Image via Grant Wild
Dr. Dre’s The Chronic being listed as one of the best Bay Area rap albums is why Alan Chazaro doesn’t trust anything generated by AI.
On a blissfully warm summer night in San Francisco — on the eastern end of a two-block constellation of old school sushi stalls, manga shops, indoor izakayas, ramen holes, and one of the oldest bonsai nurseries on the West Coast — Seiji Oda is gigging himself into a state of higher being.
The Oakland-bred rapper specializes in spiritual-hyphy transcendence. That evening at Japan Center Malls, he blessed KOHO, a community workshop and events space hosting a vintage pop-up market. Flash tattoos were being inked for damn-near-free; passion fruit lychee teas were being distributed. It was the closing act of Seiji’s month-long California tour, which kicked off four weeks prior on a boat beneath the nearby Bay Bridge.
As the sun set over Japantown, a phalanx of Baydestrians converged to see the Japanese-Irish-Panamanian spitter celebrate his album at-the-moment, a gentle gigg… It’s an apt name for Seiji, an ancestral spirit who is three parts tranquil, one part “18 Dummy.”
Seiji’s music is like sitting in a gentle Japanese garden hidden inside a bustling metropolis while Bay Area rap slaps somewhere in the distant background. It’s the coalescence of airy vocals, lo-fi bells, wind instruments, blapping Oakland basslines and the upbeat funk of 1970s Japanese city pop. It’s at once relaxing and energizing — a combination that, on paper, sounds unexpected, if not obtuse. But once you embrace that oddness, as Seiji does, you’ll reach a certain kind of Bay Area zen unlike any other.
His artistry was on full display in the large-windowed venue overlooking the chaos of Post Street. In typical Seiji fashion, the set was barebones, accompanied by only a keyboardist, a microphone, flute samples and low bass thumping from speakers positioned on the concrete floor. A projector displayed a video of two Koi fish circling each other in an infinite loop that glowed on a concrete wall behind him.
At one point during the shindig, Seiji’s father quietly emerged from the crowd to deliver an operatic duet with his son (most of his family was in attendance, including his sister who had a booth where participants learned how to carve stamps from small blocks of rubber attached to wood). As a new father myself, watching Seiji’s dad harmonize with him in real-time was one of the more stirring moments I’ve experienced at a grassroots rap show. It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever see again. You kind of had to be there to understand the magnitude of an aging man bonding with his son. But even if you weren’t there, take my word for it: Seiji Oda’s performances have the kind of gravitational energy that only an emcee who is plugged into the universe like Mace Windu is with The Force can achieve.
Lately, he’s been getting major shine, too — racking up thousands of views on his posts and getting co-signs from artists like SZA, Jhene Aiko, G-Eazy, and ALLBLACK.
He’s not new to the spotlight, though. In 2017, Seiji debuted a joint R&B-ish project GOLD with fellow Oaklander 247zé. In 2018, Seiji’s younger brother, lil ricefield, hit over 13 million views with the music video for “TRAPANESE,” a parody-filled banger about glamorized Asian American living in which Seiji appears as a bucket hat-wearing sensei and sage lyricist. He has followed all that up with a slew of memorable LPs and EPs, including lofi // HYPHY; ORA // 太陽; LOST ONES; aero4ever; and most recently, LAST SUMMER.
Like many Bay Area rappers of yore — think Mac Dre wearing a full genie costume, or E-40 giving himself 5,000 nicknames — Seiji doesn’t shy away from his playful side. On a recent “A Trip to the Corner Store” episode, he apologizes to Sade for his womanizing antics, then proceeds to invite her over from across the Atlantic — if, perchance, she happens to be tuning in from the United Kingdom. With a healthy dosage of playerish, Bay Area weirdness and élan, he floats over the jazzy, minimalist beat like an audio embodiment of Icecold 3000, the Oakland turf dancer who glides across pavement with saucy footwork and double-jointed elbows that twirl into the fifth dimension. A liquid flow, some might say.
So, fresh off a weekend performance with HBK heavyweights Kool John and P-Lo at The Independent in Frisco and back at his apartment in L.A., Seiji teleported himself onto Zoom to sprinkle us with his eccentric serenity and collar-popping game.