Roger Springall awoke this past Saturday to a missed call and strange voicemail, logged at 2:49am, from an unknown number. He was alarmed. He’d already learned of the deadly warehouse party fire in Oakland, which killed 36 late Friday night. “I have a 25-year-old son who lives in Oakland,” Springall says. His son is fine, but echoes of that initial fear are still rattling around in Springall’s head. “I’m still kind of freaked out by that.”

Springall says he worries about the same sort of disaster occurring in the South Bay. The Oakland warehouse, known as the Ghost Ship, was not zoned for residential use. However, early reports suggest many individuals lived on the premises.

As the owner of the Caffe Frascatti coffee shop in San Jose’s SoFA District, he knows and employs local artists. This is the exact demographic one might expect to find at an underground warehouse party—like the one that was just getting started at the Ghost Ship when a fire broke out and quickly tore through the building. “They’re all the same kids that are around here,” he says, gesturing to his cafe and the street outside.

That’s why Springall is hosting an impromptu benefit concert this Saturday. At the show, which will feature a number of local musicians—including Kurt Porter and Leslie Victoria, Cado, Christian Vela, Bird and Willow, Chris Reed, and Claymoon—Springall will be asking for collections to pass along to those directly affected by the Ghost Ship fire. He will give all money collected to a relief fund set up by Dave Cortese, president of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

Frascatti regular Sara Cole rents a space at The Citadel, a local warehouse that has been converted to an artist workspace. Cole says she feels very safe at The Citadel and insists that she no longer knows of anyone living at the studio complex—though some have in the past.

Springall’s daughter, Caroline, says she’s known people who’ve lived at The Citadel—or other places like it—illegally. The building is only approved for use as a workspace and is not designed to be lived in, as it lacks the amenities that even a single-room occupancy hotel might have, like multiple bathrooms and showers. As long as rents remain as high as they are in the South Bay, people will live in places like The Citadel, she says. “Things are so expensive. I can totally see how a living situation like that would happen.”

Ghost Ship Benefit Concert
Dec 10, 8pm, Free
Caffe Frascatti, San Jose

G-Eazy paid his dues. In the last seven years, the Oakland rapper shotgunned 11 projects at the Internet, starred in mega-popular music videos and established himself as a social media somebody—all before putting ink to a contract. His Web-based rise epitomizes the way recording artists get big nowadays. His proponents paint him as a reverent student of hip-hop history and a genuine wordsmith, who paired undeniable charisma with a single-minded work ethic to achieve success.

There is, of course, another narrative. The one about how G-Eazy—just like Macklemore and Vanilla Ice before him, and just like Eric Clapton and Elvis Presley before them—is simply another white guy repackaging an originally black art form for a predominantly pasty crowd. Detractors dismiss him as a polished practitioner for white families to compromise on. He’s safe enough for mom, but edgy enough for junior. With his greased hair, clean chin and fitted cuts, G-Eazy (born Gerald Earl Gillum) is as tamely dangerous as a boy-band bad boy.

Then again, it’s 2015, and questioning a rapper’s authenticity based on his skin color feels a bit disingenuous. We’ve already wrung our hands over this. At the turn of the century, Dr. Dre cosigned Eminem’s dizzy lunacy and the pale savant became the highest-selling rapper ever. Kanye and Drake came from the middle class. And a couple years back, the President kicked off the annual White House Correspondent’s Dinner by walking in to DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win.”

Hip-hop has long been more popular than rock & roll. Middle-class white boys grow up listening to it. Some try their hand at making it. And a few get good at it. But if hip-hop has expanded to include artists like G-Eazy, the real question is how and where does he fit within the genre. On Dec. 4, he submits his second full-length album, When It’s Dark Out, for our collective consideration.

The 26 year-old’s second major label LP kicks off with “Random,” a Drake-lite banger with baroque chorus blasts, regal, plodding horns and gut-punching kick-snare combos. Then comes the single “Me, Myself and I,” which rides an undulating, super-slow-mo melody into a hard candy EDM hook before exhaling into sneering bars smacked over double-dutching drums. Both tracks blurt the album’s thesis: He’s been grinding hard, and now he’s going to celebrate by consuming a bunch of nice things that won’t end up making him happy.

The theme is entertaining at times. But ultimately, just like the fast women and hard substances that populate the record’s 17 tracks, it isn’t really satiating.

The record’s bright spots include “Some Kind of Drug”—a bouncy, smoldering bedroom ode to truly bomb sex—and “Don’t Let Me Go,” which features a robo kazoo, druggy existentialism and a gale-force hook by GRACE, a gal with the pipes of a two-story tall organ. “Sad Boy,” confronts his fame-related melancholy and wrangles with superficial disatisfaction, substance abuse and his strained relationship with his up-and-down mother.

“Everything Will Be Okay” marks the most personal turn. The third verse unspools a crushing yarn about his mom leaving his dad for a lesbian lover—a woman whom Gillum eventually discovers, blue and overdosed, on the bathroom floor. He tries and fails to revive her. This intricate trauma seems ripe for further spelunking, but it’s one of few descents into the deeper recesses of what makes G-Eazy, G-Eazy.

And here is the crux of When It’s Dark Out’s failings. The title promises a deep dive into a morose mind, but it’s the same surface-level struggle rap he’s always made. It’s like expertly performed scales—technically impressive, but not terribly revealing of the human being behind the noise.

For someone who has released hours of himself talking, I wish I had a better of idea who he is. Too often, he plants songs in already exhausted soil documenting… ..his grind, greed or misbegotten evenings with nameless women. And there’s plenty of postmodern… fun to be had with those moth-balling tropes, but he takes them too seriously—boxing himself into tired creative territory. He either needs to exponentialize the extravagant debauchery or unfurl deeper reflections that could only come from his angle. Lyrically, he just has to do something to cultivate an identity beyond handsome, hardworking, well-moneyed white guy—if he wants to be remembered. If he wants to be profitable, he’s doing just fine.

Race and class matter less than ever in questions of who can make hip-hop, but just because you’re allowed through the door, doesn’t mean you can take a seat. G-Eazy is an industrious student of the genre, who has yet to submit anything worthy of tenure. Instead, he’s taken what others have done, wrapped it in his palatable package and sold it to a generation of musically omnivorous hipsters attracted to his accessible, but infrequently challenging sound.

When you profit from an art without adding much to it, diehards will dismiss you. If you’re eating, you got to bring something to the table.

One idea: Clean-cut white guys have just started to rap. But clean-cut white guys have been biting black sounds for as long as there has been black music. Yet despite hip-hop’s subsistence on sampling, these artists have been left mostly alone. This is where G-Eazy can grow sonically. If he is going to dress up like Elvis, why not scramble up some of The King’s old standards—or Johnny Cash’s gospel, or perhaps some of the Rolling Stones’ Chuck Berry imitations—into new beats?

His breakout and, in my opinion, best single, “Runaround Sue,” did this by modernizing Italian-American Dion Dimucci’s do-wop—a style with black origins. Music feels hollow without roots in a deeper culture and G-Eazy’s place in hip-hop (reluctant though he may be to admit it) is as the latest extension of an ancient, rarely confronted American tradition of white men practicing black art. He could zag away from the current trap/autotune glut and make a novel, nostalgic turn that few other rappers can. If he taps into his cultural predecessors, G-Eazy could make an honest, singular statement, expand hip-hop’s sonic palette and embrace the obvious: he is an outsider in his own genre. He should investigate the noises that come out of the elephant in the room. By highlighting that what he’s doing has been done before, he can do something new.

G-Eazy: ‘When It’s Dark Out’ plays on Dec 4 at RCA Records

The Phenomenauts are not unlike The Justice League or The Avengers. This rocket-fueled collective of rockabilly punks have been featured in their own comic books, each member of the group has an alias, and they hold meetings at a home base, known as The Command Center.

And just like Batman—the vigilante, dark knight—or the oft-misunderstood Man of Steel, the Oakland-based band has been forced to bend the rules on occasion. But only when the powers that be are unable to see just what a powerful force for good they are missing out on.

Consider their origin story:

Formed in 2000, the Phenomenauts struggled to book gigs during their first couple of years on the scene—especially at bigger venues.

Undaunted, band leader Commander Angel Nova formulated a plan. The band set up their own clandestine stage outside the gates of the San Francisco stop of the 2002 Warped Tour. Not long after they began playing to the legions of punk rock fans filing into the festival, a security guard told them to get a move on. However, while loading their gear—in full “uniform”—into the group’s “space van,” another security guard kindly directed them to the official artist entrance.

“He assumed they were supposed to be there,” says AR7, the group’s guitar-playing and singing “robot.” Though he was not a part of the band at the time, AR7, like all inductees into the Phenomenauts, has become well versed in the group’s storied, 15-year history.

Once inside the perimeter, the band identified a place to play, adjacent to an empty stage and were promptly invited to take the stage by a friendly sound engineer, who informed them that the band scheduled to play in the upcoming time slot had cancelled.

“They sold every single item of merchandise they brought with them this day,” AR7 says, adding that on that day Nova decided that the following year, the group would attempt to sneak into as many stops on the Warped tour as they could.

In 2003, the group found it was easy enough to get into the Warped venues, AR7 says. And by deploying their culinary expertise—in the form of complimentary breakfast burritos for the Warped crew—the Phenomenauts forged powerful alliances. By the time Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman caught wind of their stunt, he was a fan. He invited them back in 2004 and even gave the band curatorial control over their very own “Space Station Stage.”

In the years following their storming of the Warped Tour, The Phenomenauts have gained a loyal following in the Bay Area and earned fans all over the world. AR7 contributes the band’s success to a refusal to conform.

“I think that all of us, we’re sort of tired of the idea of a band just going up in their regular clothes, playing some songs and not putting a lot of energy—or, for lack of a better word, pizazz—into their shows.”

A Phenomenauts show is nothing if not full of pizazz. Every member of the band wears a uniform reminiscent of those worn by enlisted personnel on the Starship Enterprise. Over the years, the group has introduced a number of so-called “Phenoma-gadgets” into their performances. There is AR7’s “Theramatic Helmerator,” a piece of headgear equipped with a wireless Theremin; and the “Streamerator,” a leaf-blower that unfurls rolled toilet. All of these homemade devices are an integral part of the show, according to AR7.

“It’s important to us, because we want to just blow the lid off of every place we play,” he says. “We want to give the most entertaining show—visually and aurally—that we can.”
The group brings that show to The Ritz this weekend. AR7 says they’ll be performing music from their 2014 full-length, Escape Velocity, and may even play one—or both—songs from their forthcoming 7-inch picture disc, “I’m With Neil” (a tribute to Neil DeGrasse Tyson) and “Every Day is Science Friday” (a paean to the NPR program of the same name).
“A lot of our fans are into science, comic books and science fiction,” AR7 explains. “They appreciate it.”

The Phenomenauts plays on Nov 28, 8pm, $10 at The Ritz, San Jose