Stand on any given street corner near Sixth Street and the hundreds of venues hosting music at SXSW, and the racket is inescapable—hair metal, hip hop, punk, electronic, etc. We were right in the mix Wednesday, looking for something new and checking in on some of our favorite musicians. Here’s what we…
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Chicago’s DMN Ology has been spelling his name about six different ways since he came up in the Chicago hip-hop scene in the ’90s. It’s not so much that he’s into Satan—although devils and demons do pop up in the imagery of his songs—it’s that “Demon” was his nickname growing up, a…
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by
Aaron Carnes on February 22, 2012
At one show on their Cambodian tour last year, South Bay all-girl rock band the Like Me’s played for over 5,000 people. This was less than two years after their first show ever—at Iguanas Taqueria in San Jose. Their bass player, Helena Hong, had only just started playing the bass four days…
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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…
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San Jose’s nightlife has a high tolerance for bad taste—eurotrash masquerading as pop, cheesy nightclubs with aspirations beyond their zip code, and most importantly: lacking a single decent place to listen to electronic music. For those of us who’ve lost interest in making the + 100 mile roundtrip trek to San Francisco,…
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In 1997, Latyrx’s debut Latyrx (The Album) changed the very idea of what Bay Area underground hip-hop could sound like. Fifteen years later, Lyrics Born is still changing minds and waking up ears as a solo artist, and still working with the other half of the Latyrx duo, Lateef the Truthspeaker, who…
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Before they play the Pagoda Lounge Saturday night, Talib Kweli and Res of the duo Idle Warship will drop by Streetlight Records in San Jose to sign autographs.
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By day, he’s Lohrasp Kansara, model and actor on TV series like Law & Order, Damages and Blue Bloods. By night, he’s DJ L, who spent last year spinning on MTV and BET, along with live gigs in New York, St. Martin, Dubai, London, Paris, Mumbai and Kingston.
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I caught John Doe at his last South Bay show, at Streetlight Records last year. What struck me more than ever before was how much this guy embodies all the DIY, music-of-the-people ideals that punk rock was supposed to stand for.
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SoCal producer prodigy Dibiase remembers when L.A. became a beat mecca in 2005. Flipping his own first beats as a teenager growing up in Watts, he wasn’t too long out of high school when he started getting invited to events like Sketchbook, the weekly Tuesday night gathering of up-and-coming talent at the…
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