San Jose-based emcee Cola—not to be confused with the San Jose-based indie rock outfit, Cola— is preparing to release a new mixtape, titled House Shoes. No firm date has been given for the release, but his publicist says it should drop in mid-December. That’s the album’s art work up above.
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Joowan Kim wants to pioneer a new kind of American art music. He derides concert hall compositions as either reheated European classics or cultural appropriation pieces, like “Tibetan yak herding songs,” which he compares to wildflowers ripped from their native field and put into an expensive vase. After emigrating from South Korea…
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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…
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John Flynn on January 6, 2016
thouDirtbag Dan bustles about his high-ceilinged studio in an industrial block just outside of San Jose’s Japantown. He points out a psychedelic mural of a shark by a local artist on one wall and mismatched grey curtains stapled to another. The latter serve as the backdrop for his battle rap podcast. It…
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John Flynn on December 9, 2015
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,…
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The Bay Area earned the begrudging respect of the East Coast rap elite back in the early- and mid-aughts, with the undeniable impact of the hyphy movement. That respect, however, never seemed to rub off on San Jose, where Dave Dub has been grinding since the early ’90s with the aim of putting…
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It’s fair to say that Lyrics Born (a.k.a. Tsutomu “Tom” Shimura) felt the cultural void when he left Berkeley for UC Davis in the early 1990s. A hip-hop head stranded in a rural college town, he made the most of his time by going on late night walks through campus with nothing but…
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It’s been almost two decades since he and his Living Legends crew helped usher in a new era of DIY in hip-hop, and Scarub is still doing things his own way. In fact, he’s doing everything his own way.
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“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,…
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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…
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