From Suffolk County to GABOS: Cousin Stizz and the Dorchester Sound
The first hip-hop artist to win Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards went from SoundCloud tapes to RCA and back to running his own label.
If you were in Boston around 2015, somebody played you "Shoutout." That's Cousin Stizz, born Stephen Goss in Boston on March 15, 1992, raised in Dorchester. A childhood friend gave him the name when he was 12.
He started out freestyling in a local cypher series and rapping with a group called Pilot Nation. His friend and fellow Boston rapper Michael Christmas popping off in 2013 pushed him to take it serious. "Shoutout" was his first solo single in 2014.
Then the tape: Suffolk County, June 2015, named after the county Boston sits in. It ran up over 12 million SoundCloud listens, and a video went around of Drake playing "Shoutout" at his birthday party. The follow-up, MONDA, in 2016, made DigBoston's best local albums list that year.
RCA signed him in late 2016. His first album there, One Night Only, came out July 12, 2017, with Offset, G-Eazy and Buddy on it. "Headlock" with Offset hit over 11.3 million Spotify streams in three weeks. In December 2018 he won Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards, the first hip-hop artist to take the top prize.
After 2019's Trying to Find My Next Thrill on RCA, he went independent. Just For You (2022) and GABOS, short for Game Ain't Based on Sympathy (July 26, 2024), both came out on his own Stizz Music Inc.
Ten years after Suffolk County he's still the blueprint for a lot of kids rapping in the city: stay local, stay yourself, and own your stuff.
