The summer festival season is great for catching legacy acts and buzzy bands enjoying their moment of critical acclaim, but festivals are just a small part of the yearly musical cycle. Much of the lifeblood of music takes place outside of festival—in clubs, bars, DIY venues and occasionally even the SAP Center. This fall, a number of this generation’s most exciting musicians come through the South Bay, most of whom are touring behind new albums. From Spanish punk to Barbie Dreams, this is the best live music happening in the South Bay this fall.

Wild Animals
Sept 5
Subrosa, Santa Cruz
This May, Spanish indie punks Wild Animals released their second album on SoCal label Lauren Records. Full of melodic bangers, The Hoax draws from a wellspring of tried-and-true ’90s influences like Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr. and Dillinger Four, as well as more current indie rock acts like Swearin’ and Katie Ellen. On their first-ever American tour, the Madrid band stops by Subrosa in Santa Cruz. On a good day the small anarchist bookstore and community space fits about 50 people, making it the perfect place to catch the kinetic punk band while they’re on top of their game.

Shakira
Sept 6
SAP Center, San Jose
In an age when Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders have all held positions of authority, it’s comforting to know that at least hips don’t lie. Shakira, she of throaty vocals and diminutive height, brings this eternal truth to the SAP Center this September in all its slinky glory. El Dorado, her 2017 album, may have been under-promoted in the mainstream, but it’s chock-full of classically Shakiran material like the dubby reggaeton of “Clandestino,” and the club-ready “Chatanje,” songs sure to get the crowd going in San Jose.

Tinashe
Sept 8
Pure Nightclub, Sunnyvale
With a voice somewhere between Aaliyah and Rihanna, Tinashe is a pop superstar in the making. She may not be a household name in America yet, but in plenty of places around the globe the former child star is already a major success, placing high on the charts with her trap-pop hit “No Drama” (featuring Offset) and club-ready sizzler “Me So Bad,” both of which are on this May’s Joyride. And with dance moves as good as her voice, club-goers at Pure are in for a great performance by an artist about to break.

Nothing & Culture Abuse
Sept 18
The Ritz
If heavy shoegaze is a thing (and based on the amount of bands making it, it is), Nothing is near the center of the movement. This month’s Dance on the Blacktop is the third album by the bad-dreamy Philadelphia post-hardcore band, one that continues their tradition of mixing swirling reverb with lyrics about the disgusting banality of bodily existence. Meanwhile, the Bay Area’s own Culture Abuse make impassioned pop played with the vitality of the punk bands they love, and are one of the best bands to emerge from the gentrified mess of modern San Francisco.

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Tour
Sept 20
Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View
It’s hard to imagine the last 20 years of music without the era-defining The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Winning five Grammy awards the year it was released, the first solo album by the ex-Fugees singer laid the groundwork for pan-African American albums like Kamasi Washington’s The Epic and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, as well as the neo-soul movement of Amy Winehouse and the Dap-Kings. It’s a modern classic, and the reason why Ms. Hill remains one of the most respected and feared musicians on Earth.

Kneebody
Sept 21
Art Boutiki, San Jose
This one is not to miss. Kneebody is one of the best young jazz groups today. Last year’s Antihero is a record packed with incredible performances, weird compositional choices and, most importantly, great songs. All the songs are good. The groove on “Uprising” could kill a man. Kneebody is the kind of group that pays homage to the greats not by copying them, but by stretching the genre’s boundaries like they did. Getting this kind of talent in a room like Art Boutiki makes for one of the best shows of the fall.

Parquet Courts
Sept 28
The Ritz, San Jose
This year Parquet Courts released a song about collective action that’s named after a technique from the 1974 World Cup and ends with the lyric: “Fuck Tom Brady.” It’s good. The album opener for this year’s Wide Awaaaaake!, “Total Football” is pure nervous energy. Lyrically, it plays out like Marxist poetry, drawing a line that connect Hermann Hesse, the Beatles and the Black Panthers in a struggle against apathy. This is the first time New York band will play San Jose, a welcome sign for those anxious to see more relevant up-and-coming touring acts come through the city.

Childish Gambino
Oct 2
SAP Center, San Jose
Childish Gambino’s 2016 album Awaken, My Love! may have spawned the massive hit “Redbone,” but it proved to only be the beginning of a shift for the musician, one that culminated in his massive 2018 banger “This is America.” Like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Gambino’s (a.k.a. Donald Glover’s) recent works have made a conscious effort to fuse all elements of the African-American experience, creating something that is both pop and a cultural document. Not bad for a project that started with a Wu-Tang name generator.

Conor Oberst
Oct 5
Cocoanut Grove Ballroom, Santa Cruz
It wasn’t so long ago that magazines were calling Conor Oberst the next Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, his voice is instantly recognizable, and like Dylan, he takes elements of folk music and weaves emotional journeys into their familiar chord progressions. After more than two decades in music, he’s been a part of indie rock, emo, punk, Americana and just about every diagonal that crosses and bisects them. With him in Santa Cruz is his backing band, the Mystic Valley Band, as well Phoebe Bridgers, a musician whose work is exciting people the way a young Conor Oberst once did.

Mac Miller & Thundercat
Oct 30
City National Civic, San Jose
Somehow, despite having his debut album hit No. 1 on the Billboard top 200s with no major distribution behind it, Mac Miller has remained something of an underdog. This year’s Swimmer is full of poolside pop that came just in time for the end of summer. But more importantly, Thundercat is opening the show. Thundercat, the low-end wizard who dresses like Ash Ketchum on acid, is one of the most unique voices in instrumental music today, playing bass in way that hardly sounds like an instrument at all. Don’t sleep on the chance to see either in a rare San Jose performance.  

Nicki Minaj & Future
Nov 16
SAP Center
It’s only been a couple of weeks since Nicki Minaj released Queen, but it’s already spawned thinkpieces about her witchy laugh, freestyles about fucking Stephen Colbert, and one weird piece from Forbes of all places claiming that the album is “hypocritical” (I guess fawning over billionaires’ yachts isn’t paying the bills). With her at the SAP Center is Future, the man whose “Mask Off” made flute the hottest instrument in hip-hop. Like Minaj, Future is saying he’ll have a new album out in time for the tour. Fingers crossed that the clarinet gets a prominent feature this time.

Nothing creates the right mood for Halloween like a spooky song, but the traditional horror hit parade can start to grate after the 4,000th time. For those who have had it with “Thriller” and (god forbid) “Monster Mash,” we’ve put together a fresh list of Halloween-themed jams.

Halloween—Misfits: Just about any Misfits song will do, but as Glenn Danzig’s definitive artistic statement on the subject, this one earned its name. Its under-two-minute gutter-punk assault is so bruising it takes several listens just to get a handle on the lyrics—but as usual, the wait is rewarded.

Monster—Kanye West featuring Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj: One of the best songs on Kanye’s masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “Monster” is the American Psycho of music. The song messes with a different metaphor, comparing murder, mayhem and other assorted horrors to the music biz (rather than Wall Street), but the basic ideas have a lot in common. The controversial video really drives the point home, and if you ever wondered what it would look like if one of Nicki Minaj’s personas attacked another one, it’s a must see.

Devil Town—Daniel Johnston: From the reigning king of outsider music comes one of the most emotional and striking monster songs of all time. In under a minute, Johnston paints a vivid portrait of every goth’s dream hometown.

Zombie—E-40 featuring Tech N9ne, Brotha Lynch & Kung Fu Vampire: With a catchy hook (“if you’re a zombie, monster, ghoul or fiend”) courtesy of San Jose rapper Kung Fu Vampire, E-40 teams with Brotha Lynch—a horrorcore rapper longer before the word existed—and Tech N9ne to spin morbid rhymes for the perfect zombie apocalypse soundtrack.

I Am a Vampire—Future Bible Heroes: If “I Am a Vampire” had been written in the ’80s, it would have been an alternative dance-club favorite. The song takes the perspective of the eternally young, chic vampire. Sure, you have to feed off of people and avoid the sunlight, but that’s a small price to pay for an eternity of being fabulous.

Gangnam Style—Psy: OK, we’re sort of joking, but everyone’s going to be doing the dance on Halloween this year and there will be more than a few bar-hoping Psy look-alikes. You might want to learn it. It’s not hard.

Superstition—The Kills: From the moment the guitar kicks in on the Kills’ “Superstition,” it creates a sort of vague foreboding anxiety that the best horror movies conjure up in the first 20 minutes—before anything bad has happened yet. There is just something about the minimalist, dissonant sounds this duo conjures up that is just creepy. That compounded with a repetitive song about superstition, creates a scary Halloween tune, where the beast that lurks in the shadows is fear.

What’s He Building in There?—Tom Waits: What is scarier than a creepy, reclusive next-door neighbor that’s receiving a lot of mysterious packages? Tom Waits channels the fun, spooky ambience of the Disney’s Haunted Mansion (the ride, not the movie), as he narrates a brief story of a suspicious man in the neighborhood.

Mind’s Playin’ Tricks on Me—Geto Boys: Not just one of the best rap songs ever, “Mind’s Playin’ Tricks on Me” is also maybe the best ghost story ever set to a beat. It weaves layers of guilt, violence and slipping sanity together to make you remember we don’t need paranormal activity to be haunted. The nerd-rock version by Atom & His Package is as awesomely fun as the original is creepy.

I Walked With a Zombie—Roky Erickson and the Aliens: Roky Erickson led the legendary psychedelic rock band 13th Floor Elevators in the ’60s, but got diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of the next decade in a mental institution. When he returned to music, the content of his songs changed significantly. Now he was singing about aliens, Satan and monsters, and doing so in an incredibly intense, emotional manner. While most of The Evil One is powerful, screaming acid rock, “I Walked With a zombie” is a somber ballad, and by far the saddest, most emotional song on the album.

The Man Comes Around—Johnny Cash: Now that this song has been used in a bunch of scary movies, TV shows and trailers (most notably the Dawn of the Dead remake), it’s been pretty much accepted as a modern horror classic of country music. Cash meant it as a serious hymn, and it almost makes religion cool. But isn’t it always like that with the Book of Revelations?

Bela Lugosi’s Dead—Bauhaus: The 2009 horror film The Collector was the second film (after the more famous Bowie vampire flick The Hunger) to use this song almost in its entirety. It’s maybe the quintessential Halloween song by now—the weird guitar effects and insane lyric delivery by Peter Murphy make it timeless.

That’s That—Groove Ghoulies: Lead singer Kepi Ghoulie is such a monster movie fanatic, that even on this 35-second love song, he can find no better words to express his feeling than compare it to his favorite Halloween monsters, giving us the immortal line “I need you like zombies need brains.”

What’s on your Halloween playlist? Email your song title with a short description to letters@metronews.com to be considered for our readers’ picks playlist.

FM station 94.9’s Wild Jam 2012 was set for this Thursday, May 10, and featured the most interesting line-up yet for the station’s sporadic HP Pavilion megaconcerts. Nicki Minaj, E-40, Gym Class Heroes, B.O.B., Dev and Neon Hitch were set to perform, with the headliners billed as “Nicki Minaj vs. E-40.” An intriguing tease, especially considering E-40’s collaboration with headliner Drake at the 2011 Wild Jam. But a tease is all it will ever be, now that this week’s Wild Jam has been cancelled. The question is: why?

When the cancellation was first announced last week, this didn’t seem like much of a story. Big shows like this can be shut down for a lot of reasons, and when 94.9 organizers pulled the plug, they said details would be forthcoming. Listeners speculated online about what the reason might be—slow ticket sales, first among them. And yet, the station’s crew has not only not announced further details since then, they seem to be actively avoiding the question. A call to 94.9 was met with the canned reply “Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Wild Jam has been cancelled.”

If those circumstances were indeed beyond the station’s control, what’s the harm in explaining them? One thing’s for sure: the questions isn’t going away. Listeners have only gotten more hostile on the topic, posting comments to the station’s Facebook page like: “So I’m wondering what is going on with Wild Jam? There is no further ‘update’ as promised…in fact any info about it at all is gone from the website. I am just wondering why it had to be cancelled. Seems like 94.9 should at least explain what happened.”

Another listener declared “Maybe instead of giving out drake tickets to new people you should give out drake tickets to the people that got screwed over for WILD JAM! Very disappointed in this station.” Yet another asked what, if anything, would be done to compensate those who had won tickets, and then accused the station of censoring comments on the topic: “And it’s weird how this post keeps removing itself.”

How this became a PR nightmare is difficult to understand. The station’s Wild Jams have never been regular events (there were two in 2008, none in 2009, two in 2010, and one last year), so rescheduling wouldn’t seem to be an issue. Some listeners seem to think that headliner Minaj pulled out, since she dropped the show from her list of tour dates, but since she could have done that after the show was cancelled, there’s no way to say for sure at this point. Minaj’s next shows are May 16 and 18 in Australia.

Is the Oakland-based rapper Kreayshawn an Internet conspiracy or an absurdist comment on the state of popular culture? With a penchant for warped beats, chirpy hooks, and colorful baubles that combine Harajuku with the hood, the 22-year-old born Natassia Zolot has confounded the same Internet that gave birth to her. She performs Saturday at Studio 8’s Anniversary Party.

The surrealist asexual swagger that she traffics in has drawn lame comparisons to Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, even Lady Gaga. She also shares the criticism that she’s being “weird for weirdness’s sake,” and if that’s not enough—alert the authorities—she’s white.

In the video for “Gucci Gucci,” a wonky, fiendish rebuttal to exhausted brand names and simple minds, Kreayshawn and her crew of delinquent white girls strut through West Hollywood, pointing accusingly and mouthing cuss words. Adorned in what can only be called ‘cartoon couture,’ Kreayshawn dazzles in a Minnie Mouse headband and a blinged-out Indian head hanging from a waist-length chain. Her waif in crime, ‘Lil Debbie,’ bops in the foreground wearing a jean jacket and thick, square glasses—prescription unlikely. It’s as if someone animated the entire line of Polly Pocket and fed them a steady diet of hallucinogens and rap music.

But it’s not her fashion sense, or senselessness, that’s got the world in a fix. Her rap sheet reads thusly: an accomplice, Vanessa “V-Nasty” Reece, liberally peppers sentences with” the N-word.” Nude photos of a supposedly underage Kreayshawn were leaked on the Internet, right after a very public and very comic spat with heavyset rap-don Rick Ross. Also did we mention she’s white?

The thing is: Kreayshawn isn’t embarking on a quest to’save hip hop. It’s not clear if that’s even her genre. Hyper-referential, flippant and a little darling, it’s ridiculous to watch as hip-hop purists launch a series of missives against what’s really just hyphy junior—unthinking sure, but fun, dammit, fun. Cindi Lauper fun.

Kreayshawn performs February 25 at Studio 8’s anniversary party. The party starts at 9pm.