Four Square Vol. 2 takes place Friday, August 14 at The Independent, 628 Divisadero Street in San Francisco. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. and the show begins at 9 p.m. The event is 18+.
San Francisco has a weird relationship with its own culture.
The city loves talking about preserving culture, celebrating culture and investing in culture, usually immediately before someone announces that something really culturally important is being replaced by a startup that automates your thoughts so you don’t have to waste anymore time thinking.
But every once in a while, somebody actually does something about it.
On Friday, August 14, San Francisco rapper, comedian, battle rapper and man who knows Nick Cannon, Frak the Person is bringing Four Square Vol. 2 to The Independent in San Francisco.
And describing it as a "rap concert" doesn't really explain how unique this really is.
Four Square is essentially what would happen if a Bay Area hip-hop show got drunk, played Jumanji and woke up trapped inside a video game.
The concept combines live music, battle rap, comedy and theater, with rappers getting sucked into a fictional video game and completing challenges and "side quests" to escape. Those challenges can include compliment battles, freestyles using words shouted out by the audience and, naturally, fighting tech oligarch villains.
Basically, it’s not just a rap show, it’s a San Francisco rap show, which means it’s going to do shit its own way.
Photo of G-Eazy taking a photo of Frak and E-40 and that photo was taken by the talented Grady Brannen via Frak’s Instagram
And Frak has assembled a lineup that feels less like a traditional concert bill and more like someone looked at every rapper in the Bay Area and said yes.
Del the Funky Homosapien is performing.
So is Mistah F.A.B.
So are Nef the Pharaoh, Lil Kayla, Guapdad 4000, Stunnaman02, Rocky Rivera, Young Bari and Passwurdz. Mike Evans and Afterthought will host, with DJ Jenset handling the decks.
It's an absurd amount of Bay Area talent crammed into what will surely be an unforgettable night.
But that's also kind of the point.
Frak has spent much of his career operating as something resembling a human connective tissue for the Bay Area's fragmented creative scene.
The San Francisco native came up through Youth Speaks before making his name in battle rap, eventually expanding into comedy, music and television. He's appeared on Wild 'N Out, freestyled for Sway in the Morning and performed for hundreds of thousands of viewers on Kai Cenat's livestream. He's also received co-signs from people including E-40 and Wyclef Jean.
But the interesting part of Frak's career isn't necessarily where he's managed to appear.
It's that he keeps coming back here.
In an era when being a successful Bay Area artist can sometimes feel like completing an elaborate series of tasks designed to eventually allow you to move to Los Angeles, Frak has increasingly built his work around the Bay itself.
Earlier this year, he told KZSC that returning to San Francisco and working with the Family Not A Group collective made him more interested in "keeping the city alive" than leaving and attempting to make it somewhere else.
Four Square might be the clearest manifestation of that idea.
The project originally started with Frak trading four-bar verses with other artists before eventually expanding into a 16-track collaborative project — four squared, because apparently Frak is one of the few rappers who remembers middle-school math.
The first Four Square show landed at The Independent in January and turned the album into something closer to live theater. There was an actual four-square court. Rappers were introduced as characters entering a video game. There were sketches, animation, narration and surprise appearances.
Nef the Pharaoh showed up.
Stunnaman02 showed up.
Tia Nomore showed up.
1100 Himself showed up.
At some point Frak even appeared as a version of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, because apparently simply rapping songs on a stage wasn't complicated enough.
Now he's doing it again, except bigger.
And the timing feels strangely appropriate.
San Francisco is currently obsessed with artificial intelligence, virtual worlds and the idea that technology should mediate basically every human experience short of taking a shit.But… give it time. They’ll get to that too.
So perhaps the appropriate response from San Francisco's artists is to create their own video game.
Except this one has Del the Funky Homosapien in it. Which makes it way fucking cooler.
Four Square Vol. 2 takes place Friday, August 14 at The Independent, 628 Divisadero Street in San Francisco. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. and the show begins at 9 p.m. The event is 18+.
