There’s just something about putting a bunch of talented singers together with some top notch producers, dressing them up in sharp suits and letting the cameras roll. It worked with The Monkees, it worked with The Supremes, it worked with The Backstreet Boys and it’s surely working with Why Don’t We. Comprising five promising young singers from around the country, Why Don’t We first came together in 2016. After a requisite string of EPs and a Christmas album—natch—the boys dropped their full-length debut, 8 Letters, last summer. They come to SJSU this weekend.

Why Don’t We
Sun, 7pm, $50+
San Jose State Event Center

No one reps the Yay Area harder than E-40. But with close to 30 full-length solo releases, myriad collaborative projects and a serious knack for coining lyrical lingo, E-40 is sure to leave a lasting legacy in the hip-hop world far beyond the Bay. In addition to coming up with the likes of  Mac Dre, Too Short and Mr. Fab, the man born Earl Stevens has used his Sick Wid It label to put many more on the map—like Vallejo-based up-and-comer Nef the Pharaoh. SJSU students can catch this local legend along with P-Lo for free at SpartanFest. Note: only current students will be admitted.

E-40 & P-Lo
Oct 25, 6:30pm, Free For SJSU Students (Students Only)
San Jose State Event Center

(Ed. note: Amanda Palmer has dropped out of this show, citing complications from treatment of acute Lyme disease. Read about it here.)

It’s hard to talk about Amanda Palmer without first addressing her haters. From her days as the frontwoman of The Dresden Dolls to her flourishing solo career, Palmer, like her hero, Morrissey—for whom she’ll be opening at the SJSU Event Center on Saturday—has been on the receiving end of public criticism for pretty much as long as she’s been an artist.

Why? Take your pick. She bared her breasts onstage. She wrote a bouncy song about some pretty dark subject matter—the tale of a girl raped at a party and her subsequent positive STI test and abortion. She asked local musicians to play dates with her for free. She married geek hero Neil Gaiman. She doesn’t shave her armpits.

“People really don’t like being confronted by women misbehaving,” she says, rather calmly for someone who has a section specifically for hate mail on her band’s site. “Whereas men misbehaving can be kind of sexy. That’s part of this game of entertainment.”

She is, admittedly, hugely influenced by Morrissey. Palmer was a teenager in the ’80s—hormonally primed to be influenced by the sweeping drama of The Smiths. “I got my first Smiths tape when I was 14, 15,” she says over the phone, driving home to Boston from upstate New York. “One side was Strangeways, the other Meat is Murder. I just wore it into the ground.”

The Smiths and their contemporaries (Depeche Mode, The Pixies, Nick Cave and “all that dark apocalyptic stuff one of my boyfriends got me into”) have always been lurking in her work, even when she was writing vampy cabaret choruses on keys as one half of “punk cabaret” weirdoes The Dresden Dolls, which is where she got her start. She’s always had a theatrical, sentimental bent, somber but never sappy. Both her and Morrissey’s bodies of work speak of something more suited for the Shakespearean stage or a Lifetime movie than moody, morose rock ‘n roll.

“One of the things I love about being an older musician and having the perspective of time is that your own formation is a mystery to be solved,” she says—posing and then answering a question. “Why did the Smiths speak to me? The music you listen to as a teenager, you take for granted, until you look back at the greater context of things and realize there wasn’t anyone writing songs like that. Now I realize how formative it was.”

These days, after years of sticking almost solely to piano, she’s starting to work her way back to the sounds that started it all. “My really early music has cheesy synths and handclaps,” she says. Theater Is Evil, her 2012 crowdfunded record, which drew $1 million (she asked for $100,000), saw her going all-in on ‘80s conventions—making heavy use of the synthesizer. She is continuing in the same vein with her currently in-progress album, which she is recording with Edward Ka-Spell of The Legendary Pink Dots.

“I had this entire conversation with Edward,” she says. “We sat down (to record with electronics) and it was like I was going back to a language I hadn’t spoken in 20 years.”

Palmer’s opening slot on Saturday’s show came about under sudden, strange circumstances. “I was having lunch with an old manager of mine who offhandedly asked if I might want the gig,” she says. “In the mysterious ways of the underbelly of the industry, I was called up about the gig a few days later.”

She says she isn’t sure whether Moz personally requested her to open. “I’ve never actually met Morrissey, but rumor had it he did attend a Dresden Dolls gig.” (If Morrissey message boards are be believed, he surfaced at a Dresden Dolls show in LA around 2008.) In any case, playing for one of her teen idols seems a fitting end to the most current chapter in Palmer’s career and life.

This will be the last show before she goes on an indefinite hiatus—she’s currently seven months pregnant, and not entirely sure what the future holds, musically or otherwise. “I really, really believe in living a life of no regrets and radical compassion for myself and others. There are times when I wish I did take myself more seriously,” she says. “I feel like the key to life, as self-helpy as it sounds, is pure, unadulterated, simple self-acceptance. We are built the way we’re built. And that’s the thing I love about Morrissey. He’s totally and utterly himself.”

Like it or not, so is she.

Amanda Palmer opens for Morrissey on July 25 at the San Jose State University Event Center. More info.

In a recent interview with Tiesto, the superstar DJ spoke on how inspiring it’s been playing for American crowds in the wake of the recent electronic dance music boom. He noted that stateside, crowds aren’t pigeon-holed in one style and are incredibly enthusiastic about the emerging sound. That enthusiasm was on full display last night at his sold-out show inside the San Jose State Events Center, the latest stop on his College Invasion tour.

As has become custom, neon colors and lots of skin was the dress code—all the better to dance with. There was even a tribal headdress or two bouncing along to the four-to-the-floor bass.
Opener Alvaro elicited a decent crowd reaction from the half-full house, ending his set with a few tracks that showcased the growing trap sound (see: Harlem Shake). The crowd hit at heavy simmer at about 8pm, with Quintino dropping crowd favorites and excitement built with electro DJ Tommy Trash taking the stage to a nearly full arena before Tiesto arrived.

PHOTOS: View the Metroactive Photo Gallery the Tiesto Show

When Tiesto took the stage at 9:30pm, it was clear that this was his party to rock. While his opening acts kept the pulse with minimal tech, Tiesto’s two-hour set was enhanced with a HD video intro that made previous motion banners seem amateur in contrast and EDM favorites like smoke cannons, lasers, flashing lights and a timed mass release of thousands of white balloons.

When the balloons finally dropped near the end of his set, the vibe was transcendent, with a sea of waving hands and deep, carnal bass. Surveying the scene midway through the set, Tiesto seemed to even have the rafters engaged. His crowd came to party and he was giving them exactly what they wanted.

At 10:30, a sea of moving bodies seemed in sync with Tiesto’s musical heartbeat and that fever pitch only intensified as he neared the end of his set. Dipping back into his catalogue, 2003 classic “Adagio For Strings” made an appearance, as did a portion of Zombie Nation’s seminal arena anthem “Kernkraft 400.”

Though the sweating, minimally clothed crowd was greeted outside by a damp, windy night, the spell of bad weather did little to stave off the post-show euphoria.

View more photos from the show.

If you want to tell Rise Against they sold out, lead singer Tim McIlrath won’t stop you. In fact, when fans tell him they don’t like that his band signed to a major label, or that their last album debuted at number two on the mainstream charts, he feels them, because he’s been there.

“All the way to the kid who goes ‘Hey man, you sold out! You’re on a major label and you’ve changed,’” admits McIlrath. “I was that kid! I was that fan. I was the kid who hated Bad Religion when they signed to A&M. I was like ‘I’m never wearing that shirt again.’ Far from taking offense to someone who tells me that, I see myself in their eyes.”

But the truth is that, whatever one fan or another might think about how the band’s music has evolved since they started out on the Chicago DIY punk scene in the late 90s, no one ever questions their integrity. They’re as political and subversive in their message as they were back when they were putting out short, sharp blasts of hardcore on Fat Wreck Chords a decade ago. So when mainstream success came knocking, McIlrath didn’t see danger signs, he saw a new lease on the band’s life, a new reason to keep it together.

“I saw a challenge,” he says. “The kind of challenge I hadn’t seen since the band started, and we were just trying to win people over and get them to know who we were. All of a sudden there was this whole new challenge: how do you present ideas of social change and awareness to an audience that might be used to having the music there just to rock out to and then go home?”

As they get set to play the San Jose State Event Center Tuesday (April 17), McIlrath talked to me about strategizing their success and their most recent release, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown.”

STEVE PALOPOLI: You’ve always been an activist, but what’s it like for you now to be an activist who actually has some influence and cultural reach? There are so many causes vying for your attention, how do you decide what to invest that power in?

As Rise Against have gone from scruffy Chicago punks to chart-topping mainstream hitmakers over the last decade, they’ve run into no end of blowback from early fans who think they should still be putting out minute-long blasts of hardcore for Fat Mike.

But one thing no one would dare talk smack about is their cred as crusaders. Vegan? Check. Straight-edge? Check. Angry at the Internet? Okay, I made that one up. Still, with their history of supporting indie culture and criticizing corporate greed, it should be no surprise that on their current tour they’ll be stopping in to sign at some local record stores, including San Jose’s own Streetlight Records. They’ll drop in the afternoon before their show at the San Jose State Event Center on April 17.

Tim McIlrath and company got their start as Transistor Revolt in the much-celebrated/criticized Chicago DIY scene of the late ’90s, before changing their name and getting signed to Fat Wreck Chords for their debut album, 2001’s The Unraveling. By 2004, they’d signed to a major label, and two years later they had a gold-certified, top 10 record in The Sufferer and the Witness. Those who had been chanting “sell out” since practically the beginning of the band’s existence were no doubt confused by the fact that The Sufferer and the Witness was far and away their best album, both musically and lyrically. They’ve found more to complain about on the records since, which have pushed the band further into the mainstream, with mixed results.

Interestingly, the band’s message hasn’t changed much, even as their music has. As activists, they’re as hardcore as ever. And their commitment to heavy subject matter is once again affirmed in their most recent release, a cover of Boy Dylan’s “Ballas of Hollis Brown” with an accompanying video that’s more documentary than music clip, packed with facts and figures about American poverty, economic injustice and insanely dangerous farm equipment.

Rise Against sign at Streetlight Records on April 17 at 4:30pm. Their show at San Jose State Event Center starts at 7pm that night, with A Day to Remember and Title Fight opening.

Click here to view the embedded video.