San Francisco Weekly April 4, 2012 : Page 23

A Smart Aleck with Rhymes K. Flay performs Thursday, April 5, at Rickshaw Stop. 10 p.m., $13; www.rickshawstop.com Music abrasive beats, Flaherty showcases her play-ful voice and packs her lyrics with personal asides and brainy culture references: A fondness for Cheerios in soy milk mingles with a mention of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad . Flaherty’s online persona reinforces this image of her as a smart aleck who happens to rap. Her website includes a series of book re-views, with such titles as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar . De-livered via video, she interjects her literary commentary with images and bursts of mu-sic that flash quickly on the screen — a top-less photo of the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo lounging like a lothario, juxtaposed with a housewife declaring, “Marriage is a stifling hetero-normative institution.” This knowingness also seeps into her (unofficial) remix of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci,” which riffs on the song’s line about working at Ar-by’s by setting the music to footage of Fla-herty wolfing down a burger at In-N-Out. This ability to make rap songs that come off as both clever and kooky is a specialty of Flaherty’s — and something her record label is keen to market. “I think there’s probably a natural desire for any major label to make you a little bit more pop and more accessible and less weird,” she says. “For the most part, I think people [at RCA] were excited about the little pop elements that I already had, but what I’m trying to do is be a little weird and eclectic in certain other ways.” Flaherty is far from alone in having a re-cord label seek to emphasize her pop appeal. Nicki Minaj, the most successful female rap-per at the moment, releases songs that are performance stunts as much as straightfor-ward rap tracks. Following in her wake, the crossover appeal of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci” and the diminuitive rapper’s hipster look helped persuade Columbia to offer up a six-figure deal for her services. And Har-lem’s Azealia Banks appears to be the next hot property, after the success of her bouncy, uptempo “212.” Musing on her own appeal, Fla-herty insists that her marketabil-ity is natural, not forced. Her music is a reflection of her day-to-day life, so her up-coming album will at-tempt to sum up the thoughts and expe-riences of a twenty-something college graduate living in a metropolitan environ-ment — including trips to the farmers’ market and filling an iPod with eclectic music. As she puts it, “At the end of the day I just use hip-hop and rapping as a medium to kinda put out my weird message.” Sizzle & Fizzle Highs and lows from the last week in S.F. music. sfweekly.com | CONTENTS Meet K.Flay, the Stanford grad who might be the Bay’s next big female rapper Before inking her record deal, Flaherty had been releasing music on the Internet. Her MASHed Potatoes mixtape from 2009 had her rapping over songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Gossip, and Ludacris, featured guest verses from West Coast indie rappers Eligh (of Living Legends) and Zumbi (of Zion I), and included a ditty con-fessing an addiction to Vanilla Coke. (A 2007 interview with her college paper, the Stan-ford Daily , has her picking Fischerspooner, Lily Allen, and Fiona Apple as her iPod sta-ples.) The style of building her raps on top of songs from the indie-rock and dance worlds has pitched Flaherty away from the tradi-tional hip-hop scene, and into an alternative zone. The fusion of styles continues on her latest EP, Eyes Shut , which leans heavily in an electronic direction and even features Sizzle ■ Theatrical pop-rock band Fun. played two S.F. shows last week, and showed that it’s got more going for it than hit single “We Are Young” (which you probably heard first on Glee or a commercial during the Super Bowl). With a dynamite singer like Nate Ruess and Christopher Victorio inspiro-anthems like “Some Nights” up its sleeve, expect this outfit to have a bright future. ■ Bay Area rhyme acrobat Gift of Gab Fun. at the Indy. was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, but it isn’t slowing him down. The Blackalicious rap-per put out another studio album last week, The Next Logical Progression , and has many more projects in the works. Meanwhile, a friend has offered a kidney donation, and Gab is planning to have the transplant within the next year. ■ Local label 4 Men with Beards has given itself a difficult task: Rescuing worthy but obscure albums from larger labels’ archives and reis-suing them. Since 2001, the San Rafael outfit has put music by artists like John Lydon and John Cale back into circulation on 180-gram vinyl, where it deserves to be. Props to founder Filippo Salvadori , the one man with a beard. | LETTERS BY PHILLIP MLYNAR T he first thing K.Flay did after return-ing from South By Southwest was go to the Oakland farmers’ market with her mom. When she talks about her shopping trip, K.Flay — the rapping alter ego of 27-year-old Kristine Flaherty — casually refers to Oakland as “home.” But “home” has been a nebulous concept for Flaherty for a while now: She grew up in suburban Wilmette, Ill., attended Stanford University (where she double-majored in sociology and psychology), spent three years in San Fran-cisco, and resided in Oakland for a year. Now she’s signed a major label deal with RCA, which has her in Brooklyn for the moment. Between moving and touring, Flaherty says that she feels like she’s “living in this weird suspended reality,” both physically and in her head. But she credits this state of flux with keeping her music eclectic and her writing perky — traits RCA hopes to push to the fore this summer when it releases her debut album proper. | SUCKA FREE CITY | NIGHT+DAY Building her raps on top of songs from the indie-rock and dance worlds has pitched Flaherty away from the traditional hip-hop scene. production by Liam Howlett of fiery British post-rave unit The Prodigy. Their connection happened naturally. “Essentially, a friend of mine played Liam some of my music and he was excited about what I was doing and wanted to link up,” Flaherty says. “We got on well, and our styles of production and ways of working are similar: I like to be in a little room by myself working on things, and he does too.” The fruits of those sessions, which went down at Sarm Studios in Notting Hill, London, are the lead EP single “We Hate Everybody” and the track “Stop, Focus.” Over Howlett’s | BOOKS | FILM Fizzle ■ Earl Scruggs , legendary banjo player and a regular at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival, died at age 88 in Nashville. Scruggs was a pioneer of the instru-ment, developing a three-fingered plucking style that was eventually named after him. He was also a favorite of late Hardly Strictly founder Warren Hellman, who invited Scruggs to play the festival every year from 2005 to 2011. ■ Due to nasty homophobic connotations overseas, Berkeley-founded indie poppers The Morning Benders were forced to change their name. Unfortunately, their new moniker — Pop Etc. — is one of the worst band names we’ve heard in a while. It’s vague and nonspecific, but a way that reminds of halfassed music blogging. “Music Etc.” would have been way funnier. ■ In a feat of batshit list-making, the city of Con-cord was claimed to have one of the country’s top 10 music scenes . The website Livability compiled a list of music towns that aren’t L.A. or N.Y.C., skipped a bunch of obvious ones, and started off their list with a suburb that has summertime concerts in the town square. The website’s favorite thing about Concord? “Its resi-dents are a mere 30 miles from San Francisco!” For full versions of the above stories and much more about S.F. music, check out All Shook Down, our music blog, at www.sfweekly.com/shookdown. | EAT | MUSIC | SF WEEKLY Is Flaherty composing a rap or a book review? 23 A PRIL 4-A PRIL 10, 2012

Music

Phillip Mlynar

A Smart Aleck with Rhymes Meet K.Flay, the Stanford grad who might be the Bay’s next big female rapper K. Flay performs Thursday, April 5, at Rickshaw Stop. 10 p.m., $13; www.rickshawstop.com The first thing K.Flay did after returning from South By Southwest was go to the Oakland farmers’ market with her mom. When she talks about her shopping trip, K.Flay — the rapping alter ego of 27-year-old Kristine Flaherty — casually refers to Oakland as “home.” But “home” has been a nebulous concept for Flaherty for a while now: She grew up in suburban Wilmette, Ill., attended Stanford University (where she double-majored in sociology and psychology), spent three years in San Francisco, and resided in Oakland for a year. Now she’s signed a major label deal with RCA, which has her in Brooklyn for the moment. Between moving and touring, Flaherty says that she feels like she’s “living in this weird suspended reality,” both physically and in her head. But she credits this state of flux with keeping her music eclectic and her writing perky — traits RCA hopes to push to the fore this summer when it releases her debut album proper. Before inking her record deal, Flaherty had been releasing music on the Internet. Her MASHed Potatoes mixtape from 2009 had her rapping over songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Gossip, and Ludacris, featured guest verses from West Coast indie rappers Eligh (of Living Legends) and Zumbi (of Zion I), and included a ditty confessing an addiction to Vanilla Coke. (A 2007 interview with her college paper, the Stanford Daily, has her picking Fischerspooner, Lily Allen, and Fiona Apple as her iPod staples.) The style of building her raps on top of songs from the indie-rock and dance worlds has pitched Flaherty away from the traditional hip-hop scene, and into an alternative zone. The fusion of styles continues on her latest EP, Eyes Shut, which leans heavily in an electronic direction and even features production by Liam Howlett of fiery British post-rave unit The Prodigy. Their connection happened naturally. “Essentially, a friend of mine played Liam some of my music and he was excited about what I was doing and wanted to link up,” Flaherty says. “We got on well, and our styles of production and ways of working are similar: I like to be in a little room by myself working on things, and he does too.” The fruits of those sessions, which went down at Sarm Studios in Notting Hill, London, are the lead EP single “We Hate Everybody” and the track “Stop, Focus.” Over Howlett’s abrasive beats, Flaherty showcases her playful voice and packs her lyrics with personal asides and brainy culture references: A fondness for Cheerios in soy milk mingles with a mention of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad. Flaherty’s online persona reinforces this image of her as a smart aleck who happens to rap. Her website includes a series of book reviews, with such titles as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Delivered via video, she interjects her literary commentary with images and bursts of music that flash quickly on the screen — a topless photo of the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo lounging like a lothario, juxtaposed with a housewife declaring, “Marriage is a stifling hetero-normative institution.” This knowingness also seeps into her (unofficial) remix of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci,” which riffs on the song’s line about working at Arby’s by setting the music to footage of Flaherty wolfing down a burger at In-N-Out. This ability to make rap songs that come off as both clever and kooky is a specialty of Flaherty’s — and something her record label is keen to market. “I think there’s probably a natural desire for any major label to make you a little bit more pop and more accessible and less weird,” she says. “For the most part, I think people [at RCA] were excited about the little pop elements that I already had, but what I’m trying to do is be a little weird and eclectic in certain other ways.” Flaherty is far from alone in having a record label seek to emphasize her pop appeal. Nicki Minaj, the most successful female rapper at the moment, releases songs that are performance stunts as much as straightforward rap tracks. Following in her wake, the crossover appeal of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci” and the diminuitive rapper’s hipster look helped persuade Columbia to offer up a six-figure deal for her services. And Harlem’s Azealia Banks appears to be the next hot property, after the success of her bouncy, uptempo “212.” Musing on her own appeal, Flaherty insists that her marketability is natural, not forced. Her music is a reflection of her day-to-day life, so her upcoming album will attempt to sum up the thoughts and experiences of a twentysomething college graduate living in a metropolitan environment — including trips to the farmers’ market and filling an iPod with eclectic music. As she puts it, “At the end of the day I just use hip-hop and rapping as a medium to kinda put out my weird message.”

Sizzle & Fizzle

Highs and lows from the last week in S.F. music. Sizzle ■ Theatrical pop-rock band Fun. Played two S.F. shows last week, and showed that it's got more going for it than hit single "We Are Youngh (which you probably heard first on Glee or a commercial during the Super Bowl). With a dynamite singer like Nate Ruess and inspiro-anthems like gSome Nights" up its sleeve, expect this outfit to have a bright future. ■ Bay Area rhyme acrobat Gift of Gab was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, but it isn’t slowing him down. The Blackalicious rapper put out another studio album last week, The Next Logical Progression, and has many more projects in the works. Meanwhile, a friend has offered a kidney donation, and Gab is planning to have the transplant within the next year. ■ Local label 4 Men with Beards has given itself a difficult task: Rescuing worthy but obscure albums from larger labels’ archives and reissuing them. Since 2001, the San Rafael outfit has put music by artists like John Lydon and John Cale back into circulation on 180-gram vinyl, where it deserves to be. Props to founder Filippo Salvadori, the one man with a beard. Fizzle ■ Earl Scruggs, legendary banjo player and a regular at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival, died at age 88 in Nashville. Scruggs was a pioneer of the instrument, developing a three-fingered plucking style that was eventually named after him. He was also a favorite of late Hardly Strictly founder Warren Hellman, who invited Scruggs to play the festival every year from 2005 to 2011. ■ Due to nasty homophobic connotations overseas, Berkeley-founded indie poppers The Morning Benders were forced to change their name. Unfortunately, their new moniker — Pop Etc. — is one of the worst band names we’ve heard in a while. It’s vague and nonspecific, but a way that reminds of halfassed music blogging. “Music Etc.” would have been way funnier. ■ In a feat of batshit list-making, the city of Concord was claimed to have one of the country’s top 10 music scenes. The website Livability compiled a list of music towns that aren’t L.A. or N.Y.C., skipped a bunch of obvious ones, and started off their list with a suburb that has summertime concerts in the town square. The website’s favorite thing about Concord? “Its residents are a mere 30 miles from San Francisco!” For full versions of the above stories and much more about S.F. music, check out All Shook Down, our music blog, at www.sfweekly.com/shookdown.

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