How the Web Series and Album ‘Rent Check’ Are Fueling a ‘San Francisco Renaissance’

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n a Thursday night in rapper-producer Afterthought’s home studio in the Fillmore, he, fellow musician Baghead and comedian Mike Evans Jr. are plotting out the weekend’s itinerary. It’s the two-year anniversary of their 17-member artist collective, Family Not a Group (FNG), and there are Costco trips to be made (they’re cooking jambalaya for 100 people for their anniversary party at El Rio) and a half-dozen friends’ DJ gigs to hit up.

Afterthought is still jet-lagged from his tour in Europe, and Baghead hasn’t even had the chance to take off his nametag from the school where he and Evans work by day. The three are tired and hungry, yet fueled by the excitement of dreams within reach — it’s all in a day’s work for up-and-coming creatives who were born, raised and working hard to stay rooted in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S.

That sense of hope and precarity is the backdrop of Rent Check, a new web series starring Evans as a fictional version of himself — a relatable, tie-dye-wearing striver trying to make it in San Francisco. Evans started writing it in 2019, and the project catalyzed the formation of FNG, who came together during the recording of the accompanying Rent Check album in 2021. In the two years since, FNG’s momentum seems to have grown exponentially: the crew’s many endeavors have had a lift-all-boats effect for young, diverse artists from the City, and the energy is contagious.

“A lot of people who are around us think about us as having elevated to a level or whatever,” says Afterthought, who executive produced the Rent Check album with Evans and Baghead. “But we still have no money, and most of us work regular jobs in addition to being artists. It’s the hardest position where it’s like, ‘Do I quit and be so uncertain?’ — which is basically what Rent Check is dealing with.”

The community-funded web series was a huge, collective effort. Evans co-directed Rent Check with Jules Retzlaff, and the small, independent Surge Media Collective’s Jill Hill and Annie Aguirre came on as producers. The cast includes many FNG members and standout Bay Area musicians like Stunnaman02 and La Doña. After its YouTube release in May, the show will get a proper celebration Nov. 4 at the Brava Theater with a screening and live performance of the Rent Check album, which hits streaming platforms on Nov. 3.

“I think it’s very Bay Area and of us to have been like, ‘We’re gonna do this shit grassroots and do this shit on our own,’” Evans says.

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n Rent Check’s surreal vignettes, as the fictional Evans communes with a hyphy ghost and battles bullies on the basketball court, the 12 episodes coalesce into an absurd, hilarious and at-times poignant story about a young man’s search for meaning and belonging.

Amid gross-out gags and raunchy jokes, Rent Check is sophisticated in how it blends social and political commentary with humor, building on Bay Area shows and films like Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs’ Blindspotting, Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo and Joe Talbot’s Last Black Man of San Francisco (whose star, Jimmie Fails, plays a fitness coach in Rent Check). Race, gentrification and inequality are the focal points of those works, but Rent Check doesn’t strain to overly explain itself. Instead, social injustices are the backdrop of Evans’ misadventures, and, by trusting the viewer to get it, the show is able to take the conversation to interesting places.

A particularly hard-hitting episode called Pimp of the Year explores a viewpoint often heard on the street level of Bay Area activism, about the limitations of electoral politics. While smoking weed dressed as Spiderman on Halloween, days before the 2020 election, the fictional Evans argues the importance of voting blue to two friends (in cheesy zebra-print coats and dollar-sign necklaces) who insist that all politicians are pimps.

“A president never change shit in the hood, bro,” says a character played by rapper-activist Rich Iyala. “Never! As far as I’m concerned, it’s just another white man in power.”

To Evans, the encounter hasn’t lost its relevance in 2023. “In all reality, it’s like no matter who the president is, they’re still a part of the same fucked up machine that’s literally killing babies across across the world right now,” Evans says. “In that episode I play the character of the typical person that believes in the two-party system, that believes all Democrats are our saviors.”

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hese political conversations aren’t just happening on screen. Evans met Iyala on a trip to Sacramento to protest statewide police brutality, and many of the Rent Check collaborators have a history of boots-on-the-ground social justice activism. Evans connected with Rent Check series co-director Jules Retzlaff while campaigning for justice for Mario Woods, who was killed by the San Francisco Police Department in 2015. And in 2016, Retzlaff and Rent Check album executive producer Baghead were two of the four San Francisco State University students who participated in a hunger strike in response to cuts to the ethnic studies department.

The crew’s politics come across poignantly on the Rent Check album track “Cut the Stimmy” by EaSWay, Frak, Afterthought and Kaly Jay (who plays the aforementioned hyphy ghost), where a chorus of “fuck Joe Biden” is rambunctious enough to incite a mosh pit.

“The way we’re pushing the song now is trying to express that politics is about who has right to food and water, who has a right to shelter, who doesn’t,” says Baghead. “Whether it’s gentrification in San Francisco or what’s happening in Palestine, we see the establishment as people who continue to support the structures that are in place now that will put profit — put wealth, capital — over people’s lives.”

The Rent Check crew and FNG might look like they’re all about having a good time on the surface, but there’s a deeper purpose to bringing people together through laughter. After so many working class people and artists have been pushed out, Baghead calls what they’re doing the “San Francisco renaissance.”

“Really what I want for us is more stability in our artistic careers and in San Francisco — that’s the constant fight that we’re battling,” says Afterthought, noting the album and many FNG projects wouldn’t have happened without his parents generously opening their home to their huge crew of 20-somethings. “I get a parking ticket now and it’s like, all right, well, I gotta pay for the parking ticket, or I pay for this music video.”

“We have hella fun, but we’re still creating music in spaces where we’re critically thinking about what’s happening and what our role is as a people,” Baghead adds, “What can we do, you know? And doing it from a place of knowing that we deserve to have joy.”

The Rent Check film screening and concert takes place at the Brava Theater in San Francisco on Nov. 4. Tickets and details here.