith that Dayton Family will soon be on the top of the charts, and thanks to the support ICP has given them.

While that’s a fair assumption to make in some respects, be careful with the amount of sound similarities you think Dayton Family (traditional underground hip hop) and ICP (horror rap) have. For one, Dayton Family, at least when they were up and coming in the mid 90s, were not a horror rap group. They were a more traditional underground hip hop group whose lyrics touched on themes of survival in an economically challenged environment. There is little talk about the morbid content covered heavily in ICP’s horror rap songs.

For proof, let’s take a look at some examples from one prominent ICP horror rap song and one prominent Dayton Family underground hip hop song.

ICP’s "Chicken Huntin’" Horror Rap:

 

Barrels in your mouth, bullets to your head

The back of your neck’s all over the shed

Boomshacka boom chop chop band

I’m 2 Dope and it ain’t no thang

To cut a chicken, trigger’s clicking

Blow off his head but his feet still kicking

Last as long as you can my man

Cause when that chicken head hits the fan you got

Blood guts fingers and toes

Sitting front row at the chicken show so…

 

As you can see, these lyrics are vile to say the least. Furthermore, it’s pretty obvious that ICP doesn’t expect you to take these horror rap lyrics seriously, they’re plainly meant to be funny and for novelty purposes only. Despite the fact that both Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope come from backgrounds similar to Dayton Family, they choose to make funny horror rap songs in most instances instead of more traditional underground hip hop songs.

Dayton Family’s "F.B.I." Underground Hip Hop:

 

I'm wakin’ up in the mornin’, with problems on my mind

Motherf*ck the education and drug rehabilitation

I'm smokin’ on that weed and the green is getting’ tasty

Dead feds in my closet cause they tried to chase me

 

These are the opening lines to Dayton Family’s "F.B.I.", and the paint a completely different picture than the horror rap lyrics do right off the bat.  With much of underground hip hop’s themes similar to those mentioned above in the Dayton Family song, it would appear that they are not the anomaly, ICP and their horror rap is.

So, to say that underground hip hop group Dayton Family will be the next big thing in horror rap because of ICP taking them under its wing would be misguided. Chances are that, if Dayton Family does regain the momentum it once had, it will be because they’re bringing back the same gritty street lyrics that once made them popular, not because they crossed genres into horror rap.

However, as is the path for an successful artist signed to Hatchet House, if Dayton Family does get their career back on track, they will most likely end up being signed to horror rap record label Psychopathic Records, where every artist as a horror rap artist. None are mainstream underground hip hop like Dayton Family.

Keeping that in mind, it would not shock anyone if Dayton Family and the horror rap heads in charge at Psychopathic found a way to make a hybrid sound by combining both horror rap and the underground hip hop Dayton Family is known for!

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Dayton Family is an underground hip hop group from Flint, Michigan, who is trying to get their career back on track with the help of Psychopathic subsidiary Hatchet House Records. To learn about other underground hip hop artists on Psychopathic Records and those who run it, please visit http://hatchetgear.com.