CHI-TOWN SHYSTERSâ„¢

The group was formed in 1999 when we were all very young. When the group first started our original name was s.w.a.t; it was then changed to shysters in 2003 and we later added on chi town to our name later that year to fully represent our city. We all grew up on Chicago’s Westside in the Henry Horner projects. Growing up in Henry Horner influenced us to rap in many ways first of all to get out the projects; and second the projects were facing the legendary United Center ; so every time the united center had any type of event we will see all these expensive cars , and people with money and we wanted to have them things when we grew up. While every other kid in the hood’s dream was to become a basketball or football player we turned to rap and began to to write raps at a young age.
Once we started writing rap we were very fortunate to find out that each one of us being blood cousins had talent in writing raps. In 2001 Allen Lane (pun), only 11 years old and the oldest of the cousins decided that the group need to take it up a notch and purchased a karaoke machine that he saved up for by selling fire works out the apartment he lived in the projects. When he brought the machine home Deandre Gleeson (young-dre) 10 years old was one of the first with a song ready to record , every one else started being more dedicated within the next few weeks. In 2003 (pun) got a computer that can record music and CTS began doing at least 20 songs a month on puns computer of industry beats.
We started submitting songs to record company’s not knowing better and thinking it would be easy to get a record deal. After so many demo submissions and responses that we didn’t want we took a 2 year break from rapping. In 2005 gave our selves a reality check after finding out more things about the business we were trying to get into. First of all we realized that we needed to start getting custom beats, and we need to get in a real studio. In 2006 after getting our money right, and meeting a lot of new people that gave us info we needed, and have a rap career going for them we got into the studio.
We started recording at a local studio on the Westside of the chi. Our first song that we ever did in the studio is call “ stay g’d up “ all though the last 6 months of 2006 we were in the studio doing songs of custom and industry beats. In Jan.2007 CTS did an interview with fox news Chicago about their group ; since then CTS has been in a better Studio recording there first album called “ THE MIDWEST TAKEOVER “ as the name implies our fans know what we are about to do and know that one of the greatest groups are just getting started “ C.T.S !!!”
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