San Jose, California:
Holy Mountain of Technology, Underdog of Art
San Jose, for those who don't know, lies about a 50 minute drive south of San Francisco and is the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley. With a population of almost a million it's actually quite a bit larger than it's famous neighbor to the north but you'd never know it to look at the place. Its downtown lies in the airport's flight path which means all the buildings have to be relatively low and it's the quintessential sprawling western American urban model—more like a gigantic suburb than a real city. It's also a very new city overall, partially because earthquakes keep knocking the old buildings down, but mostly because, before it was home to the likes of eBay, Adobe and Cisco, San Jose was largely farmland.
So why on earth would I choose to write about this place in terms of music? Well, I lived there for a while a few years ago and you know how, once you've owned a certain kind of car you can't help noticing that make and model every time you're near one? That's a little like my experience with music from San Jose. Before I lived there I couldn't name a single band from that city. Afterwards I kept noticing them. I make no claims about quality here, I'm just going to throw the names out there.
The bigger artists from the city are an odd hodgepodge of styles really. Smashmouth and Papa Roach are two of the more well-known examples—not exactly a strong selling point but something you might expect from a sprawling California quasi-suburban metropolis. On the other hand, weirdo experimentalists Xui Xui call the city home as well. Garage rockers The Count 5 were also from there and were the first band from San Jose to have a hit—with their song "Psychotic Reaction". The Doobie Brothers and Chocolate Watchband popped up not long after. Peanut Butter Wolf grew up there, and during my stint in old SJ I even had the pleasure of seeing him do a DJ set at a bar right across the street from my apartment. Mathcore goofballs Heavy Heavy Low Low hail from there as well, as do doom metal legends Sleep.
These last two bands I mentioned lead me to my personal experience with the San Jose music scene: loud music. As a person who spent considerable time perusing the "musicians" section of craigslist while I lived there, I can tell you there are a hell of a lot of metal bands there as well as a good amount of punk. This was further demonstrated to me both in hearing the other bands at the practice space I wound up at, as well as from the sounds emanating from the clubs downtown, such as Voodoo Lounge (now closed), Caravan Lounge and Blank Club. Caravan Lounge in particular was a wonderful, slightly seedy spot for local metal.
I assume it isn't the beautiful Mediterranean climate and sunny skies of San Jose that made people want to kick up such a ruckus. I assume it also isn't all the technology and wealth. Maybe it's those countless miles of suburbia that were so often traffic-clogged that you would frequently get to say, Guitar Center, only to have to wait for a parking space to free up in the lot. Or maybe, just maybe, it's a kind of second city primal scream. Maybe, like a couple other cities I've lived in, it was the bellow of the overlooked, a demand to be acknowledged. Maybe it was even a sort of first cry of a newborn, for a new city whose artistic zenith has yet to come.