The SF radio market bores me out of my mind with its lack of variety (I'm sure there are other smaller markets that are worse, but it's pretty bad for a major Top 20 market, in my opinion).
Face it, the kinds of people who made the Bay Area interesting have largely gone - the artists, the artisans, the people who weren't in it just for the money. As I reflect on the nearly quarter-century that I spent there, it seems that I caught the tail end of a time when there was a diversity of people and interests with interests in cultural exploration and open-mindedness. What's there now is a tech monoculture. There were a couple of pauses, first with the 2001 crash that wiped out many of the first wave of startups, then with the 2008 great recession. But the tech start-up mentality of monomaniacal focus on some business proposition or another in hopes of striking it rich came back stronger than ever. Costs went ever higher. Non-tech people first found some refuge in the East Bay, but with so much money sloshing around in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, some of that money made its way to the East Bay, too. I overheard far too many conversations from people talking about their start-up, their funding rounds, and their financial exit strategies. It wasn't just that, though - commutes became increasingly arduous and just time-consuming.
In 2019, during yet another BART commute into the city where social distancing (a term we didn't know then) consisted of being six inches apart from your fellow riders, I remember thinking to myself, "this way of life isn't sustainable." The pandemic caused another pause, but, aside from much-reduced BART ridership for reasons we won't get into here, that nose-to-the-grindstone, culture-free way of life seems to have come roaring back. I don't understand it. It now seems to be a chasing of fads - cryptocurrency last year, AI this year, and something else in 2024.
Is it little surprise, then, that Bay Area media reflected that narrowing of interests? The interesting, quirky people either adapted or left, and what remains are people with tastes and desires connected directly to the hopes of striking it rich with their start-up (when the reality really is that only the venture capitalists ultimately win, and maybe a few founders, but ordinary employees? .... nah!), and who don't have much cognitive capacity available for anything other than their generation's equivalent of background music.
It's not all tech monoculture, but you have to know where to look. It ain't south of Market, that's for sure. So on Friday, I was walking in North Beach, at the corner of Columbus and Broadway, waiting for a traffic light to change, on my way to the City Lights bookstore. As I waited, I heard music that was at once both familiar and unfamiliar. It came from eight musicians, playing classical Chinese instruments.
They were playing "Jingle Bells".
That's the kind of thing you would hear nowhere else but San Francisco. The core of the city still exists; you have to know where to look for it. Radio won't help you find it; stations are going to try to appeal to the broadest masses possible. Right now in San Francisco and the Bay Area, that means appealing to the technology monoculture and its lack of interest in anything that doesn't offer the prospect of riches.
