Last week we wrote about the fact that several homegrown Bay Area rappers, including E-40 and Too Short, were oddly absent from the Rock the Bells lineup at Shoreline over the weekend, despite the fact that they performed at the festival’s San Bernadino show a week earlier. It appeared to be a…
Continue reading »
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.
Continue reading »
For five years running now, Rock the Bells has been the South Bay’s biggest rap show. It’s also the strangest megatour of the 21st century; since its debut in 2004, it’s reinvented itself almost every year, and this one is no exception.
Continue reading »
As a member of the iconic South Bay hip-hop group Subcontents, Tape Mastah Steph was an integral part of the emerging underground hip-hop scene in San Jose back in the ’90s. Today, he still is, even though he moved out of California almost a decade ago.
Continue reading »
Anyone who wonders what hip-hop could possibly have in common with traditional Punjabi music has never heard Ustad Lal Singh Bhatti sing. “He’s the ultimate freestyler,” says rapper Vijay Chattha of his bandmate in the San Francisco hip-hop-funk-jazz group BlackMahal, who perform at Summer Fest in downtown San Jose on Saturday
Continue reading »
Anyone whose knowledge of Detroit hip-hop begins and ends with Eminem would do well to study up on Slum Village. The story of this crew is one of the strangest in modern hip-hop, a sprawling saga that begins in the same world of Motor City battle rap that 8 Mile made famous,…
Continue reading »
“From sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, your mind had to be on nobody but God,” says Phife Dawg, remembering weekends at his grandmother’s house growing up, in last year’s documentary about A Tribe Called Quest, Beats, Rhymes and Life. “So I had to sneak and watch Soul Train. I had to sneak…
Continue reading »
Rey Resurreccion, one of San Jose’s best, unsung rappers, recently released a video for his track “Saturday”, produced by the Bangerz. The video itself is pretty standard, mostly a lot of shots of Resurreccion and his crew biking, skateboarding, breakdancing and, of course, plenty of tattooed women. What is exceptional is the…
Continue reading »
The Learning Curve crew has been making some of the sharpest and strangest hip-hop to come out of the L.A. underground in the last couple of years. In particular, Turtle (Ken Katagiri) and Bakus (Brandon Backhaus) are trippers on the mic, sporting influences that range from Dan the Automator and Del tha…
Continue reading »
Sometimes Aaron Aquino can’t believe what passes for a live show from beatmakers. If it’s some guy fiddling half-heartedly behind a laptop for the whole set, the man better known by his DJ handle Squareweezy is not impressed. “Is he checking his email, or performing for us?” Aquino says he has to…
Continue reading »
