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 with one another.

With influences including 2Pac, J. Cole, Mac Dre and Meek Mill, Lavish recently released a video for his song, “San Jose,” which honors the city he calls home.

Check it out here:

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, Opio is announcing he isn’t content with retreading the same old path. The record finds him teaming with progressive producer, Free the Robots, to blend his vintage flow with vanguarding beats.

“There is just an infinite amount of cool shit going on,” Opio says. “But I’m trying to go beyond that, beyond the plethora of artists, and step outside of anything that anyone is doing. I’m trying to be futuristic and retro.”

The album’s title comes from a species of atmosphere-brushing sequoia. It means “always flourishing.” These woodland giants surrounded the studio in the gut of the NorCal mountains where Opio’s silky bars blended with Free the Robot’s astral synths, pregnant 808s and slinking snares. The duo sought the woodsy air for the monastic clarity it provides.

“It was just a way for us to decompress and really get re-energized and into that creative spiritual space,” he says. “Watching the waves roll in, or being in the middle of the forest or right next to the river, that shit has always been something that I’ve grown up with and been around. But the canvas doesn’t reflect that. It’s not like I’m saying, ‘Yo check out the ill redwood tree.’”

Opio first heard hip-hop in kindergarten. In 5th grade, he started rapping at local battles of the bands, eating pizza backstage with musicians twice his age. In Oakland, a hub for the burgeoning genre, Opio spent Christmas money on studio time, but also DJ-ed, sprayed graffiti and joined in breakdancing circles with supportive elders.

“Everybody that I looked up to in my neighborhood was into hip-hop,” he says. “The culture itself had just this magnetic aura about it. It was also purely youth culture at that time. It was just for the kids. Your parents didn’t have any idea what the hell all this hippity-hoppity stuff was.”

In high school, the Souls of Mischief congealed. On the title single of their first album “93 ’til Infinity,” Tajai, Phesto, A-Plus and Opio trade verses. It’s like a million smiles laid over crackly boom-baps and early electro echoes. The sage teenage crew stretched the West Coast sound in new dimensions, forsaking the gangsta mojo of N.W.A., et al, and pioneering a pot-mellowed hippie vibe. They toured with De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, breaking ground for the experimental, subterranean West Coast scene.

“We were just being ourselves and articulating that naturally in our environment,” he says. “We had a very universal ear for the history of black music. We were really into Miles Davis, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, the list goes on and on. It was a combination of all those experiences that helped us create something original.”

Souls of Mischief is a subset of the broader Hiero crew—which also functions as a record label and is home to Del the Funky Homosapien, who joined the collective after chafing under the limited scope of his cousin Ice Cube’s production team. To Opio, group recordings magnify creativity as ideas ricochet from brain to brain, but the surplus of creativity can lead to a glut, which is why, he says, it’s nice to work solo.

“The vibes can be thick and it’s a good feeling,” he says. “But that means ideas that I have are not able to come into full view without everyone else’s approval. There’s just not enough time in the day to do everything that we might think of. So it’s good to step outside of that.”

Over his prolific career, Opio has burrowed into many niches within his genre. He can be silly like on Mark It Zero, a mixtape built from quips and soundtrack snippets from The Big Lebowski—or contemplative, like on the latest Souls of Mischief project, There is Only Now, a layered narrative that sprawls from a near-death experience. He peppers all his acrobatic stanzas with calm wokeness that never veers into sheeple-preaching.

“Music just has to sound good,” he says. “I’ve heard conscious music that sucks. I’m just being realistic. Shit could be fucked up all around you, but you still want to have fun. You can still enjoy yourself without being blind to what goes on in the world.”

Opio plays on Dec 16, 9pm for $10 at BackBar SoFa, 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

“It’s 2015. We gotta stay away from the negative shit,” the San Jose-based emcee and producer Cola says on a recent evening, as he plays with the bottle cap of the soda he is drinking.

The emerging rapper is referring to the recent Chris Brown shooting at local South Side club Fiesta, but he could just as easily be discussing his own philosophy as an artist. He says he’s dealt with too much negativity in his past; now his focus is solely on empowerment, positivity and self-love.

Just listen to “Reflections,” a highlight from the mixtape he dropped in October, No Such Thing. The release has been his most successful to date, earning nods from local heavyweights and placements on both Snoop Dogg’s GGN web show and the Dogfather’s chart Underground Heat. He plans to release two new music videos in the coming months.

A San Jose native, Cola grew up as Anthony Mastrocola on the city’s west side and attended Archbishop Mitty High School on a baseball scholarship. While he moved around a lot growing up—he jokes he’s become real efficient with packing—he never changed schools. He says he would often challenge his teachers and goof off in class, but managed to dodge any serious consequences thanks to his general likeability.

His stage name doesn’t come from an unhealthy love for carbonated drinks. It’s actually a contraction of his last name and was first used by his high school football coach. Since then, he says, “I’m literally Cola to everybody.”

50 Cent, Eminem and the Neptunes were the first names in his CD collection, but when his cousin introduced him to rock in middle school, his focus shifted to Nirvana, Sublime and Slayer. Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix remain lasting influences. Nirvana’s iconic smiley face is tattooed on his forearm.

His rock influence is still present in his work. The music video for “Mosh Pit” follows Cola as he is kidnapped by bikini-clad, masked women. The raucous song carries forth atop a high-energy beat, which samples Green Day’s infamous guitar riff from “Brain Stew.” Such nostalgic flips are a through-line on No Such Thing, which also features samples from Dirty Vegas’ hit “Days Go By,” Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” and Sister Nancy’s dancehall classic “Bam Bam.”

After his deep excursion into rock, Cola veered back to hip-hop his freshman year in high school when he was introduced to Hieroglyphics and Living Legends. As much as he enjoyed 50 Cent, he gravitated to these underground legends because he found them more relatable. The Bay Area’s hyphy movement, best known for its late poster boy Mac Dre, also had a large impact.

While his musical focus was initially on rapping and recording as much as possible, Cola admits that his approach is now more refined. “I’m trying to perfect my songwriting,” he says, and nowhere is he more proud of his renewed process than on album cut “Tomorrow,” featuring Rey Resurreccion.

In his first verse, he weighs the pros and cons of settling down, compared with following a hard life to an untimely demise like a number of notable rock stars. After Rey’s verse, Cola’s visions of future success collide with his current stagnation and frustration, leading him to struggle with the notion that “supposedly I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

“It was my breakthrough as far as writing a conceptual song with a bridge and variations. My first verse was the realest, most natural one I’ve ever written,” he adds.

Local heavy hitter Dirtbag Dan recently stepped in as a mentor after hearing No Such Thing while on tour. Such support can still feel a bit surreal for the 24-year-old. He now has his own studio but had to move clothes out of his friend’s closet to record his verses in the not-so-distant past.

“It’s amazing because a year ago, we were standing around in parking lots outside of [Silicon Valley] De-Bug because we had nowhere to go. We couldn’t go to anyone’s house because everyone’s situation was fucked up. There was a lot of waiting around,” he says.

The positivity in his recent output stems from contemporaries like Bay Area hip-hop collective HBK Gang (home to Iamsu! and Sage the Gemini). He’s also indebted to Lil B the Based God, whose positive “based” philosophy has found mainstream recognition, most notably in Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-nominated hit “i.”

Cola’s rampant optimism is a recent transition for someone who admits he once suffered from depression and self-consciousness. At its worst, those feelings led to thoughts and attempts of suicide.

Back then, he recalls earnestly wishing he could’ve been born as one of his better-liked classmates. These days, however, he is clearly much more comfortable in his own skin. It’s a feeling he wants to help others discover.

“As soon as you can stop worrying about failure, and as soon as you can erase the fears of not being good enough,” he says, “then you’re free to do anything.

Much like the Aesop of antiquity, it isn’t particularly easy to get a bead on Aesop, the emcee of the Bay Area and Los Angeles hip-hop crew, Living Legends. A Wikipedia search of the Aesop of Aesop’s Fables will inform you that scholars are undecided as to whether Aesop ever really existed or if folk tales were simply attributed to him. Similarly, Google searches for Aesop of the Living Legends crew turn up websites that haven’t been updated for years and YouTube clips from the late aughts.

This is due to many factors. First and foremost, any online query featuring the words “Aesop” and “hip-hop” will return an avalanche of hits pertaining to Aesop Rock, a similarly named rapper with a larger online footprint and a free-associative, tongue-twisting style quite different from that of the Aesop in question.

Second, for the past few years the man known to his close friends and family as Derrick McElroy has been on a bit of a hiatus from making music. Reached by phone from his current home in his native Fresno, he says he made the conscious decision to retreat from hip-hop a few years back to focus on his family and take up some lower-profile work as a promoter and sound engineer.

Beyond that, McElroy says that he isn’t a very easy person to get a hold of. “If you hadn’t caught me today, you might not have gotten this interview,” he says with a chuckle. It’s easy enough to believe. Over the course of the interview, the multi-instrumentalist, producer and lyricist frequently walks away from the phone—his voice growing faint as he walks across the room to tend to some other more-pressing business than talking to a local paper. (He later confesses that he is making a sandwich.)

“I’ve always been about doing things underground,” McElroy says, explaining that he’s never had a publicist, that he doesn’t often give interviews except informal ones to fans after shows, and that he has always booked his own tours—including his forthcoming tour of the West Coast, which includes a stop at the Back Bar SoFA this Wednesday, Oct. 22.

McElroy, who sometimes goes as Black Aesop or Aesop’s Fables, says he is preparing to come out of hibernation—both to push his recently released a mixtape, Seeds of Hip Hop, which McElroy made with DJ Hecktik and features remixed versions of some of the duo’s favorite hip-hop classics from the ’80s and ’90s, overdubbed with new verses and slightly modified choruses.

The spooky boom-bap beat of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit,” becomes “LL Crew Ain’t Nuthin to Fux Wit!!!,” with Black Aesop spitting verses from his catalog in place of the verses from RZA, Inspectah Deck and Method Man. The sparse creeping electric piano of Nas’ “One Love” becomes “Love One.”

“It was a really weird thing I did,” McElroy says of the Seeds of Hip Hop project. “It was using beats from the past, in the future, but with lyrics from the past.”

Weird or not, it would seem that making the mixtape helped to inspire the emcee—reminding him of why he got into rapping in the first place. McElroy had played in bands and written poetry all before he finally decided to pursue hip-hop full time. Asked why he chose that path, he says it’s hard to say, though he recalls being moved by the likes of KRS-One.

“Listening to a lot of KRS one made me want to be good at rapping,” he recalls, adding that he was inspired by many rap groups from that era. “Old school hip-hop—real rappers from the ’80s and the ’90s, inspired me to be the real intelligent rapper that I am.”

Now, McElroy says he is in the midst of putting together what he hopes will be the best album he’s ever made. “For the last couple years that’s what I’ve been doing—making this magnum opus,” he says. “This album won’t be released until it’s perfect.”

Until then McElroy says he is looking forward to getting back on the road and touring—noting that he is especially excited to be playing at Back Bar SoFA, the former space that housed the Cactus Club, which as he recalls was the first place Living Legends ever performed.

“San Jose is where I started my career—was the first time I played with real sound, a real stage, real lights, real artists,” he says. “It’s a big deal anytime I walk into that place. The memories are crazy.”

Aesop is performing at Back Bar SoFA on Oct. 22 at 9pm. More info.

Kung Fu Vampire fans have come to expect the unexpected. He has built a cult following for his theatrical shows, which have included an eight-piece live rap band with drums, cellos, violins and back-up singers. Then, of course, there’s Kung Fu Vampire himself—a bald, pale-white vampire with fangs, goatee, white contact lenses and a lavish emperor’s kimono draped over his body—spitting verses about life, love, sex and death better than many traditional rappers.

Fans may be shocked, however, by what Kung Fu Vampire is up to now, as his current 48-city tour finishes with a flourish at the Blank Club on Dec. 8. This time around, KFV is playing just hard-hitting, no-frills hip-hop—no makeup, no kimono, and only bass player Jeremy Pollett and drummer Chris Paston to back him up.

“Some of these shows, I’ll just straight rock in a fedora and a T-shirt—and people love it,” Kung Fu Vampire says. “They’ve all seen that other guy. They’ve seen that other image. I want people to be blown away by the music.”

Despite doing something so different, Kung Fu Vampire has earned a lot of praise from his fellow San Jose rappers.

“I have a lot of respect for Kung Fu Vampire because as long as I’ve been making and performing music in the South Bay, he has been a driving force, always pushing and creating his vision where others would have given up or changed styles to fit the newest trend,” says Benny Medik from local hip-hop group Language Arts Crew.

It’s been 12 years since he first emerged as Kung Fu Vampire. During that time he has worked around the clock, booking tours, promoting himself, writing music and pressing on even when it didn’t seem like he was getting anywhere. Those who have worked with him know that he is an ambitious, determined performer.

Kung Fu Vampire really started to see an increase in fans over the past three years after he went full throttle with a near constant touring schedule, scoring opening slots for acts like Insane Clown Posse, Twiztid and Tech N9ne. While these groups have come to love and embrace him, he hasn’t signed to any of their well-established labels. Instead he continues to release music on his own label, Mad Insanity Records, which he shares with horrorcore rapper Mars.

In 1990, LA Times reporter Robert Hilburn said this of rap music: “It was ten years ago that the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ became the first rap single to enter the national top 20. Who ever figured then that the music would even be around in 1990, much less produce attractions that would command as much pop attention as Public Enemy and N.W.A?”

This was back in the golden age of hip hop, when artists were still reinventing the genre with ever new record that was being released. Yet, despite the groundbreaking influence “Rapper’s Delight” had, it was still viewed as a disco-inspired novelty record. Now over thirty years since its release, the significance of that song has grown more apparent. The Sugarhill Gang hadn’t just made a silly song, they’d figured out how to craft pop music out of this budding street art. One year later, Kurtis Blow would top them by releasing, “The Breaks” the first hip hop song to sell a half million records. He would also become the first rapper to sign to a major label. This was only the beginning of rap’s close relationship to pop and mainstream music.

Doug E Fresh’s legacy is a little more obscure. He helped to popularize beatboxing, even earning the name “The Human Beat Box.” But while beatboxing didn’t stand the test of time, it was an essential part of the early language that formed rap while still in its infancy, just like rapping a capella on street corners and spitting verses over funk albums at block parties.

Other artists emerged in the late 80s and early 90s that helped shape rap more into the slick pop music it is now, as well as the loose, artistic bare bones underground art other rappers would continue to refine. Regardless, rap was never as raw and untarnished as it was when it was still in the hands of the forefathers.

Oddly, Sugarhill Gang founding members Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright and Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien will not be performing this Friday as part of the Sugarhill Gang. According to recent the recent documentary, “I Want My Name Back,” the duo lost legal rights to the band name and instead tour as “Rapper’s Delight.” Silvia and Joe Robinson, owners of their former label, Sugar Hill Records, currently own the rights to the name and have a different group of guys performing in their place.

The Sugarhill Gang (with Robinson, not Master Gee and Wonder Mike) play the Mountain Winery on September 14th at 7:30pm. Tickets are $35-$55.

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.

Photos by Metro photographer Jennifer Anderson.

RZA

In February, unknown San Jose rapper Antwon released the video for his song “Helicopter,” which quickly became the subject of music blogs all over the internet, most notably spin.com. It’s now creeping up on 80,000 views and counting.

What made “Helicopter” an Internet sensation was how seamlessly the director mashed together scenes from the Steve McQueen 1960s car chase flick Bullitt with footage of Antwon and his crew walking around those same San Franciscan streets.

But the real gem in the video is the song itself. It’s a unique hybrid of party-rap, stoner-rap, emo-rap and nerd-rap, without actually falling into any one of these pre-existing rap genres.

“A lot of people will tell me, ‘oh you’re an Internet rapper.’ My stuff got big on the Internet because I couldn’t get it big anywhere else,” Antwon says.

In fact, the majority of music blogs that wrote about Helicopter were not rap-oriented. Antwon has yet to get much interest from the hip-hop community.
“Rap music has its own media, like The Source or XXL, but a lot of rappers don’t fit into that mold. It’s easier for me to get into Fader and stuff like that. My audience isn’t a really strong hip-hop audience. They are people that listen to a lot of different stuff,” Antwon says.

The music for “Helicopter” is actually an instrumental song called “Helicopter Does Not Exist,” which was produced by Walsh, for his own 2010 EP, Smoke Weed About It. It’s a funky, dissonant electronic track with an authentic retro vibe that could easily pass for a cool soundtrack to a ’70s action flick that never existed. Antwon contacted Walsh and asked if he could rap over it for his mixtape Fantasy Beds. Walsh told him yes.

K.Flay, also known as former Stanford student Kristine Flaherty, returned to her Bay Area roots Saturday at Live105’s BFD 2012, pirate-themed extravaganza headlined by Jane’s Addiction, Silversun Pickups and Garbage the Shoreline Amphitheatre.

Flaherty found her hip-hop muse as an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Since then, she’s created a reputation as unique as her musical tastes. Flaherty’s show translates well with fans of both hip-hop and rock since her music, while rooted in hip-hop, often moves into other genres.

At the Subsonic Stage, one of three side stages at Shoreline, she switched between rapping, live mixing and sampling and pounding on a drum alongside her drummer.

In conversation, she carries a professional, scholarly demeanor as she riffs on everything from her new-found interest for Pantera and Metric to her studies on The Farm in Palo Alto.

“I try to give everything a chance to understand why it has been successful,” Flaherty says.

Growing up, Flaherty was surrounded by a variety of music. First from listening to her father’s classical records to repeating Liz Phair albums alongside other strong female leads in music during her teenage age. Though her strength is hip-hop, that until recently was almost exclusively male-dominated, many of Flaherty’s musical roots originate from strong female leads. Most recently, Metric’s “Youth Without Youth” caught her ear.

“The thing that I like about Metric is that they are pushing boundaries,” Flaherty says. “I like that they are trying to do some things electronically—there’s a new wave feel to the track. It’s a little bit of a throwback.”

Flaherty first arrived to the Bay Area from the suburbs of Chicago as a dual major in Sociology and Psychology at Stanford University.

“I’ve always been interested in domains that have both a very technical side and a little bit more of a philosophical side,” Flaherty says of the two studies, which include both technical statistics and human interaction theory. “I think I always liked that dichotomy, which is probably why I like music, too. I like the technical parts and also being a weirdo on stage.”

Flaherty dabbles in a variety of genres and can hold down a conversation but found that her true strength lay in hip-hop because it lent her the best structure and freedom to write songs that expressed her personality.

“The ability to really manipulate words and to write something as if it was a puzzle was really cool to me about rapping,” she says. “There’s a lot of opportunity for wordplay, rhythm and experimentation.”

While Flaherty continues to expand her career into new areas with a U.S. tour and festival stops, including Boonaroo in Tennesse thise weekend, she advises to all who are just starting out in music to just learn as much as possible.

“The more you know, the more you empower yourself to make things happen when other people don’t necessarily believe in it,” she says.

More information about k.flay, along with a free download of her most recent E.P., Eyes Shut, can be found below at her official website. http://www.kflay.com/

More photos from BFD.