A City ≠ A Scene: Observing The Limitations Of San Francisco’S Significance As Music Signifier

Cookney, Daniel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0060-4969 (2025) A City ≠ A Scene: Observing The Limitations Of San Francisco’S Significance As Music Signifier. In: AMPS Proceedings Series, pp. 266-273. Presented at AMPS: Urban Futures - Cultural Pasts: Sustainable Cities, Cultures & Crafts, 15 July 2024 - 17 July 2024, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.

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Abstract

Leyshon et al. state that considering the role of “place” to music is to “allow a purchase on the rich aesthetic, cultural, economic and political geographies of musical language” (1995: 435). However, this paper considers the limitations of using the city as a signifier for music output - particularly should this initiate obvious comparisons to a specific moment in its history. Focusing on coverage of a group of San Francisco-based electronic dance music acts that emerged in the 1990s (Hardkiss, Young American Primitive, Dubtribe Sound System, Single Cell Orchestra, Freaky Chakra), it locates a media portrayal largely built on the city’s decades-old hippy heritage. For example, these acts were described as “an affiliation of kaleidoscopic wild riders and psyberdelic (sic) outlaws … pooling together the digi-funk hippy vibes from the psychedelic state” (Hill 1994: 55) who notably supplied “acid drenched hits of California sunshine” (1993). As Matthew notes: “to someone from the Midwest who could only read about it, San Francisco appeared to be the locus of a dreamy, idealistic, neo-psychedelic renaissance” (2014: online). While citing marketing and journalistic practices for categorisation that foreground potentially misleading connections between eras due to a shared location, this paper also observes the original 1960s hippy movement’s own difficult relationship with the media and how a dominant constructed narrative around a city, its music and its heritage that was committed to print continues to be distributed via digital platforms.