Words by Max J. Joseph
Illustrations by Rob Engvall
“Ain’t it a pity, that you hate this city / But the way you feel, ain’t no big deal.” That’s how the chorus to Oakland duo Zion I’s “Koncrete Jungle” begins. Unlike Zion I, who released their first record in 2000 to much acclaim, many other hip-hop artists and producers who came up in the Bay Area of California through the 1990s are no longer making music today. Many are now dead, some moved away and found regular jobs, while others simply disappeared from the scene.
The Bay Area is a collection of nine counties sprawled out around San Francisco’s Bay in northern California. These counties cut through five sub-regions, with San Francisco serving as the nucleus of it all. In the early to mid-1990s, the city itself was a haven for artists who wanted to live the urban life for modest money. There were shows of some kind on every day, art schools were widely available, and while rents were still relatively expensive, the overall cost of living was reasonable. The most important thing San Francisco promised was a lifestyle you couldn’t really find elsewhere in the U.S. at the time.
The tech creep which characterises its current persona started in the southern regions of the Bay Area and moved north. Tech developers and entrepreneurs, many of whom were just as geeky if not more than the traditional creative types involved in the visual and music arts, finally made it into San Francisco en masse and the rest has been history. Where these wizards went with their digital products, sales and marketing teams invariably followed, and thus the first real wave of gentrification truly engulfed the city.
Even though the dot-com bubble of the mid-’90s lasted a mere half-decade, the city of San Francisco had its first partial makeover. Office blocks were going up everywhere. Today, apartment space has shrunk into half of what it was, for almost double the price. Sadly, this boom didn’t actually bring in as many people as it pushed out, and for a while at the beginning of the millennium, San Francisco was known as the “fastest shrinking city.” In the ’90s, a house in San Francisco would set you back an average of $420k. The median home price there today is $1.3m. Native artists were among those who bore the brunt of this inward migration and implosion.
125,000 years ago, San Francisco was an island, and amusingly, many of the locals retain traits and dispositions more easily associated with island folk: perennial pride, protectiveness, and insularity. Depending on your own tastes, you might view a city like San Francisco as Los Angeles’ introverted little brother or its stern older brother. However you view it, there is no doubt that each city has its own unique personality, but whereas L.A. has largely retained its same character and glitzed itself up, San Francisco has changed dramatically in socio-economic orientation.
The 1990s were a time of momentous economic propulsion, but also terrible tragedy. References and affection to hip-hop once produced in the Bay Area are scant in popular culture today, especially outside of the Bay. Attending any regular bar or club in any major city around the world will probably expose you to hip-hop from southern California, not to mention the endlessly reprinted records, continued radio play, and the general veneration enjoyed by the familiar big-hitters: Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac among others.
But even Tupac, a figure firmly established in hip-hop folklore as a product of L.A., spent four of the most important years of his adult life living in the Bay. He moved to Marin City, north of San Francisco, in 1988, before spending time in Oakland and finally heading to L.A. for what was tragically the last year or so of his life.
He even recorded his debut solo album, 2Pacalypse Now, in Richmond—a city in the Bay Area. Yet his attachment to the Bay Area is mostly absent in his lyrics, despite there being a good representation of Bay Area rappers present throughout his albums. There is an argument that an artist who moved around as much as Tupac did would have transcended the thematic confines of any single location, but the evidence for this suggests otherwise.
One of the only references to the Bay that comes to mind was in the form of a shout-out in the ubiquitous “California Love.” Earlier, in a 1993 interview, Tupac explained, “When I got to Oakland, that’s where I learned the game. So that’s why I give all my love to Oakland. If I’mma claim a city, I’mma claim Oakland.” The disconnection in the public consciousness between his formative years as an artist in the Bay Area compared to the peak of his career elsewhere tells a story about the culture there at the time: first, it was easier to achieve success away from the Bay, and second, it didn’t matter to many people that he spent important years in the Bay—a place with its own character—in the same way that it would matter for the artists associated with L.A. and New York.
The guys from southern California who were going through the same trials and tribulations had perfected G-Funk, a subgenre of hip-hop emerging throughout the West Coast, so that it resonated with audiences beyond not only their own neighbourhood but the state. Meanwhile, up north, MCs seemed stuck in the stress and misery of their own circumstances. The similarities between these two variants within a subgenre are extensive, yet the schisms which permeate the flow, content, and delivery on a deeper level manifest when examining the music and the circumstances it was created in.
From the outset, we can do some preliminary landscaping: northern California, even before its tech boom, enjoyed much better public transport, whereas mobility in the south of the state is (still) very much about where your own car can take you. The geographical layout of the Bay lends itself to the development of small fiefdoms, dislocated from each other yet stitched up by the wonders of urban planning. On the other hand, Los Angeles is a singular, sprawling, densely packed metropolis. Diversity is a rule in L.A. and an effect in San Francisco.
Even something this small ties into how things were organised: the Bay Area famously produced compilation albums by various local artists, masterminded by a handful of key figures, whereas the south produced individuals who became superstars in their own right, sometimes collaborating for mutual benefit or in benevolent hierarchies, but never really needing to.
In a way, the Bay Area was the West Coast’s East Coast—a largely self-contained arena of artistry. As much as it often pretended not to be, it was a tradition firmly contained within its own community, and one which ultimately sought answers from its own community. For many artists, this came out of necessity—they simply had nowhere else to look for answers but themselves, and quite often and understandably, they couldn’t find any. In a cruel irony, the Bay—home of this self-referential creative community which knew best how to talk about itself—gave birth to the digitally driven hyper-connectivity that would leave that community gutted open.
During this transformation, the Bay’s gritty scene eventually gave way to the Hyphy movement: a noughties tradition of feel-good hip-hop with up-tempo beats, eclectic use of bass, and machine-gun rhyming developed to complement the Bay Area’s prosperous image today. This was an area undergoing radical change. The music had to match it to keep up.
The Bay Area, once home to some of the most lucid, talented rappers who were never known as well as their southern counterparts, became tremendously gentrified by a slew of tech entrepreneurs who went on to found the biggest centres of cultural production in the United States: the aforementioned Silicon Valley types, the social-media gurus—all from a very different, and overwhelmingly non-local, demographic.
What was there before these sidewalks became servers? What happened to this culture before it was displaced and told to get with the programme or move on? What were those voices saying?
Bay Area hip-hop in the 1990s represents a distinct and overlooked thread of G-Funk. When people were humming along to “Let Me Ride” by artists who always seemed destined for greatness, little-known rappers like Fly Nate the Banksta were asking “What Should I Do?” in the north. Stylistically, there seems something inevitable about the success and longevity of the better-known hip-hop pioneers in the south, while those in the north were grappling with change that was largely not inclusive of them, rendering each day unpredictable and their futures in music-making even less certain.
Hip-hop produced in the Bay during this time was conceptually unique. Its originators and pioneers are still virtually unknown despite leaving a huge effect on the cultural memory of Bay Area natives who either still reside there or have moved away due to gentrification. While Dr. Dre went on to found a business empire, artists like Herm, one of the key individuals who put together the classic Trying to Live in the Ghetto compilation album and its follow-up Still Trying to Live in the Ghetto, went on to manage a janitorial company.
Herm Lewis, who simply used his first name as his rap moniker, hails from the Bayview-Hunters Point area of San Francisco. Described in SFGate in 2002 as “an ex-con who became a self-appointed big brother on the streets” who “has spoken at too many funerals in the Bayview to count,” Herm brought together people who might have otherwise been wrapped up in feuds. In a 1995 interview, he told SF Weekly, “When I’m hosting, I come out on the positivity tip, talking about stopping the violence and increasing the peace. If I notice any negativity during a show, I’ll get back on stage and try to calm things down.”
And violence was certainly a regular feature of Herm’s life and career. “A majority of the time a rap concert is given, something goes wrong,” Herm said in the same interview. And that’s just how it was. Two of the three members of the up-and-coming group RBL Posse were shot and killed in gang-related killings (Mr. Cee and Hitman), with the only remaining member losing an eye (Black C). Teenage rapper Lil Swoop was murdered on the same day as Tupac. Coughnut, Killa Keise, Rappin’ Ron, Mac Dre—other MCs from the Bay who lost their lives to violence.
Violence in the Bay was exacerbated by turf wars, poverty, and terrible stress, chronicled most notably in the track “Stressin’” by 2 of the Crew, and Cellski’s “Stressed Out,” with the latter featuring Swoop’s best-known verse in a life brutally cut short shortly after his teen years. Both songs portray vulnerable states of being, with an openness undisguised by a tough-guy act. The stress of living in a place like San Francisco as a recording artist and performer during this time meant realising your own obsolete state in slow motion—it meant having an acute feeling of being left behind. Your homes were not only being colonised, but your art redefined and repackaged.
Stories of sticking up for yourself, the frustration of meeting demands related to narcotics, the shady and unpredictable interplay with clientele and everything that came with it were all cast as tedious and then as necessary. There was an awareness that these were just things you had to do growing up even if they may not be the things that would help you leave this life behind.
Les G (real name Leslie Gray) was another producer from the Bay who put together compilation records, with the excellent Silent Cries from the Ghetto standing out due to a sublime array of tracks and terrific artwork by the prolific Phunky Phat Graph-X. The art of compilation became big business very quickly. Albums that would have cost $10–15,000 to produce (including artist fees) were making a lot of money back as hip-hop heads felt more confident in their quality—after all, it’s difficult to have filler with only one song on a record. Seeing these profits, artists started to charge more, and costs quickly exceeded $100,000 in a matter of years. Les G was prescient enough to release this record before the market became saturated.
The production here was so on point: Taydatay’s “Everybody Die” is as brooding and relentless as it is elegant. The staggered, ascending and descending bass grooves coupled with the matter-of-fact chorus, “Everybody die, everybody die,” and high synths make you feel like you’re on a steady route forward, regardless of the morbid conclusion.
“Doin’ Things” by Devious offers more characteristically muted yet driving beats punctuated by perfectly rendered synth notes. Finally, the album wraps up with the title track by Big Ed, another artist sadly gone before his time. A line from the track delivered almost in isolation, “Why do I have to see the murderous things that I see?”, is a running theme. There is a sense of being stuck pervading throughout the consciousness of the artists on this album, but like good artists, they all find creativity through limitation.
Another artist who appears on Silent Cries… is Young Ed (now known as Bread Ed). He put out one of the most memorable albums from the Bay in the ’90s: Time to Stack. A stand-out track, “My Way,” was remixed by Les G for Silent Cries, and rendered darker. The synths remixed into the track in Les G’s version sing out and speak of a pensiveness which almost kisses the coasts of the Far East melodically. In the Cellski-produced original, the mood is lighter and less severe, with classic G-Funk synths neatly peppering the track, and every other track throughout the record.
Cellski is a major component of the success of this album musically, producing every track and appearing in several—a standout being “Where the Love At?” This is a solo record recorded by a senior in high school from the Bay Area that actually stands the test of time without sounding tired or unfocused. Cellski was a capable producer and spitter, having demonstrated both skills on his own solo record. Young Ed was thrust into the spotlight, riding beats that sometimes felt he had to match in quality in order not to be overshadowed. For the most part, he succeeded.
The most astonishing thing about this record is how cohesive it is despite featuring over ten different artists. This isn’t to say it is low on variation, but high on thematic style. Each artist is aided by the brilliant subtlety of Les G’s production skills throughout the record, and each artist offers their own story on a rotating Bay Area canvas developed specifically to enhance their own individual styles.
What of other solo records? The Bay Area wasn’t all lucrative mega-albums with shared revenues. An artist named Fly Nate the Banksta released Nothin’ but the Money in 1996. On it, contemplative gems like “Message to the Woodz” and the aforementioned “What Should I Do?” offer a glimpse into honest introspection of life in the Bay with minimalist and effective beats:
It’s hard for true talent to make a mil / so I’m rapping about what I see every day / they say negativity gets no radio play / so what shall I do? Rap about the fake, or rap about the true?
That particular dilemma is common in hip-hop storytelling, but it was difficult not to compare levels of success with the artists developing farther south and offer some kind of commentary on what was going on—cue the familiar wars of authenticity. The awareness of success in the south was always there: “Watch me blow up like Snoop and Dre / West Coast South Bay” (G-Pack on “South Bay Groove,” 1995). In a way, these artists weren’t struggling against “selling-out,” but rather struggling to preserve their own unique Northern California sound—and to win with it.
Yet it wasn’t all doom and gloom. More light-heartedly, San Quinn was inviting us to “Come On In” to observe his life of run-ins with the police and dreams of better tomorrows to playful melodies, high-hats, and outrageous bass in 1995 before trap was a thing. One of the best flows never heard, the amount of intricate bars packed into this track on his debut solo effort, Live N Direct, is simply dizzying. Other groups like 2 of the Crew and their underrated debut Dankaristic Pimpshit didn’t even get a pressing. In some ways, it’s a marvel some of this music was even made in the first place given the circumstances.
“These contracts we have with rap labels pay us twice a year,” E-Sic of the Cold World Hustlers told SF Weekly in 1995. “Shows are the food on our table,” adds Big Vic. When hip-hop started vanishing from the clubs and nightlife in the Bay Area, it hurt the artists the most. Because of where these artists were from and the potentially violent crowds that would be following them, they struggled to secure gigs elsewhere. As a result, they were unable to showcase their live skills, gain new fans, or even make ends meet.
When one factors in the over-saturation of the compilation album as a vehicle towards the end of the Bay’s own golden age—to the ludicrous point of offering mammoth four-CD bigger-must-be-better releases nobody had time to listen to—the economy surrounding the scene began crumbling. Greedy promoters began charging exorbitant ticket fees for what they complained were high-risk shows. Artists resented the arrangement and complained of insufficient funds spent on security despite the high fees. While this to-and-fro was happening, the police would always be lingering, ready to kick the doors down.
Many of these artists were caught between doing these shows simply to earn money and having their own safety at the back of their mind given the recklessness of club managers and promoters. Violence wasn’t uncommon at shows, but no more so than at punk or metal shows, where promoters and the police were noticeably softer. The mostly white crowds attracted to those shows would usually be forgiven for any carnage wrought, and their favourite bands would be invited back without as much as a second thought.
None of this music provided my own first experience of the Bay Area. When I was eight years old, my older brother, then seventeen, went to live with my uncle in San Francisco for most of the year. His period of absence wasn’t as memorable as his return: he brought with him a range of cassettes and CDs, all hip-hop, and all utterly unknown to a London audience, let alone my young ears. It wasn’t until I became a teenager myself that I could really begin to listen and appreciate the music (or even understand what the MCs were talking about).
I asked him how he came about this material, and he said our cousin there had introduced him to it. This was of course before he had stolen my uncle’s car one night and spent a summer’s evening joyriding across the state with no licence and a few girls in the backseat—no doubt, whilst some of this music he had never heard was playing. He was eventually pulled over by the police and hauled in front of my uncle, whose face he still remembers vividly today.
One of the records he brought back was Cellski’s Mr. Predicter. This is a record I have probably played just as much as The Chronic, yet none of my peers had even a mild awareness of it. I would put tracks from it on at house parties to rooms of mostly uninterested people who could not sing along and wanted the music to revert, much to my chagrin. “I’m just young thug / selling dope and drugs / the city that I’m from really ain’t got no love”—I feel you, Cellski.
What this record actually symbolises, more than my own modest experience of it, is a mega-album that never was. Every single track is masterfully produced, and each verse paid attention to. This is a rare enough achievement on any record, never mind the often neglected and underfunded solo releases of Bay Area artists. What Cellski achieved with this album should have become timeless.
Yes, when people were still listening to established artists a decade or two ago at their prime, it was virtually unknown outside of the Bay. Yet I have put it on nearly twenty-five years after its release to bemusement and wonder. My friends simply cannot believe how good it is—to compare it to anything as embarrassingly overlooked in the East Coast, I can only summon up Masta Ace Incorporated’s Sittin’ on Chrome released in the same year: 1995.
The whirling beats with tremendously low basslines found in “Braindead” would not be out of place in stellar releases by Dre during the same time period, but where Mr. Predicter really shines is in its range: from chorus-less dirges to urban cruelty like “The Inner City” to the effortlessly cool, jaunty anthem “Livin’ in the Bay,” all the stories here are impeccably told. The production on these two tracks alone defies expectations for new listeners. Mr. Predicter really is a testament to the enduring sound of the Bay in the 1990s, and how much the music industry failed these artists at the time.
Partaking in a far less eventful outing than my brother, I spent an evening last summer in Chicago driving north along Lakeshore Drive towards Evanston for dinner—an affluent suburb in the Chicagoland area. The transformation in Evanston hasn’t been nearly as ruthless and all-encompassing as seen in the neighbourhoods of the Bay Area. This was a poor neighbourhood with a sizeable African-American population which has concentrated into areas defined by stagnation and neglect, whereas Evanston proper enjoys trendy brunch places and themed restaurants. The eerie effects of socio-economic segregation can be felt even here on a small scale.
I am being told about the history of this suburb to the sounds of “Peep Game” on Mr. Predicter, and I am wondering where the communities in the Bay moved to when the tech giants moved in, and what impact this had on the hip-hop scene there.
Today, the biggest factory of American cultural production is no longer Hollywood, but the tech industry. The same shift exists in all developed states: technological design and output is the main source of consumption for all of us who enjoy music, art, or any other form of cultural production. What does this mean for the music industry? The old model of selling records is now over—what matters now is clout, downloads, and marketing campaigns. This is a whole new way to do things, and for many artists who grew up in the streets, it’s difficult to properly adjust and make a living.
Alongside the technology industry, there is now a nostalgia industry catered to providing a sense of a valuable past that we are in the process of losing. Old sounds, rhythms, and methodologies are resurfacing: the cassette tape release, the resurgence of vinyl, and uncomplicated beat structures are all throwbacks to a bygone era when these were the standard. There is a danger of falling prey to gimmicks over substance as we fall back in love with things we can see and touch, but the chances are that if the artist is investing in analogue, they’re investing in their own staying power and relevance.
But it isn’t all romance. Bay Area artists came under enormous pressure to adapt (or conform, depending on your view) to new patterns of music, new sounds, and new realities on the ground. Technology companies are now taking music almost fully off the streets and filing it into servers and online spaces they design, moderate, and own.
The marriage of art, tech culture, and big business has affected the world as we know it, but it’s interesting to investigate the effects on the physical spaces the tech industry still needs to headquarter its digital worlds. It may be that we only fully realise these effects in the future with hindsight and a longer pattern of study, but some are already there.
Artists making hip-hop in the Bay during the 1990s represented a midway point in the evolution of the local scene. The seeds of this scene were planted in the underground during the ’80s; they blossomed from the early ’90s and finally terminated with the “good times” of the ’00s, where the culture began its decline and gave in to excesses mostly imaginary.
The Bay Area today is a bustling, technological utopia for Silicon Valley types who believe that technology can not only solve all of the world’s problems, but create and provide all of the world’s entertainment. It has become a place for people who enjoy and have secured their own lavish, traditional spaces in the real world whilst sermonising to the masses, particularly the creative types they’ve pushed out, that the most valuable real estate is now online.
This is a new kind of poverty where the only spaces these artists can now afford are free and online, because they are not getting paid anymore. This practically deletes, not reformulates, an entire idiosyncratic economy, and replaces those dollars with advertising revenues contracted to big servers. The little guy with a microphone can now be heard by anyone around the world instantly because of modern technology, but the same technology threatens the material conditions that make art sustainable.
The strength of conformity is now strong in San Francisco. Tech giants have emerged and introduced specific ways to not only do things, but specific ways to create and think. There is orthodoxy present where none existed a few decades ago. Because the local economy has been so defined by the tremendous success of technological start-ups in recent years, it has created a profile of success. Previously, San Francisco and its immediate suburbs were defined by a sense of spontaneity, pretentiousness, even recklessness, but this has all given way to sleek, palatial buildings crammed full of the same kind of brilliant person.
Flattening culture and digitising it turns us all into online citizens first and foremost, eroding the connection we have with our local communities. It’s a new kind of poverty; one where styles are informed by consent rather than exposure; one where the thing that is being pushed away can simply be ignored in favour of something selectable and desirable. This turns everything into a bad love poem.
It can be argued that the monopolisation of urban space, particularly in the Bay, has virtually destroyed a scene. In other high-density, high-cost cities, the same process is underway. Artists developing something original are often poor, because they are by definition not part of a reliable franchise. So with barely a curb left to hang out on, what does it mean for the future of the idiosyncratic, local hip-hop scene?
We don’t have to be nostalgic about these historic struggles which can feel even more real than our own, but we can learn from them as important new battles continue to be fought today, a time of unprecedented wealth but also unprecedented hunger and scarcity.
Sometimes, the struggle to be heard now takes place after your last social media post—we find ourselves not only competing with each other, but the things we have put online every day in real time. People used to compare albums released years apart in the abstract and according to taste, but now that everything is quantified in a certain way, it becomes difficult to resist the machinery around the music and its influence on the creative process.
The struggle has transformed: the guy selling tapes out of a van has been forced to migrate online, hosting music on websites like SoundCloud and setting up a Patreon account in the hope that enough people decide he is worth more than “free.” Yet, looking at these forgotten souls from the Bay who gave us so much and received so little in return, nothing is ever really free.