Culture of San Francisco - Popular Music

Popular Music

San Francisco has often hosted influential rock music trends, starting with the San Francisco Sound during the 1960s. Two of the most influential bands from that era, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, started out in San Francisco in 1965. Other groups include rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, and Journey, seminal punk band the Dead Kennedys, and alternative metal band Faith No More. It is the birthplace of thrash metal with bands such as Metallica, Testament, Exodus and latterly Machine Head. Punk, electronica, industrial, goth, and rave activity 1980s and early 1990s, was also somewhat influential. Gentrification during the late 1990s is said to have forced many performers to move away. However, San Francisco, especially in the Fillmore and Hunters Point districts, is the home of numerous rappers, including Messy Marv, RBL Posse, Rappin' 4-Tay, HughEMC, San Quinn, Andre Nickatina, Big Rich, JT the Bigga Figga, Ant Rich 415, and Paris. San Francisco DJs and electronic musicians are credited with defining the laid-back, dub-influenced sound of the West Coast house music. Prominent DJs and artists include Kaskade, Miguel Migs, Mark Farina, and DJ Garth. Dub Mission and other regular parties keep San Francisco's music scene fresh.

Famous songs about San Francisco include Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", the Scott McKenzie song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)", People Under the Stairs' "San Franciscan Nights", Chris Isaak's "San Francisco Days", Journey's "Lights", "Fake Tales of San Francisco" by the Arctic Monkeys, and "Save Me, San Francisco" by Train

Read more about this topic:  Culture Of San Francisco

Famous quotes containing the words popular music, popular and/or music:

    The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.
    George Steiner (b. 1929)

    It is said the city was spared a golden-oak period because its residents, lacking money to buy the popular atrocities of the nineties, necessarily clung to their rosewood and mahogany.
    —Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    A man in all the world’s new fashion planted,
    That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.
    One who the music of his own vain tongue
    Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)