The child of Ethiopian immigrants, Lavish is a young San Jose emcee with big aspirations. The up-and-coming rapper was raised in the Santa Teresa neighborhood and first took an interest in hip-hop in middle school, where he and his friends would spend their free time (and class time) engaging in rap battles…
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John Flynn on December 9, 2015
East bay rapper Opio has gray hairs winding through his twisty locks. The tenured spitter has been a pillar in the Bay Area underground since the early ’90s, operating on his own and with the Souls of Mischief as part of the hallowed indie hip-hop collective, Hieroglyphics. With his most recent project, Sempervirens,…
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John Flynn on December 2, 2015
G-Eazy paid his dues. In the last seven years, the Oakland rapper shotgunned 11 projects at the Internet, starred in mega-popular music videos and established himself as a social media somebody—all before putting ink to a contract. His Web-based rise epitomizes the way recording artists get big nowadays. His proponents paint him…
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“It’s 2015. We gotta stay away from the negative shit,” the San Jose-based emcee and producer Cola says on a recent evening, as he plays with the bottle cap of the soda he is drinking. The emerging rapper is referring to the recent Chris Brown shooting at local South Side club Fiesta,…
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Much like the Aesop of antiquity, it isn’t particularly easy to get a bead on Aesop, the emcee of the Bay Area and Los Angeles hip-hop crew, Living Legends. A Wikipedia search of the Aesop of Aesop’s Fables will inform you that scholars are undecided as to whether Aesop ever really existed or…
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Kung Fu Vampire fans have come to expect the unexpected. He has built a cult following for his theatrical shows, which have included an eight-piece live rap band with drums, cellos, violins and back-up singers. Then, of course, there’s Kung Fu Vampire himself—a bald, pale-white vampire with fangs, goatee, white contact lenses…
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In 1990, LA Times reporter Robert Hilburn said this of rap music: “It was ten years ago that the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ became the first rap single to enter the national top 20. Who ever figured then that the music would even be around in 1990, much less produce attractions that…
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Rock the Bells, the biggest hip-hop party of the summer, took over Shoreline Amphitheatre for two days with performances from new acts like A$SAP Rocky and old-school rappers like Big Daddy Kane and Salt-n-Pepa.
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AARON CARNES on July 16, 2012
In February, unknown San Jose rapper Antwon released the video for his song “Helicopter,” which quickly became the subject of music blogs all over the internet, most notably spin.com. It’s now creeping up on 80,000 views and counting.
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K.Flay, also known as former Stanford student Kristine Flaherty, returned to her Bay Area roots Saturday at Live105’s BFD 2012, pirate-themed extravaganza headlined by Jane’s Addiction, Silversun Pickups and Garbage the Shoreline Amphitheatre.
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