From the 17th floor of the KQED building downtown, San Jose is an impressive sight. The city of more than a million sprawls, unfurling against mountain ranges to the east and south and against an equally sublime range of suburbs to the north.

Normally, this view is only available to members of the Silicon Valley Capital Club. Today, however, there is an interloper among their ranks—a different kind of San Jose elite, still not quite used to the high life: producer B. Lewis.

It’s 10am and Lewis has already had a full day. While the rest of the coast was asleep, he was finalizing the art for his first proper full-length release, putting the finishing touches on an album cover he designed himself. Next, he packed a duffle bag and got in the car. When the sun finally rose over the Sierra Nevadas, he was already north of Bakersfield on the I-5, making a trip from his new home in Los Angeles back to the place where it all began: San Jose.

This week, Lewis releases his debut, Sunset on Carmella. Commissioned by San Jose Jazz, the record caps off a yearlong partnership between the musician and the local non-profit arts organization, which included a number of public performances and a series of lessons on music production delivered to a group of South Bay high school students.

For Lewis, the album is something of a farewell to his longtime home. In October, the producer moved to LA after signing a deal a major management team, the same group behind some of the biggest pop hits of the last few years.

Pick one—the new record or inking the deal—and it would already be a banner year for the producer. Yet both moves pale in comparison to Lewis’s other recent accomplishment: a writing credit on an album released just a few weeks ago by Kanye West.

The road here has been neither easy nor direct. In San Jose, few lamps light the way of the artist. But from the 17th floor, as the city comes to life, and Lewis puts a decade of grinding behind him, his future is looking bright.

PASSING PORTRAITS

Born in San Jose in 1988, Bradford Lewis was raised in a musical household. The son of a jazz musician, he started playing bass while still in elementary school. “Then guitar, and then piano. Pretty much all self-taught,” he says.

In his early years, the Lewis family moved around a lot, bouncing from Los Gatos to Willow Glen to South San Jose. Eventually, they settled in Evergreen.

As a teenager, Lewis began going to all-ages shows in San Jose and Santa Cruz, most of them in DIY spots, church basements and community centers.

“I was watching these bands and thinking, ‘I can do this shit,’” he remembers.

Inspired by the scene’s accessibility, he started his first band in high school: a metal band he describes as “experimental and wild.”

“I was like, ‘What if we got thicker strings, tune down to Drop G and just see what happens?’”

That project was a learning experience. In addition to writing all the music, Lewis provided the equipment and practice space (the family garage), booked the shows and even drove the band around.

“It came to a point in time where I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

For Lewis, the point had always been the music. Playing in the band got him interacting with other musicians and up on stage for the first time. Unequal workload aside, he enjoyed it. So, in 2007, after graduating high school, he enrolled at Ex’Pression College (now known as SAE Expression College) a local private university focused on training students for jobs in the entertainment industry. There, he began to hone his production skills, learning how to engineer, record and mix a session.

But all of that would just be prologue, the price of entry into a great coliseum of working musicians, all of them fighting the impossible and trying to survive in the Bay Area.

CHOICES

Like a true DJ, Shea Modiri gets his music the hard way: digging through the crates and checking out what he finds.

“I just love music,” the 38-year-old selector and show promoter says. These days, Modiri is a part of the soul and R&B night “The Changing Same” at The Continental, where he spins under the moniker Shea Butter.

The first time he heard B. Lewis, Modiri was doing a little digital crate-digging on Bandcamp, clicking his way through every single release tagged “San Jose,” just to see what he’d find. That’s when he discovered one of Lewis’s first beat tapes.

“He stood out,” Modiri says. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’”

He was mystified. At the time, he had been organizing a recurring party called The Treatment. He thought he knew the San Jose music like the back of his hand. But then, here was this guy with these crazy beats.

Soon after, Mordiri saw that Lewis was playing a show at First Street Billiards, the former pool hall now home to Forager.

“I was, like, a fan,” he says. “I went up to him and I was like, ‘Dude, I love your shit. You’re awesome.’”

He invited Lewis to perform at The Treatment , and they became fast friends.

Modiri started coming by the studio, aka the garage at Lewis’s mom’s house.

“That was not a comfortable studio,” he says. “It’s a garage. So when it was hot, it was fucking hot in there. And when it was cold, it was fucking cold.”

Still, Modiri was impressed by the music. Even more so, he was also impressed by Lewis’s work ethic.

If Lewis eventually had to move to LA to get where he wanted to go with music, it was certainly not for lack of trying here. From 2009 on, he collaborated with a vast range of artists big and small, many of them people he’d met around the Bay Area. There was K.Flay, whose debut album had recently cracked the top 15 on the Billboard rap charts. There was a tour with Sonnymoon, a band featuring Anna Wise, who had just recorded all the female vocal parts on Kendrick Lamar’s studio debut, Good Kid M.A.A.D. City. In 2014, he produced Winter & The Wolves by Rhymesayers rapper Grieves, putting him in touch with the Midwest’s famously vibrant underground hip-hop scene. That record even featured an appearance by underground hip-hop heavyweight Slug, of Rhymesayers’ marquee act Atmosphere.

“We did about 85 percent of that album here in my studio,” Lewis told me back in 2016. “Slug doesn’t really do features anymore, so that was kind of a cool thing to put on my resume.”

The more he collaborated with people, met people from outside of San Jose who were connecting nationwide, the more people took notice of his work—and the drive that Mordiri had picked up on years earlier.

“He probably works 10 to 14 hours a day at recording music,” Modiri says. “All he does is make music. But unless you’re working with him, you don’t see it. It probably just comes off as, ‘Oh, he’s really talented.’ In reality, it’s years and years and years of being locked up in his studio.”

One of the people who noticed Lewis’ dedication was a musician in LA named Scott Fulton.

“I came upon his work on a music blog,” Fulton says. “He released this album of beats that really caught my attention. The production was really unique and forward-thinking. I listened to it a ton at the time.”

A few years later, Fulton moved to the Bay Area and began working for San Jose Jazz. At that year’s Winter Fest, while watching Thundercat play, he recognized Lewis in the crowd.

“Only at that point did I realize he was a San Jose-based artist,” he says.

STRANGE THINGS

By 2017, Lewis and Modiri had been friends for the better part of a decade, and their relationship had begun to change.

“It was just organic,” says Modiri. “It was never like, ‘Hey, be my manager…’ But that’s exactly what happened.”

In his first act as manager, Modiri told Lewis to write up a list of all the people he wanted to work with. After one look at that list, he gave Lewis a clear directive.

“He was like, ‘You need to get to LA ASAP. There’s nothing here for you in San Jose anymore,’” Lewis recalls.

Taking his new manager’s advice, Lewis started making trips down to Los Angeles, staying for a week or two and doing the same thing he’d been doing in the Bay: meeting people, collaborating, grinding. It didn’t take him long to get in with in with the promoters of the iconic, long-running and now-retired LA party, the Low End Theory.

“It was very similar to what we were doing up here with The Treatment—a beats night,” says Modiri.

At Low End Theory Lewis was a hit, and was brought back repeatedly (including once for one of the event’s farewell shows). There, he made connections with a range of new people—among them an LA-based producer named Falcons. In 2018, Lewis and Falcons put out their collaborative Daydrift EP, a moody blur of neon synths, backpacker beats, and big pop hooks. With a team already behind Falcons, the five-song set brought Lewis’s music to an even wider audience.

Around the same time, Lewis had begun working on some tracks with a friend in LA he just calls “Jerry.”

“We have a good connection, good vibe,” Lewis says. “We like making weird stuff.”

One night while working on music together, Jerry told Lewis that Kanye was on the hunt for new beats. “I’m like, ‘Sure Kanye’s looking,’” Lewis remembers, not thinking much of it. “Everybody’s always looking.’”

Without fretting over who might ultimately listen to the session, the two set about working on a couple ideas. One of them had all the hallmarks of a B. Lewis song: dreamy, floating synth pads, understated rhythm, a subtly complex chord progression. That idea started to catch and they recorded a vocal melody: a soft, crooning vocal line that creeps upward as the chords resolve underneath.

At the end of the night, they had three or four songs. By then, Lewis had already written hundreds, most of them just sitting in iTunes folders on his computer, labeled by year. After the writing session, he went right back to working on his own projects and preparing for his next big collaboration.

“It was 2018, and the 50th anniversary of the Dionne Warwick song ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’” says Brendan Rawson, director of San Jose Jazz. “We were thinking, San Jose is such a different place from what it was 50 years ago. What’s the soundtrack of this region today?”

To answer the question, the organization began a new concert series: “Do You Know San Jose?” In addition to performances by a number of up-and-coming local musicians, the series was to feature an artist in residence, a significant role whose duties included multiple performances, a series of lessons taught to local high school students and the commissioning of a new album. For their first artist in residence, San Jose Jazz set their sights on Lewis.

“He was really top of the list,” says Scott Fulton, now San Jose Jazz’s special projects manager. “We’re really happy he said yes.”

For Lewis, used to scraping and scrapping for every job he got, the choice was easy.

“Shea just came up to me and was like, ‘You wanna do an album for San Jose Jazz?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’”

And then he got another call.

“My buddy Jerry, he was like, ‘Yo, I think we got this Kanye cut.”

’YE AREA

On Sept. 29, 2018, B. Lewis was watching the Saturday Night Live season premiere. The musical guest that night was Kanye West.

Earlier that week, Kanye had announced a new album over Twitter along with the cover art and a date: “9.29.18.” Everything pointed toward an on-air album release. But that’s not how things went.

“Never came out,” Lewis says.

Instead, at the end of the show, Kanye delivered a pro-Trump sermon to a captive audience, dipping in and out of song as he told the crowd that white people should get to make Cosby jokes, too, and that everyone should just follow their hearts.

Understandably, Lewis was confused.

“I called my boy and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘I have no fucking idea.’”

Lewis’ connection called Kanye’s people, then called back.

“He says, ‘It’s not coming out tonight. I guess he’s putting it on hold. He wants to rewrite some shit.’”

All of this was back when the record was supposed to be called Yandhi. A few months later, Kim Kardashian West announced a new release date: Nov. 23. Like the first release date, that day came and passed with no album.

Over the next 11 months, the new Kanye album was teased repeatedly. A version of Yandhi leaked, and was even reviewed a few places. Then in January, rather than release the record, Kanye started holding gospel performances billed as “Sunday Service.” In what sounds like a scene from a particularly lazy Simpsons episode, he delivered an Easter Sunday Sunday Service at Coachella.

By then, the album had been renamed. It was no longer Yandhi, with its connotations of intellect and non-violence. Now, draped in hues of gold and royal blue, the album was called Jesus is King. West had become a born-again Christian.

Lewis, on the other hand, had begun to lose faith. For more than a year, he’d been telling people about his track on the new Kanye album. The claim was starting to sound desperate.

“Nobody believed me!” he says. “I’d been teased with this thing dropping nonstop.”

Luckily, he had other irons in the fire. The record he had done with Falcons the previous year had caught the attention of Electric Feel, the production team behind “Psycho” by Post Malone, “Havana” by Camila Cabello and other big pop hits. Scott Storch worked with them, and Frank Dukes.

“The people on that label are literally the people that he wrote down on that list three years ago,” Modiri says. “Everything was planned for him to be in this spot.”

Electric Feel wanted him to move to LA permanently. Having heard what he was capable of, they wanted him doing sessions yesterday. It had taken a decade, but he was finally where he wanted to be. All that was left to do was submit the album to San Jose Jazz. With the help of his longtime friend (and the secret ear for all his projects: his mom), he pieced together his first official solo album, Sunset on Carmella. The title captures the bittersweet nature of the moment.

“Carmella Court was where I lived,” Lewis says. “So Sunset on Carmella is like the sun going down on San Jose and rising in LA.”

SUNSET ON CARMELLA

This week, Sunset on Carmella is out on all streaming platforms. In a way, it is the start of B. Lewis’ career: his first album under his own name, with a label behind it. All it took to get here was a decade of work, hundreds of songs and dozens of collaborations.

“For me, nothing was laid out,” he says. “I just kind of found my own way. I ping-ponged around until I found my own sound.”

These days, B. Lewis is no longer a San Jose resident. But sitting over a beer at the SoFA Market in downtown, he can’t help reminiscing. Towards the end of the interview, he remembers his first paycheck, back when he was still in high school at Valley Christian.

“I worked at a machine shop,” he says. “It only lasted, like, two weeks. Not because I didn’t like it, but because my friend’s dad, who ran the place, was like, ‘You need to do music.’ I got paid like $180 or something like that. I’m glad I did it, but…”

Here he pauses. The song that had been playing over the loudspeaker has ended, and a new song is just beginning. This one begins with vocals: a soft, crooning line that creeps upward over a strange sounding chord. Together, a pair of voices sing:

We began after the storm inside

The song is “Everything We Need,” by Kanye West. The melody, sung by Ty Dolla $ign and Ant Clemons, is the same one Lewis sang, in the version he wrote at a friend’s house back before the move, back before the album and management deal, back before he ever knew any of this was going to happen.

“…but I’m doing fine,” Lewis continues, as the chorus ends and the beat kicks in. “I’m doing fine.”

“What makes this night so special is that it’s about y’all and the way you feel: This is a representation of that feeling.” Feelings were indeed front and center at Kanye West’s Saint Pablo Tour in San Jose last night, an emotional, visual, aural rollercoaster ride that lasted nearly three hours and could’ve gone on longer if the audience hadn’t been on the brink of rioting.

Not only did Kanye feel like Pablo, he also left the audience feeling all ten stages of grief over the course of his hour-long spoken word performance/tirade/slam-poetry session about Donald Trump, education, race in America, internet echo chambers, and, of course, himself. While shoes, hats, and other articles of clothing were thrown at West from the raucous pit that churned below his floating stage—partly a representation of the audience’s feelings last night—fans were also wilding out at the raw energy, passion and creative ingenuity he brought to his off-the-wall, one-man show.

You have to give it to Kanye for being Kanye. He spent the evening floating above an audience, tethered to a tilting stage that showered fans below in gold, orange and yellow lights—reminiscent of a scene out of a Philip K. Dick novel or a George Miller film. Beginning the show with “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” the self-proclaimed modern-day Einstein led the audience through a few of his hits from his latest, post-physical-release LP, The Life of Pablo album, stopping repeatedly to comment on the country’s current political climate and revealing that he didn’t vote but if he had, it would’ve been for Donald Trump.

As the audience began booing in anger, Kanye persisted that he wasn’t asking their opinion on who should have won, but was simply stating that he did win, despite everyone’s confident predictions that he would lose in a landslide, and questioned that false confidence.

“Don’t believe that just because the media doesn’t like the headline, there aren’t enough people out there who do believe it,” West said. “For everything you might not like, there’s another human being right next to you who might like that shit. You might not like what you’re hearing right now, but I’m just gonna ask you to ask more questions.”

Unfortunately, Kanye’s constant interjections and interruptions didn’t allow for a cohesive flow of songs, or even any semblance of his recorded work to be fully enjoyed. When he wasn’t skipping songs altogether—“skip that track, next one”—he was bringing the audience’s energy from zero to one hundred real quick, starting a verse, stopping after the first line, talking extensively, then starting the song over again. For “Freestyle 4,” Kanye repeated the first verse three times, stopping before every chorus to shed light on racism or Donald Trump’s campaign genius and then skipped the song altogether.

BIG BROTHER: Yeezy urged the crowd to stop believing everything they read on the web. Photo by Greg Ramar.

He did try to end the performance on a strong note, singing hits like “Runaway,” “Stronger,” “Touch the Sky” and ultimately ending with “Ultralight Beam.” It wouldn’t be true to form if he didn’t stop in the middle of the booming gospel choral outtro for “Ultralight” to leave the audience with one last bit of wisdom: “This world is racist, OK? Let’s stop being distracted to focus on that as much. It’s just a fucking fact: We are in a racist country, period. Do not allow people to make us talk about that so fucking long. Let’s talk about whatever the fuck we wanna talk about, just stop fucking talking about that, bro.”

Kanye West said it best last night: “You are fooled by the information on the mother fucking internet, bro!”

As news outlets across the globe will report on his outlandish claims today, we have to consider last night’s performance in the context of Kanye West—one of the few celebrities on the planet with the chops to go head-to-head with Trump in a troll-off.

Ye has been saying outlandish things in the interest of making headlines for the majority of his career. Did he really believe that George W. Bush didn’t care about African Americans? Does he actually fancy himself a god among mortals? Would he really have cast a vote for Trump?

Perhaps these are the wrong questions to be asking—at least when it comes to last night’s show.

In an era in which the truth has become a matter of opinion—thanks to the social media bubbles we actively choose to live within—perhaps all that counts is that West has managed to go viral with his antics yet again. There is at least one man out there who can attest to the virtues of viral content. And come Inauguration Day, that man will be taking the oath of office.

Check out photos by Greg Ramar from last night’s show below:

Photo by Greg Ramar.

Photo by Greg Ramar.

Photo by Greg Ramar.

Photo by Greg Ramar.

Photo by Greg Ramar.

Photo by Greg Ramar.

Click here for the full gallery.

Listen to “Ultralight Beam” below:

It’s been more than a decade since Kanye West first burst into the mainstream with his triumphant, soul-sampling debut, “The College Dropout.” He’s come a long way since his early days, spinning up beats for Roc-A-Fella Records. In 2016, Ye is everywhere—from fashion, to producing, to creating his own unapologetic, boundary-pushing tunes. He comes to town on the heels of his latest effort, “The Life of Pablo.” Also this week, British producer Mat Zo brings his psychotic EDM circus sounds to Pure Lounge, Dream Theater unfurls their sprawling new concept album, “The Astonishing,” at City National Civic, and a collection of some of San Jose’s best musicians get together to celebrate Nirvana by covering their seminal 1994 album “Unplugged” in its entirety at the brand new Forager.

Giddens & Powell
Wed, 7:30pm, $15-$65
Bing Concert Hall, Stanford
This concert brings together two award-winning folk music artists—Rhiannon Giddens of Carolina Chocolate Drops, and renowned fiddler Dirk Powell. Fresh off her first solo debut album, Tomorrow is My Turn, Giddens returns to the stage to perform alongside Powell, who is widely considered to be one of the world’s leading experts on traditional Appalachian fiddle style. Together they merge the rich musical heritage of North Carolina and Kentucky. With three Grammy awards under her belt for albums with Carolina Chocolate Drops, T. Bone Burnett-collaborator Giddens is truly one of folk music’s living legends. (JT)

The Perpetual Circus
Wed, 12pm, Free
Empire Seven Studios, San Jose
Avery Palmer’s drawings and paintings carry the psychic weight of another century. The background colors range from a variety of nudes to deliquescing corpse grays. These arid landscapes are peopled with hybrid forms of humanity—animals, insects, dolls—all sharing our bodies. In addition to this palette of washed-out anomie, the remote facial expressions express a recessive dream world. Palmer’s surrealism fleshes out the unconscious, where bent thoughts thrive. Here every sleeping mind looks directly into the eyes of death. The canvases are less populated than those of Hieronymus Bosch, but they both share the sense that with tomorrow comes some fresh hell. (JE)

Masego
Thu, 9pm, $15-$25
The Continental, San Jose
Creative, funky, and above all, smooth, multi-instrumentalist and producer Masego weaves trap beats, soulful vocals and jazzy saxophone lines into fresh, danceable tracks. He even throws in a bit of old-school beat-boxing—a.k.a. scat singing—into the mix. The result is sound that feels both contemporary and timeless, boundary-pushing and classic. At 23 Masego displays serious potential, drawing inspiration from the likes of Kanye West and Ryan Leslie, while delivering a sound all his own. Currently on his international “Melanin Man” tour, Masego brings the party to The Continental’s weekly Changing Same party this Thursday. (JT)

Kanye West
Thu, 9pm, $43+
SAP Center, San Jose
The cult of Kanye comes to San Jose this week, as Yeezy brings his Saint Pablo Tour to the Shark Tank. A producer, emcee and professional provocateur, West began his career in the mid-’90s, working behind the boards as an engineer and beat-maker. Since breaking out as a solo artist with 2004’s The College Dropout, Ye has demonstrated a knack for innovation—pioneering the use of sped-up soul-vocal samples, paving the way for Drake and The Weeknd with his indie-rap crossover 808s & Heartbreak, and making his own rules on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus. His latest, The Life of Pablo, has proven both a commercial and critical success. (TJ)

Artrage: Evan Holm
Thu, 7pm, $5
San Jose Museum of Art
Multidisciplinary artist Evan Holm is the Aquaman of DJs. For the San Jose Museum of Art’s current exhibition Indestructible Wonder, Holm’s contribution Watertable took up the entire length of one gallery. The hollowed out table contained a pool of black water with music machinery that, despite being entirely wet, could still emit sound. For “Artrage,” Holm will play records underwater in a performance piece called Submerged Turntables. Can we anticipate an urban dance party set against a fairytale idyll? As the DJ himself puts it, don’t be expecting a rave: “The pool, black and depthless, represents loss. I am enacting a small moment of remorse towards this loss.” (JE)

Mat Zo
Fri, 9:30pm, $20-$25
Pure Lounge, Sunnyvale
With a sound reminiscent of Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers, Grammy-nominated British DJ and producer Mat Zo takes his futuristic house and electronica sounds to break-neck speeds on Mad, his latest, aptly named EP. The three-track set is an explosive mix of glitchy synths and room-spinning beats sure to induce feelings of vertigo—whether from the music itself, or from the wild dancefloor freakouts it’s bound to produce. Just check out Mad’s lead single, “Troglodyte,” to get a sense the fantastical alien-circus Zo is leading. Currently on a nationwide tour, he comes to the South Bay this weekend to push Pure patrons out of their respective comfort zones. (JT)

Nirvana Unplugged
Sat, 7:30pm, $10-$12
Forager, San Jose
Recorded just months before Kurt Cobain’s death, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged In New York went on to serve as an enduring epitaph for the Seattle band—despite all odds. The band clashed with MTV producers in the runup to the Nov. 18, 1993, performance; the setlist featured few Nirvana hits and was heavy on obscure covers; and the day before the show, Cobain threatened to walk, only to show up the next day in the throes of heroin withdrawal. San Jose Presents celebrates the 23rd anniversary Unplugged this weekend—gathering 16 local musicians to perform the album in its entirety at the new Forager Tasting Room and Eatery. (NV)

Radkey
Sat, 8pm, $8-$10
The Ritz, San Jose
Young, hungry and talented, the Radke brothers—Isaiah, Solomon and Dee—hail from St. Joseph, Mo., and have a muggy, muscle-car-infused sound to match their Southern heritage. Inspired by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Misfits, Led Zeppelin and Jack White, Radkey crank out white-knuckled garage rock anthems for a new generation of punk kids. Recently, the boys have been touring behind their debut LP, Dark Black Makeup, gaining fans at festivals like SXSW, Coachella and Afropunk, with their blistering odes to mashing on Nintendo controllers and roaming the burbs on their skateboards. (JT)

Calendar Girls
Sat, 8pm, $19-$42
City Lights Theater, San Jose
Queue up and brew a cuppa in preparation for City Lights Theater Company’s newest production—Calendar Girls. Based on the hit 2003 British comedy, which itself was based on a true story, Calendar Girls follows a group of senior Yorkshire women who after the death of one member’s husbands from Leukemia, find an unconventional and exhibitionist way to fundraise for Cancer Research—printing and selling nude calendars of themselves. The results are more humorous than salacious…and ultimately touching. Directed by Jeffrey Bracco, City Lights Production of Calendar Girls premieres Saturday, Nov. 19. (TM)

Sandow Birk & Lori Wood
Tue, 7pm, $10
Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga
Artists have different ways of expressing themselves—from painting to sculpting to the creation of interactive pieces. Making centuries-old books come to life is his Sandow Birk’s forte. Birk made a name for himself by dedicating five years of his life to illustrating and translating Dante’s Divine Comedy into a contemporary vernacular—with the aim of giving the late-medieval text a 21st century appeal. Birk took nine years to do the same for The Qur’an. His recently released adaptation of Islam’s holy book reads like a modern-day illuminated manuscript. Birk will talk about his intentions and process with veteran art professional Lori Wood. (TJ)

For the past six years, Kayvon has been spinning cutting edge indie, electronic and alternative tunes on his KSCU program “The Modern Things.” With an emphasis on new music, it’s safe to say that Kayvon has his pulse on today’s musical landscape.

He also spins every year at the Limousines annual xxxmas Fuckfest show at the Blank Club, arriving this year on December 20, and 90s dance parties at the Willow Den. Here are his top album selections for 2013 (in alphabetical order by album title).

Haim – Days Are Gone (Columbia)
When I first heard of Haim in the Summer of 2012, I liked the remixes of their songs but was reluctant to the whole branding/image. I felt like it was another Lana Del Ray type corporate creation, but after seeing them at Treasure Island Music Festival a few months ago, I’m now a believer. Really talented trio, expect to see more of them.

Somewhere Between ego and anxiousness lies Kanye West, the self-appointed rock star of modern hip-hop. His Yeezus Tour, stopping at San Jose’s SAP Center on Oct. 22, is his first solo tour in five years, and in a way this feels like the most appropriate time for him to revisit his favorite subject: himself.

For the last few years, Kanye has somehow become his own worst enemy. His energy and enthusiasm for both his industry and the general idea of creativity have been mistaken as the ramblings of a megalomaniac, bent on selling his own genius in a bid for attention, instead of what it is: a challenge to break the framework of what a “rapper” can and cannot do.

Kanye’s latest album, Yeezus, released with little advance promotion and minimalist album artwork is, in many ways, his most uniquely personal in the way that it is infused with a sense of urgency.

The energy that infuses so much of Yeezus is one of claustrophobia. The production is minimalist and foreboding; more bent on atmosphere and textures than it is hyped-up soul samples and anthemic choruses. As an artist, West’s work is invariably tied to his own identity, but now it’s less about how he sees himself and suddenly more about his perception of what his identity is to listeners.

With the racially potent singles “Black Skinhead” and “New Slaves,” and the more symbolic sampling of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” in “Blood on the Leaves,” the pendulum sways away from luxury rap on Yeezus and highlights the adversity (some self-imposed, other born deep into the fabric of the culture) that Kanye faces in his quest to be more than just a rapper and cross over into fashion and other creative disciplines.

What also makes West compelling is that he simultaneously subverts and encapsulates our cantankerous relationship with the current idea of celebrity. He sometimes resists it—in a very physical way with recent paparazzi encounters—but he must know deep inside that the simple act of resistance is fodder for the very industry he laments. So much of the third wave of his narrative is informed by an abstract understanding of celebrity (fathering a child with Kim Kardashian borders on performance art), yet it seems what he really desires is the ability to utilize the privilege for something more.

So why won’t anyone take him seriously? When Kanye West, who is largely to thank for shifting rap culture’s post-gangsta self-boasting into something more vulnerable and introspective, says that he wants to tackle other creative challenges with the same sense of command and craft that he has music production, why is it met with something worse than criticism—closer to a snickering apathy?

So much of West’s struggle seems rooted in the most invisible of racial tensions in pop culture—one that allows an African American man to become a tastemaker and filthy rich, yet offers him limited vertical mobility when it comes to exploring other creative ventures.

Consider Justin Timberlake, who is free to shuttle between mediums and industries, or Tom Ford, who expanded beyond the fashion world and became an Academy Award-nominated director. West is largely reacting to what is, in fact, gold-plated shackles—a sense that his role as an artist has already been defined. As West put it in a recent interview: His Truman Show boat has hit the painting.

So much of what West has become known for is his general outrage. His comments, often dubbed “rants” by even his most ardent of supporters, aren’t always the most articulate responses to the ailments of present-day celebrity. His ramblings—lately focused most on his inability to break into the fashion industry despite hip-hop’s overwhelming influence on style —have prompted many to pin West’s sense of self as far too inflated for his own good.

Maybe it is. Or maybe he’s just that good. Or maybe it’s not actually about any of that. West’s ego is without a doubt more present than ever (“Jesus Walks” marks the beginning of West as we know him; the self-praising of “I Am a God” on Yeezus catches him at a remarkably different end of the same spectrum), but there is a sense that his ego is now being used more as evidence in his fight for “more” than it is an actual impulse to project his mythology back onto us.

His wealth and his power used to be enough; now, it’s more about reaching for a more fully defined sphere of being—a space in which he isn’t restricted by anything but the limits of his own impulses.

Kanye West performs with Kendrick Lamar at SAP Center on Oct. 22. More Info.

Just a few days after Jay Z announced a tour stop at SAP Center, Kanye West is following suit with his own solo show in San Jose.

West will perform Oct. 22 at SAP Center in San Jose and Oct. 30 in Oakland with Kendrick Lamar. Tickets go on sale Sept. 13 at noon. Yeezus was West’s sixth album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, selling 21 million copies tody at 66 million digital tracks.

OCTOBER

19 Seattle, WA Key Arena

20 Vancouver, B.C. Pepsi Live at Rogers Arena

22 San Jose, CA SAP Center

23 Oakland, CA Oracle Arena

25 Las Vegas, NV MGM Grand Garden Arena

26 Los Angeles, CA STAPLES Center

NOVEMBER

1 Salt Lake City, UT EnergySolutions Arena

3 Denver, CO Pepsi Center

5 Minneapolis, MN Target Center

7 Chicago, IL United Center

10 Detroit, MI Palace of Auburn Hills

12 Toronto, Ont. Air Canada Centre

14 Montreal, Que. Bell Centre

16 Philadelphia, PA Wells Fargo Center

17 Boston, MA TD Garden

19 Brooklyn, NY Barclays Center

21 Washington, DC Verizon Center

23 New York, NY Madison Square Garden

29 Miami, FL AmericanAirlines Arena

30 Tampa, FL Tampa Bay Times Forum

DECEMBER

1 Atlanta, GA Philips Arena

6 Dallas, TX American Airlines Center

7 Houston, TX Toyota Center

While Spin Master J—the nom de scratch for 22-year-old South Bay DJ Jerry Huizar—was in Fahrenheit’s Wheels of Steel battle last year, he told me he saw his sets as 20 minutes to tell the audience a story.

He came in third in that DJ battle, after having won Beezo up in San Francisco the year before. But it turns out that storytelling philosophy might be even more important to his turntable career than his technical skills.

Huizar won the first Music Palooza last year at Evergreen Valley College, where he goes to school, doing a short set centered around the theme of what makes a good DJ.

“This year, I wanted to do something more over the top,” he says. So last month at the second Music Palooza, he did a six-minute piece about his last semester at Evergreen Valley. He has transferred to San Francisco State, where he’ll start in the fall, after moving north this summer. In some ways, his set in April was as much a farewell to DJing in the South Bay as it was to his school. Using everything from LMFAO and Kid Cuti bits to Simpsons and Family Guy samples, along with some Kanye, Sam Cooke and Trey Songz, it’s a sound collage, with not just a few story elements, but an actual plot.

Huizar says he got inspired to take the narrative to the next level when he saw what DJs were doing at the Threestyle competition in SF.

“A lot of DJs were doing so many tracks and tricks, I thought if you could slow it down to tell a story, that would be amazing,” he says.

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. After Huizar posted a video of the performance to YouTube, it was reposted by DJ Inbetween. That’s apparently how legendary Bay Area DJ Jazzy Jim, best known for his long stint on Wild 94.9, apparently found it. He, too, reposted it, which suddenly gave it a level of fame Huizar hadn’t been expecting.

“It got around on Facebook,” he says.

He realizes most people won’t be used to seeing a DJ do this kind of project, but he figures that just makes him stand out a little more in the crowded world of turntablism.

“There’s tons of DJs in the world,” he says. “But there’s only a handful who get famous.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

So it turned out that crazy rumor about Kanye West is true. No, not the one about Kim Kardashian, but the even more unbelievable one that the guy has actually been having fun on this tour with Jay-Z. In fact, he was full-on clowning at their HP Pavilion show last night, playing off his why-so-serious reputation with a funny running gag that had him stopping and re-starting “All of the Lights” over and over because he just wasn’t quite getting enough light, or he had to give the white people in the audience permission to sing the word “nigga.” On that last one, he lost his deadpan, trying and failing to hide a smile. It was exactly the kind of human moment that Jay-Z seems to inspire in him.

Of course, 30 seconds later Yeezy was ripping into maybe his most intense performance of the night. It was hard to imagine how “All of the Lights” could be improved live, but he traded the studio polish for raw power, crashing through a crescendo of noise in the chorus that was sheer sonic lightning.

If anything rivaled it, it was his rendition of “Runaway,” the stunning ballad of remorse from last year’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. (Is it any secret that Kanye’s a better singer than he is a rapper?) In a show packed with spectacle—and enough lasers to supply a Star Wars trilogy—the set-up was as simple and elegant as the song itself: West atop an elevated, cube-shaped stage lit solid red.

Jay-Z had his moments, too. From the first time that Kanye stepped away from the stage and Hove launched into “Where I’m From” and “Nigga What, Nigga Who,” his flow was amazing as he spit lines on top of each other, reminding everyone why he’s one of the best rappers of all time for pure delivery. “Empire State of Mind” and “Izzo” were show-stoppers, as well.

Of course, these were all solo numbers, which they traded off throughout the show. Wasn’t the point of this tour to take their collaboration on Watch the Throne to the stage? Yeah, but it just didn’t play out that way. They opened with several songs from the record, starting with “H.A.M,” then “Who Gon Stop Me,” “Otis” and “Welcome to the Jungle.” But when mixed with their solo material, the stuff from Watch the Throne simply couldn’t hold up. There were some odd set choices too—why was “Lift Off” (clearly a party-starting tune) buried near the end of the set? “No Church in the Wild” seemed to come too late, too. On the album, it’s practically their mission statement, but by the time they got around to it at the show, it seemed like filler. “Niggas in Paris” was a predictable choice for the closing minutes, but even that album centerpiece seemed anti-climatic after the mind-blowing performances of better songs.

The pair’s best moment together was definitely “Monster,” from Kanye’s last album. But it was also fun to see them perform on each other’s hits, which they did on “99 Problems” and “Gold Digger,” including a goofy transition between the two that captured what’s best about their chemistry. They respect each other, yeah, but they also like each other, entertain each other, and challenge each other. Even if their best moments were solo, I have a feeling there’s something about being in this together that pushed them to the heights they reached as performers last night.

— Steve Palopoli

One of the biggest rap shows of the year lands in San Jose tonight with the latest tour stop for The Throne, a.k.a. Jay Z and Kanye West.

With the cheapest tickets hovering around $70, the “luxury rap” duo shouldn’t have a problem financing more Bentleys, designer clothes and exotic trips.

What can we expect? A steady stream of hits from both rappers’ catalogs, an assortment tracks from their joint album released last summer and a performance of their latest single “N*ggas in Paris” at least seven times. Our friends at Idolator provide more insight with a list of Top 5 Moments from the first Staple Center show on Monday.

Count on hearing their first single “Otis” only once.