Oakland's 'Black Misfits' Concerts Build Bridges, Break Ground

“Everybody wants you to be black and positive,” says Maya Songbird. “Yet no one offers you a door or a window to escape white supremacy.”

Oakland’s Black Misfits music festival, a free monthly concert showcase which she co-hosts with the equally eclectic local singer Tyler Holmes, is her gesture toward that window.

Maya Songbird is a sexually-spiritually charged and sonically groundbreaking chanteuse who is building bridges between long-standing Bay Area black communities and an increasingly diverse noise and experimental music scene.

It’s not unusual to see Maya on four or five billings every month on both sides of the Bay, or on a West Coast tour with avant-garde musicians on the Ratskin Records label. Though typically focused on instrumental music, the local electronic imprint will soon feature new material from Holmes as well.

We’re standing outside of the Night Light, a popular club near Oakland’s Jack London Square, in between acts. She notes that seven years ago this was the site of her first-ever live performance. The audience’s warm reception gave her the confidence to launch a music career, and now she’s devoting her efforts to continuing that process.

Even with the rising stardom among mostly white and Latinx electronica nerds, it wasn’t enough for Maya; there was still new ground to be broken for local black musicians. Her monthly Black Misfits showcase is borne of a desire to shatter expectations for what black arts should be.

“Even though we invented punk and rock ‘n’ roll, we’re boxed into a category where we can only contribute R&B and soul music,” Maya notes. “I wanted to open a lane for black artists who are not afraid to be experimental in their art, where they can let down the burden of these stereotypes—of what being black is—and start a whole new world.”

For the organizers, moving to the Night Light’s cover-free downstairs lounge was crucial for making their endeavor sustainable. “Now that I don’t have to worry about an attendance quota, I’m able to pay the artists, which is very important for them. If you’re just starting out, being paid for your art is very important for inspiring you to come back and do it again.”

Typically, new performers are relegated to the opening acts of shows, when audience tends to be smallest. Not so here. That night, the singer Zero Charisma made her live debut before a small yet captive audience—but not after being primed with the dazzling wordsmithing of local rapper Kniqi Knados.

Maya stressed that supporting local rap artists feels more critical than ever now, amid reports that the City of Oakland has routinely discriminated against hip-hop performances with harsh, overly punitive oversight.

“It’s really important to be able to offer a safe space for queer artists, black artists—just people in general—to enjoy themselves, and enjoy new art.”

As though to emphasize her point, our interview was cut short by a thundering bass sound ushering us back inside. Maya’s friend Oji Edutainment, one of the most bizarre rappers in the Bay—if not the world—had started his set with no prior warning.

Oji is at once a total outsider and a native son: born and raised in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood and steeped in the region’s unique rap legacy, he frequently collaborates on his recordings with vocalists from as far South India and East Africa. His complex, rhythmically impeccable freestyles often delve into spontaneous speaking-in-tongues.

For Oji, it’s an “inner divinity” that he’s sharing with the audience, and the audience responds in kind. During his set at the Night Light, cloaked by a mysterious mask and overeager fog machine, the rapper nevertheless made himself truly vulnerable by opting to perform mostly in a capella to circumvent technical issues he had with the club’s sound mixing. Rather than being disappointed, the crowd erupted into frantic cheers.

Therein lies a core tenet of local music at large: only at his most idiosyncratic does Oji seem to be truly at home. There’s no one else even remotely like him, but what else did you expect? This is the Bay Area and these are its Black Misfits.

Holmes, too, breaks through genre boundaries that had seemingly no right to exist in the first place. This being the first performance of The Tyler Holmes Band, the staunchly nonbinary singer was backed by guitar, clarinet, and a drum machine. Holmes embellished their otherwise minimalist songs influenced as much by Mariah Carey as Marilyn Manson with stabs of dissonant piano chords and feedback loops from a tape recorder.

It wasn’t until well after midnight that Maya Songbird even touched a microphone. By the time she started her traditional opening salvo “I Believe in Magic”—where the audience repeats the title at Maya’s instruction—I found myself thinking, “well, no s*** we do; we’re here, aren’t we?”

Songbird and Holmes have achieved something exceedingly rare amid Oakland’s ruthlessly prejudiced media landscape: a petri dish of sorts for new artists to feed off the audience’s rapturous approval (and generous tips).

Unsurprisingly, the experiment works. Performers, bolstered by a supportive crowd, grow and challenge themselves with riskier material. And the audiences keep coming back for more.