Okay Kaya at The Independent (San Francisco, CA)

Okay Kaya summons the household gods of the 18-34 demographic at The Independent on Thursday, 27 April 2023.

Zannie suppresses the central nervous system to relieve stress rapidly in the opening slot.

Hump Day News goes West to San Francisco.

Hump Day News landed in foggy San Francisco to cover a short spate of shows. Can we shake off our East Coast bias and hear with fresh ears what sound sounds like on the other side of the continent?

It’s indie music in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, not gamelans in Gambia. Not a problem. Musicians and clubs hit the same beats in San Francisco as they do in Boston: social media promotion (“ticket link in bio!”), bored door guys, too many IPAs on the beer list, peeved sound techs, friends and family who leave right after Jenny or Johnny or Josie performs.

Still, there’s a hint of something different in the air blowing through the bones of Alcatraz. Even with all the bloody carnage wrought within the city limits by Silicon Valley bozos, there’s a space for San Francisco bohos.

Hump Day News broke out the notepad and knocked back a few beers to find out…

Crossed paths with a girl from Stockton, California. She was a bit stoned and worried about her parking spot. I didn’t realize until later that Stockton was a good ninety-minutes in the car, at least, which had to make her one of the most committed Okay Kaya fans in The Independent.

Or maybe not? She seemed a bit blasé about music in general. Exhausted, she said, by her playlists. One thousand songs, she said, was her limit for sound artifacts she cared about. And she hit that mark a while back.

What drew her to the show then? (Me, still not understanding how utterly fucking drawn to the show she was, having driven all the way from Stockton.) Something about Okay Kaya, the moniker for New Jersey’s Kaya Wilkins, a Norwegian-American model, actress, and musician signed to Jagjaguwar.

Wilkin’s portfolio of glamor sends up the kind of smoke signal that wanders farther than a California wildfire. Especially along the electronic corridors of 18-34 digital natives. You can definitely smell the cinders from your stuffy bedroom in the wastelands of the Golden State interior.

The girl from Stockton couldn’t resist the bill because of who was on stage as much as any music they played. Two or three strong, independent, leading females, who filled 80% of the room with not much more than a karaoke rig. The music was incidental.

More important for her was making the trip.

Alone.

To prove she could do it.

Would do it.

Rehearsing the day that she leaves Stockton for good.

Zannie

Zannie performed as a one-person bedroom glam apostle. Cindy Sherman meets Sean Nicholas Savage.

They segued effortlessly from microphone sing-a-longs to pre-recorded backing tracks, to guitar-led pop/rock ditties. Their finger picking showed some rootsy know-how, but there was no mistaking the central thrust of their set, which was 90% attitude over sound.

Shades of Morrissey at Top of the Pops, shaking a blue gardenia at the crowd. They didn’t make any fuss about announcing the last song as the last song. When they were finished, they simply disappeared.

Okay Kaya

Okay Kaya’s set played out like a senior thesis at Hampshire College.

The New Jersey native Kaya Wilkins set up a wooden tripod, stage left, with a hanging platform full of knick-knacks you’d win playing Skee-Ball at the Jersey Shore. She would later introduce the gallery of broken toys living within the tripod as her “band.”

True enough, she performed solo above a multi-layered sediment of backing tracks. But she wasn’t alone. There was a partner on stage, possibly a medicine woman, who filmed a live feed of the entire performance that was projected at the back of the stage, à la Digital Awareness.

At some point Wilkins announced that she had “an urge to stroke a rug.” Which, presumably, she did. There must have been a swatch of shag carpet on stage with all the other toys. And she took her time working through the secrets of each magical artifact, searching around the stage for a comfy spot like it was a sofa in her living room.

Included in the set list was her single “Snacks,” which the crowd ate up. They showed even more interest in “Psych Ward.” At each chorus the crowd knew when to chime in: “...in the psych ward…in the psych ward…in the psych ward.”

You can bet the girl from Stockton was singing along.