Punctum

By George Chen

WE ARE STANDING out by the water, wondering if we'll get into the "club." The club is not actually a club; it's the Betalounge, a space out by Third Street that usually Webcasts DJ sets. The waiting-in-line ambience is heightened by chilly air, a mound of dirt prettied up by power lines, and two Porta Pottis across the street. The door lady is unfailing in her duty. Her duty is to keep me out, for I am not on a list. This would be fine under normal circumstances, when money would do the trick, but there are no paying customers here. There is only a guest list to see Gold Chains and Antye Greie-Fuchs, and despite my insistence, my name is not on it. (Full disclosure: Gold Chains is on Tigerbeat6, the label where I work.) You pay with clout. Our friend Sue lends us some, working her Jedi mind magic on the door lady. Honestly, I forgot to RSVP, but I am not going to let some in-group formality ruin my Friday night. If I am turned away, I will slink home and wonder about what music I'm missing, the gas wasted, and the social opportunities squandered as my 20s evaporate. But no – the mind trick works, the clouds part, and I am allowed inside.

I do not want to succumb to nostalgia, but when the night goes well, I get a hit of déjà vu, a secondhand buzz from my personal past – reliving social and musical awakenings in synapses that have gone numb. Once, finding a new band was like the buzz of 700 platonic crushes stuck to a little strip of magnets. Up until six years ago there was an active indie punk scene in town. Then it got diluted or boring, or at the very least, it ceased to be a scene – subgenres like hardcore, indie pop, and noise split it into factions.

Lately I've found myself having conversations about "the scene" and where it's headed. It seems a bit silly coming from a bunch of artsy farts in their latter 20s, and even more absurd coming from the young 'uns, but it's really no sillier than the entire staff of MaximumRockNRoll setting up a barbed wire fence around their punk playground. The unifying characteristics of the current S.F. underground have less to do with adherence to sound than they do with an approach. Challenging the inherent boredom of genre fealty are such varied acts as Total Shutdown and Gold Chains – whom I was lucky enough to see in the same week as Aesop Rock and El-P. As two focal points of the evolution of local music scenes, Total Shutdown and Gold Chains are the best examples I can point to as representing this merging sensibility. Maybe I'm hallucinating from sleep deprivation, but by the time I walk past the Betalounge door lady, I'm seeing the same faces I saw earlier in the week at those other shows.

After September, I began to wonder if this weird and aggressive music still had a place in the world, if any form of aggression did. Recall that in the weeks following, media sources proclaimed irony dead once and for all. Playing music at all, let alone engaging in a deconstruction of music, felt like an uncertain luxury of being 3,000 miles removed. Writing about music felt like absolutely the most insignificant act in an already parasitic enterprise. Yet since then, the viewers have gotten more serious about their joke. In this zeitgeist, it's hard to call a scene that gives so many people energy and joy "ironic." Getting freaky at Pink and Brown or Lowdown shows is not going to stop the war, we all know that, but something in the DIY ethic of these bands makes sense right now.

The scene is small. There are maybe only 50 people having this conversation about it. It's hard to say exactly what it's about, but I see the provincialism as a musical corollary to antiglobalization: we are getting back to pushing our private lives, turning neighborhoods into venues and workshops, ditching the materialism of bubble commerce. The Mission Creek Music Festival is a good example, though these days a festival is almost redundant. San Francisco is a constant festival. On any given night, the options for live music and related events tend to flood the indecisive, and new bands are forming all the time with that same drive to break down your fourth wall. Plus, with the upswing of unemployment, there are a lot of people willing and able to raise a ruckus on a weeknight, untethered by the demands of an alarm clock. As Gold Chains sings to the dense crowd at the Betalounge, "it's nice to live your life like every fucking night's the weekend."

These days, for the first time I'm aware enough of the differences in quality of life, the contrast between the "new" economy and the new-old one. Some of us are living the same, but there's less competition for resources, more psychic legroom. I much prefer this anarchic energy to the standoffish mannequin postures of the past six years of local music culture. When I was having nightmares about my office job, fomenting revolutions sounded great. The "scene" was a virtual-reality escape pod from my alienated labor – aided by the Internet, I fantasized about scenes in Providence, Melbourne, and New York, but never about where I came from. It took a lengthy dry spell to discover that in this small corner of my world, revolution has happened; new bloodless regimes are taking hold.

This isn't just about music. When I'm not too jaded to notice, the potential for transformation is everywhere, fecund.

Onstage, Gold Chains is surrounded by friends and performers drinking wine, taking turns at the microphone, and throwing roses into the audience. By the end of Gold Chains' closing theme song, "Rock the Parti," a cluster of humans are tumbling on top of one another, hoisting one another up in the air, and spinning like idiots. Afterward the MC announces, "That's the first time we've had a mosh pit here." It's about fucking time.

George Chen lives in Oakland. He is cofounder of the magazine and record label zum (www.zumonline.com). E-mail him at georgezum@yahoo.com. The Gold Chains and Antye Greie-Fuchs show was recorded for an upcoming DVD to be released by the Betalounge (www.betalounge.com).