The grim imagery in Yase’s and Llama’s music runs counter to the popular idea of San Francisco as a playground for the tech industry’s elite. It also calls attention to the fact that the city has become not only an expensive place to live, but a divided one. Gentrification has displaced residents, transformed neighborhoods, and, in the last couple of years, been tied to police violence and officer-involved killings. After Mario Woods, Alex Nieto, and other people of color were shot and killed by law enforcement, activists known as the Frisco 5 went on a hunger strike in April, and demanded that S.F. Mayor Ed Lee take action against the San Francisco Police Department.

When I spoke to one of those activists, Ilyich Sato, who is known in the Bay Area rap community as Equipto, he had just been discharged from the hospital, after calling off the hunger strike, which lasted 17 days. “We went to town hall meetings, we had sit downs, we had disruptions,” Sato said over the phone from San Francisco. “We felt like we had exhausted every avenue as far as how to approach this situation.” Sato sees recent instances of police violence as a battle being waged against S.F’s most marginalized citizens. “It’s ethnic cleansing,” he said, characterizing the way the city’s demographics have transformed over time. “Slowly but surely, they’re wiping entire communities and cultures off the map.” A week after our conversation, SFPD fatally shot Jessica Williams, an unarmed black woman, and Police Chief Greg Suhr resigned.

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Though they were born and raised there, neither Lil Yase nor Llama Llama have performed in San Francisco. Yase told me he resents being labeled a Bay Area rapper. He said his own work, distributedly largely through social media, is more influenced by the Gucci Mane-birthed Atlanta scene, and Chief Keef’s viral rise out of Chicago public housing. “They localize you when you’re from the Bay,” he explained. Stylistically, Yase’s music shows this resentment and hints at his desire to be included in a larger narrative. “In other places, it seems like everybody fucks with each other and collaborates — they help their people evolve.”



While some are frustrated by the perceived ceiling for Bay Area rappers, others in the community are working to ensure that past mistakes on the business end are not repeated. “I felt like the one thing that we always lacked as a community was a structure and a framework for artists to really be successful,” Ghazi Shami told me in May as we sat in the conference room of the San Francisco offices of EMPIRE Distribution. A distribution and record label hybrid, EMPIRE counts artists ranging from established stars like T.I. to local up-and-comers, like Yase and Llama, among their clients. Shami grew up in S.F.’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. Before founding EMPIRE in 2012, he worked for a decade as a producer and sound engineer, collaborating with guys like San Quinn and Messy Marv. In 2006 he landed a job with one of the first independent distribution companies to partner with iTunes, INgrooves Music Group. “I started looking at the marketing campaigns and people’s contracts with others distributors,” he recalled. “I realized [the distribution model for Bay Area rappers] was not set up to win — this was set up to barely stay relevant.”