Update: The public unveiling of E-40 Way is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 21, from 10 a.m. to noon, at the corner of Del Sur and Magazine Streets in Vallejo, just outside E-40’s childhood home. City leaders will read a proclamation and issue a key to the city for the sign unveiling ceremony.
In 2015, Earl Stevens — better known around the soil as rapper E-40 — released “Magazine Street” on his album Poverty and Prosperity. And as anyone who’s listened to the linguistic fabricator throughout his multi-decade career knows, it’s impossible to list the amount of times Magazine Street has been mentioned in his music.
So it’s only right that the city of Vallejo will dedicate nearly a mile of the major thoroughfare to the entrepreneurial rap mogul by renaming it “E-40 Way.”
The decision was unanimous among Vallejo’s City Council members in July. Though the city will keep its Magazine Street signs, additional signage indicating “E-40 Way” will be added for a one-mile stretch in southern Vallejo, between Laurel St. and Old Glen Cove Road. It will run through Beverly Hills, the neighborhood where E-40 grew up with his mother and three siblings.
The decision comes 30 years after Stevens released Federal, his first studio album, which documented life in “the V” and helped pioneer an entirety new subgenre of rapping about street life in Northern California.
