by
Jay Edgar on July 7, 2021
Those still looking to get hyphy after Mac Dre Day on the 5th can’t do much better than seeing San Francisco underground rap legend and Mac Dre collaborator Andre Nickatina—the killa whale—bring the party to South Side SJ’s Branham Lounge. Often spoken in the same breath as both the Thizz Entertainment founder…
Continue reading »
by
Mike Huguenor on June 4, 2021
So far there is exactly one great San Jose anthem of the new millennium: “The Hometown” by Rey Resurreccion. Spitting on top of a heartstring-tugging banda beat from DJ Cutso, Rey makes the case for all the golden grains of the Valley of the Heart’s Delight: “Barbeques, fairgrounds, go karts, taquerias /…
Continue reading »
San Jose-based emcee Cola—not to be confused with the San Jose-based indie rock outfit, Cola— is preparing to release a new mixtape, titled House Shoes. No firm date has been given for the release, but his publicist says it should drop in mid-December. That’s the album’s art work up above.
Continue reading »
Joowan Kim wants to pioneer a new kind of American art music. He derides concert hall compositions as either reheated European classics or cultural appropriation pieces, like “Tibetan yak herding songs,” which he compares to wildflowers ripped from their native field and put into an expensive vase. After emigrating from South Korea…
Continue reading »
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…
Continue reading »
by
John Flynn on January 6, 2016
thouDirtbag Dan bustles about his high-ceilinged studio in an industrial block just outside of San Jose’s Japantown. He points out a psychedelic mural of a shark by a local artist on one wall and mismatched grey curtains stapled to another. The latter serve as the backdrop for his battle rap podcast. It…
Continue reading »
by
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,…
Continue reading »
The Bay Area earned the begrudging respect of the East Coast rap elite back in the early- and mid-aughts, with the undeniable impact of the hyphy movement. That respect, however, never seemed to rub off on San Jose, where Dave Dub has been grinding since the early ’90s with the aim of putting…
Continue reading »
It’s fair to say that Lyrics Born (a.k.a. Tsutomu “Tom” Shimura) felt the cultural void when he left Berkeley for UC Davis in the early 1990s. A hip-hop head stranded in a rural college town, he made the most of his time by going on late night walks through campus with nothing but…
Continue reading »
It’s been almost two decades since he and his Living Legends crew helped usher in a new era of DIY in hip-hop, and Scarub is still doing things his own way. In fact, he’s doing everything his own way.
Continue reading »
