'E-40 Way' To Be Unveiled in Vallejo as City Honors Famed Rapper

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.

Naming streets after influential rappers has of late become a rite of passage in the Bay Area, with East Oakland recently honoring Todd “Too Short” Shaw with his own strip of pavement along Foothill Boulevard and 2Pac posthumously receiving a “Tupac Shakur Way” commemoration on Oakland’s MacArthur Boulevard. The addition of “E-40 Way” only further cements the influential role rappers have played in our region’s cultural landscape.

For a genre of music known for street credibility, Stevens has always garnered respected among his peers. He’s also an advocate known for his community work, philanthropy and mentorship of younger artists — factors presented before the vote took place at July city council meeting.

This article originally published on Aug. 1, 2023.