By Aidin Vaziri • June 17, 2025
The Bay Area’s storied hip-hop legacy takes center stage next month with the debut of the SF Hip-Hop Festival 2025, a two-day celebration of music, technology and culture.
Scheduled to take place at the Midway on July 18-19, the festival opens Friday with Culture RenAIssance: A Hip-Hop & A.I. Symposium, featuring legendary MC Rakim as keynote speaker.
The panel will explore the evolving relationship between hip-hop and artificial intelligence, touching on ethics, innovation and equity in music tech. Rakim will also present his new fintech and AI venture, Notes, designed to empower independent artists with financial and entrepreneurial tools.
Saturday’s all-day showcase will bring together more than two dozen performers spanning eras and coasts.
Headliners include West Coast rap duo Tha Dogg Pound, marking the 30th anniversary of “Dogg Food,” and Digable Planets, currently touring in celebration of 1994’s “Blowout Comb.”
Bay Area legends Souls of Mischief, Mix Master Mike with Invisibl Skratch Piklz, RBL Posse, San Quinn and Los Rakas will join a stacked lineup reflecting the scene’s depth and diversity.
“SF Hip-Hop was founded to preserve and celebrate the rich legacy of Hip-Hop culture in our city while creating new pathways for the next generation,” said co-founder Kamel Jacot-Bell in a statement. “This moment represents the power of our community coming together to claim space, tell our stories, and shape the future we want to see.”
Naturally, the day-long festival’s primary draw is the musical lineup, with San Francisco hip-hop icons like Mix Master Mike, San Quinn, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and RBL Posse alongside up-and-comers like Paris Nights and Seiji Oda from across the Bay Bridge.
The intersection of civic policy and hip-hop may seem less prominent in San Francisco than in the East Bay, home of political rappers like Paris and the Coup. But Davis points to the long tradition of San Francisco graffiti, and the ways it’s challenged political norms in prominent spots around the city to make visible “the kinds of social justice resistance that we sometimes hear in rap from the East Bay.”
To that end, an upstairs graffiti exhibition and blackbook session on Saturday will include San Francisco artists such as Apex, Bukue and Omen2. In the hallway outside the concert hall will be an exhibit dedicated to the work of Mike “Dream” Francisco. And panel discussions, including one hosted by KQED’s Pendarvis Harshaw, will take place in a side room throughout the day.
But it’s Exhibit A, with work by Malik Seneferu, Ahmad Walker, Andrew Wilson and the Black Panther Party’s legendary artist Emory Douglas, that will provide performance backdrops to exemplify the notion — popularized in hip-hop by KRS-One — of “edutainment.” A bit of turntablism flair from Rob Swift, a bit of “Big Steppin’” from Stunnaman02, and a bit of education on San Francisco’s rates of incarceration, mental health and income inequality.
“What happened in the Fillmore, what happened to Bayview, with regard to dispossession and poverty, and the diminishing population of Black people in San Francisco … it’s a pretty intense story,” Davis says.
