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Green Day’s Dookie yielded three number-one singles for the group and the first of several Grammys for the band. When the acoustic Green Day ballad ‘Time of Your Life’ was featured in the last episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, the punk world sneered in unison, but the group won back admiration in 2004 with the dark social critique of American Idiot. Since the early success of their gold album Punk in Drublic, San Francisco–based NOFX avoided Green Dayish derision by staying on an independent label and recording an exceedingly sloppy show at Slim’s Click here called I Hear They’ve Gotten Worse Live! – winning mosh-pit props from their punk base and racheting up their record sales to $6 million without the help of a sitcom.

Punk continues to evolve in San Francisco, with queercore success of Pansy Division, the brass-ballsiness of Latin ska-punk La Plebe, and all-girl, all-badass rockers the Donnas. It may not be ‘traditional’ punk (isn’t that an oxymoron anyway?), but it’s very San Francisco.

Jazz

Ever since house bands and player pianos pounded out ragtime hits to distract Barbary Coast audiences from bar-room brawls and gunshots, San Francisco has had a romance with jazz. Today, the SF Jazz Festival is among the nation’s best jazz festivals, attracting the leading innovators, interpreters and improvisers.

For decades, the city was besotted with bebop and West Coast jazz innovated by the legendary Dave Brubeck Quartet in the 1950s. Brubeck’s groovy, mathematically complex rhythmic shifts, combined with Paul Desmond’s supercool bossa nova saxophone style, had San Francisco hepcats finger-snapping their approval, and made Time Out one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. Bebop had its disciples among the Beats, and such is the continued devotion to the work of John Coltrane in particular that he’s revered as a saint at the African Orthodox Church of St John Coltrane. San Francisco’s ’50s jazz scene saw recordings by Miles Davis and frequent tour stops by Billie Holliday, and it’s memorably chronicled in Kerouac’s On the Road.

Starting in the ’60s, the SF jazz scene exploded into a kaleidoscope of styles. Devotees of trumpeter Don Cherry followed his work with Ornette Coleman’s avant-garde ensemble, while Dixieland band Turk Murphy developed a following with roots jazz fans. At the legendary Yoshi’s Click here and other jazz clubs around town Click here, tempos shift from Latin jazz to klezmer, acid jazz to swing. Local jazz innovators like Broun Fellinis regularly share the bill with hip-hop groups at local clubs and street festivals, and jazz traditionalists have shared the bill at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Even listeners not familiar with jazz will recognize the work of native San Franciscan Vince Guaraldi, whose score for A Charlie Brown Christmas has become the beloved antidote to cloying Christmas carols.

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CINEMA & TELEVISION

The local film and TV industry is frequently referred to as ‘Hollywood North’ – and ooh, how they hate that. San Francisco doesn’t do sitcoms, though many pretend to take place here (the city is hereby absolved of all responsibility relating to the Olsen twins and the cheesy ’80s Full House), and only the odd MythBusters episode, Food Network show or HGTV home-design special bother to do location shooting here. What the city does do are standout public TV programs at powerhouse PBS station KQED and local ethnic media programs in dozens of languages, ranging from Persian to Portuguese. The local film industry would prefer to keep a respectable distance from Los Angeles so that it can concentrate on making documentary films and Sundance contenders, minus the paparazzi and studio-mandated happy endings.

Well, it’s a little late for that. The Bay Area has been home to big-name directors and producers and a liberal sprinkling of movie stars since the 1970s, and there’s no reason to expect that this will change anytime soon. American Zoetrope, the production company of Godfather auteur Francis Ford Coppola and producer of Sofia Coppola films such