San Francisco - Alison Bing [24]
Funk & Hip-Hop
The ’60s were perhaps best summed up by freaky-funky, racially integrated San Francisco supergroup Sly and the Family Stone in their creatively spelled 1969 number-one hit: ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).’ San Francisco’s ’70s funk was mostly reverb from across the bay in Oakland, where Tower of Power worked a groove with taut horn arrangements. All this trippy funk worked its way into the DNA of the Bay Area hip-hop scene, spawning the jazz-inflected free-form Charlie Hunter Trio and the infectious wokka-wokka baseline of rapper Lyrics Born. Oakland’s MC Hammer was an ’80s crossover hip-hop hitmaker best known for inflicting harem pants on the fashion world, though his influence can be felt in the bouncing, hyperactivity of E-40. Political commentary and pop hooks became an East Bay hip-hop signature with the breakaway Billboard-chart hits of Michael Franti and Spearhead, Blackalicious and the Coup.
But the Bay Area is still best known as the home of arguably the world’s most talented and notorious rapper of all: Tupac Shakur. He became a victim of his own success in Las Vegas in 1996, when an assailant out to settle the increasingly violent East Coast/West Coast gangsta rap rivalry fatally shot him. San Francisco rapper San Quinn got his start opening for Tupac but takes a less hard line, remixing the 1967 Mamas and the Papas hit ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ into his ‘San Francisco Anthem’ and adding a bougie twist: ‘We got the cable car/but my car got cable.’
Punk
London may have been more political and Los Angeles more hardcore, but San Francisco’s take on punk was just weirder. The New Wave and punk scene took root in San Francisco in the late 1970s, and Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra ran for mayor in 1979 with a platform written on the back of a bar napkin: ban cars, set official rates for bribery and force businesspeople to dress as clowns. With a motto ‘There’s Always Room for Jello,’ he received 6000 votes; his political endorsement is still highly prized in mayoral races.
Biafra was the ringleader of a three-ring circus in the ’70s that included the Avengers (founded by San Francisco Art Institute grad Penelope Houston), Crime (whose 1976 song ‘Hotwire My Heart’ was the first US punk single, later covered by Sonic Youth), and noise/punk innovators Flipper (formed from the remains of Negative Trend, which also yielded post-punk dub masters Toiling Midgets). Post-punk kicked off locally with Marin’s precocious proto–New Waver Todd Rundgren and power-popping Flamin’ Groovies, whose 1976 cult-hit album Shake Some Action critics call the first New Wave album. But for oddity it’s hard to top art-rockers the Residents, whose identities remain unknown after three decades and 60 records’ worth of strange sounds, all while wearing giant eyeballs over their heads.
Search & Destroy was San Francisco’s poorly photocopied and totally riveting chronicle of the ’70s punk scene as it happened from 1977 to 1979, starting with an initial run financed with $100 from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and morphing into V Vale’s seminal ’zine RE/Search in the 1980s.
Today, punk’s not dead in the Bay Area – in fact, it’s getting mainstream radio play. The East Bay’s one-two punch of ska-inflected Rancid and Berkeley’s Green Day brought punk staggering out of the underground and blinking into the glare of the mass-media spotlight in the mid-’90s. Recorded in three weeks,