Hard Times For Bay Area Hip Hop

[CRONICI]

(daveyd.com)
The Bay Area's Hip Hop scene has been going through some rough times as of late. There have been two killings at recent events. The latest mishap was a female who was attending a Nate Dogg album release party. Two weeks prior a young man was shot to death inside the Justice League night club where San Quinn and Andre Nickatina were performing. Both incidents came as shocks and were major blows.

Now the Bay is facing the lose of one of its premier night clubs-Maritime Hall. For those who don't know, the Maritime for the past 6 years has been the Bay's version of the Latin Quarters. Its a spacious place and damn near everyone from the entire Wu-Tang Clan to KRS-One to Public Enemy has graced its stages. Maritime was the spot for the Spit Kickers Tour, The Lyricist Lounge Tours and several Broke Ass Summer jam shows put on by the Living Legends crew. Its been one of the few places in the entire Bay Area where local acts could perform to large crowds with out much hassle or too much stress. Maritime was an all ages venue which habitually drew large crowds for all their shows. Violent incidents were darn near non existent. Their security was always tight. as they would either use The Nation of Islam or some of the Samoan security crews.

About two years ago Maritime came under fire during the height of the dot com craze. Greedy residents moved into the warehouse district where it was located and immediately began launching complaints to police and city officials about the large crowds and subsequent 'noise' after folks let out. How ironic was that when you consider that Maritime had been there for years before all these overpriced lofts and condos got built. A huge campaign was launched by the Bay Areas Hip Hop and music community to help keep the club's doors open, but now they are all but through by October 31. The spot where Maritime is housed saw its rents recently triple which created a situation where the venue could have a packed house of a 2500 people and not make any money.

What makes this so interesting is that during these lean economic times more than 20% of the lofts and recently built office spaces are vacant as the dot com industry went belly up. The Bay was hit hard when a huge performance space that housed more then 500 musicians in the neighboring Mission district was torn down to make room for a greedy dot com that has since gone belly up. Over the past two years dozens of Bay Area Hip Hoppers have found themselves being priced right out of the Bay Area. Everyone from Mystic to DJ Paul Nice to The Luniz to Living Legends have all found themselves having to vacate the Bay and go to either NY or LA. For folks who don't know its cheaper to live in Midtown Manhattan then in San Francisco which has the highest rents and housing prices in the nation. Oakland is not to far down on the list.

With the closing or Maritime the Bay finds itself a dire situation. All the other major concert venues in San Francisco that are comparable in size to Maritime including, The Fillmore, The Warfield, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and The Shoreline Amphitheater in nearby Mountainview are all owned by Clear Channel which also owns all the urban/Hip Hop stations in the area. Very few local acts have had the opportunity to grace the stages of these venues and certainly not with the regularity that Maritime offered.

The Justice League although considerably smaller than Maritime has long been the other venue in SF that has been safe haven for underground Hip Hop. But over the past year they to have come underfire. The complaints have been mainly due to noise and parking concerns. The JL had to go through all sorts of changes like sound proofing the entire building and limiting their advertisements so as not to attract 'certain types' of crowds. The JL has been for the most part violence free. However, with the recent shooting, opposing forces may have now found their excuse to go after them with a vengeance.