Voices of San Jose State artists echoed in the Student Union amphitheatre Thursday night during the MOSAIC Cross Cultural Center’s “Open Mic.”
Community members were invited to attend in person, but also had remote access via YouTube livestream.
The MOSAIC’s first open mic night of the fall semester consisted of both song and spoken-word performances and is expected to return on the first Thursday of every month.
Aidyn Nguyen, an environmental and design studies sophomore, was pacing in a sequin skirt offstage as she expressed her nerves moments before she took the stage with her electric guitar, “I’m so nervous, but I should be fine.”
Nguyen put the audience in a trance with her hypnotic guitar picking, though she said the nerves didn’t completely subside when she entered the stage.
The long-time musician described her sound as “smooth low-pop,” a sound that’s becoming increasingly desired among independent artists on social media platforms including TikTok.
A string of thought-provoking, spoken-word performances detailed societal issues, culture and stories inspired by the artists’ own experiences.
With artists like Oliver Cervantes, listeners savored every line.
Cervantes, a creative writing senior, sparked jubilant roars from the audience with his reading of his own, ‘Desert Cowboy,’ a poem he wrote while ending a trip in Las Vegas before heading back to Southern California and the young woman he saw along the way.
He said the inspiration hit him like an assassin when he saw the young woman working with her hair in a ponytail.
‘Desert Cowboy’ was one of the more provocative poems read at the event as he ended his performance asking the audience if his subject wears ponytails to bed.
Cervantes is a local poetry performer at Nirvana Soul, a nearby cafe located on South 1st and San Carlos Streets.
He said he’ll continue to stage his poems at the MOSAIC’s monthly gig while also featuring at the cafe’s weekly open mic night on Thursday nights.
The crowd’s attention was then passed on to first-time performer Andy Garcia as she sang Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”
Garcia commanded the stage with the kind of confidence many only have while singing in the shower.
“I've been struggling . . . the semester’s not ideal. So I just wanted to give a little reminder that we’re all in this together and we will survive,” Garcia said, nearly out of breath from her performance.
Senior Ken Ueda-Martinez, also known by his stage name Caine Debs, silenced the audience with an announcement prior to his performance: “Full disclosure, I’m not racist.”
Ears perked up but soon relaxed as his song proved to reclaim ethnically derogatory terms and sang in celebration of his Japanese and Mexican heritage.
Debs said he was bullied in his youth for his mixed race and it was particularly difficult growing up because “you’re not supposed to express feelings in Japan and you’re supposed to do nothing but express feelings in Mexico.”
“I didn’t know who I was until I found rock ‘n’ roll and punk rock,” Debs said as he looked back at the empty stage from the top steps of the amphitheatre.
Debs plans to return for MOSAIC’s next open mic as he’s in his final semester this fall.
He said, “I plan to [make music and perform] for the rest of my life, regardless of whether it makes money or not.”
In the last year, the struggle of the coronavirus pandemic seeped through many artists’ desire to perform live.
“I want to give out that feeling of ‘no matter how lonely you feel you're never truly alone’ with good music,” Debs said. “I want to be able to make people feel like they have a friend in the room even though they're the only ones in the room.”
Thursday night’s lineup made it clear a new wave of beatniks found an engaged audience away from Fog City and in the light of Silicon Valley.
Whether listeners heard a velvet voice of poetry about generational trauma or an original song about quitting cigarettes from an artist in denim, Thursday night was the only crowd some of them have ever known.
The long-lived concept of artists molding their struggles, anxieties and even unhappiness into art for the enjoyment of others lives on, live at the MOSAIC.
