On a recent Saturday night during a relatively tame event, one of San Jose’s long-running DIY venues, Kitty Castle, was permanently shut down by the police. “Before this month, I had talked to the cops at least three other times,” says Stephanie Chang, who launched the venue in 2012, and has been…
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Locals watching Jimmy Kimmel Live last month might have noticed a familiar face. On Nov. 14, sitting behind the keyboards for L.A.-based folk-rock group Dawes, was San Jose native Lee Pardini.
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An openly misogynistic, KKK-endorsed serial abuser and circulator of anti-Semitic imagery is now president-elect. Peter Thiel, a Lex Luthor-esque Bay Area billionaire who waged a unilateral war on the First Amendment, tried to dissuade youth from attending college, and is planning on infusing himself with the blood of adolescents so that he…
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You’d be forgiven for not knowing what is going on in San Jose music right now. You’d be forgiven for thinking that in fact nothing is going on in San Jose music, or that “San Jose” and “music” aren’t really words that go together at all. We are, after all, the 10th…
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With a voice like absolutely no other and a sense of rhythm that often stretches the very definition of the term, Danny Brown is one of the strangest and most electrifying figures to have emerged from hip-hop’s underground.
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As a genre, hip-hop is all about taking the past and pushing it into the future. It’s about the meshing of sounds together. Before his untimely passing earlier this year, A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg summed it up succinctly in an interview with the blog I Am Hip Hop: “If you…
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The Annex in Menlo Park was doing about as well as any recording studio could hope to do. Throughout the aughts, or post-Napster years, everyone in the recording industry—from the labels and musicians to producers and engineers—had to innovate to survive. Compared to many others, The Annex had equipped itself well for the…
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San Francisco made a lot of contributions to the early days of punk. Bands like Crime, Flipper and The Avengers each made their own, unique contributions—expanding the nascent genre’s boundaries in myriad directions and incorporating disparate sonic elements, from rockabilly to noise.
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A new program intended to aid South Bay youth in creative endeavors kicks off Labor Day weekend in San Jose. A.M.P. (or, Arts & Music Program) offers free art and music workshops for anyone ages 13-21. Hosted by the Roberto Cruz Leadership Academy on Story Road, the program has been organized by one…
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After working for years with the Island Reggae Festival, hosted annually at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, the San Jose-based streetwear brand Cukui is going solo to bring the South Bay a music festival that boasts a number of big names in reggae, hip-hop and Latin rock.
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