Greatness

In many ways, accusing Greatness of being brash would just be too easy. The 22 year old phenomenon from Boston has just begun making his mark but to call him an overnight success would be grossly incorrect. The Beantown emcee has been cultivating his unique brand of Hip-Hop for years and hasn’t been shy about telling any and everyone why he feels it’s the best thing going in music today. Drawing equally from the chaos of 90’s grunge and the anxiety of golden era New York Hip-Hop, Greatness has balanced skill with pop sense, credibility with creativity, and continues to push the artistic envelope.The son of two Haitian immigrants, Gregory Dor was born May 8, 1986 in Dorchester, MA. At the tender age of two, his mother was struck by a stray bullet during a gang fight. Though she would recover from the incident, the traumatic experience was enough to move the family and they relocated to Roslindale when Greg was four years old. Despite the change of address, the backdrop of Dorchester continued to be the proving ground for the youngest Dor as he continued to attended school and socialize in his hometown.During his formative years on the streets of Dorchester, Greg and his group of friends (dubbed The Graveyard) engaged in many past times, mostly consisting of drugs and alcohol, but also rapping. After an initial battle with stage fright, Greg began rapping for his friends and getting a strong reaction. Greg would begin taking song writing seriously and only continued to get better. Recalling B.I.G’s knack for storytelling and Eminem’s pin-point delivery, Greg’s lyrics matured at an accelerated pace. His songs read like an encyclopedia of pop-culture, all while tinted with an undeniably self-centered, Dorchester stained perspective. As he grew older and, in turn, more focused on honing his craft, his lyrics continued to sharpen but also took a more serious twist. After flirting with several potential stage names, he would christen himself “Greatness,” claiming it was less his title and more his goal, the declaration of the driving force that pushed him to follow his dreams.Though he was deeply rooted in the tradition of Hip-Hop that bred such emcees as Nas and Jay-Z, Greatness’ ideology was clearly doused in Rock & Roll aesthetics. During his high school years he would become enamored with the legacy of the late Kurt Cobain. Pulling a page from the Nirvana front man’s book, Greatness learned to balance dark, confessional lyrics with pop melodies, creating a sonic dichotomy not typically found in rap music.After countless rap battles and a new alliance formed with a classmate, a fledgling producer who would go on to be known as J.Alex, Greatness focused his attention on securing a record contract, the next logical step for the budding star. After a few false starts with several local labels, Greatness and J.Alex chose to start their own label instead and, thus, Cold Day Music was born. To coincide with the creation of the new label, Greatness also opened his own studio, Revolver Recording Studio, after graduating from the Art Institute, studying audio engineering.With the formation of Cold Day, Greatness released his first official offering, The Heroin Habit, in the spring of 2009. A mixtape that evolves into a concept album, the record plays out as a strangely organic mixture of Reasonable Doubt and Alice in Chains’ Dirt, all the while blurring the line between reality and fiction. In fact, The Heroin Habit is much indebted to Layne Staley and his haunting cries on Dirt, particularly in the abrasive honesty of the lyrics, a fact not lost on Dor as he has taken on the moniker “Layne Cobain” in tribute to his two fallen idols. With every listen to the songs on The Heroin Habit it becomes harder to guess which lyrics were spawned from a burst of creativity and which were plucked directly from a therapy session.With The Heroin Habit completed, Greatness has returned to the studio with his attention now focused on his next release, The Greatness EP, a record which displays an unlimited amount of crossover potential while remaining true to the artist. Greatness seems poised to take the next step in his career, going from good to, well…great.