'THE STAIRWAY TO heaven is a ladder of surprises," St. Thomas Aquinas said, paraphrasing Aristotle. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," St. Bernard of Clairvaux said. Our own patron saint was too busy losing himself in a symphony of messianic birdcalls to e-plan any moral Travelocity reservations, but the racket of his namesake city keeps reaching for that soul-shakin', body-rockin' rainbow – while bending over backward in satanic sympathy.

Nothing original comes out of the Bay Area. Make that nothing wholly pure. We're the ultimate bricolage city – a shantytown of missionary vocations, forged identities, and corrugated tin roofs (re)built on the shaky premise of what poet John Ashbery calls "takeitapart," the ability to traffic a globalized youth market's red hots and green lights into an incandescent amber cloud all our own.

What the musical world proffers, the Bay Area bewitchingly perverts – be it the ecstatic double arabesques our big band-era elders heaped on their dancehall daze, the white-winged doves our Fillmore muezzins spooked into black ether, squawking out their love supremes – or, even now, the '90s bourgeois revolution our tattooed Shiva divas and Utilikilt-ed survival researchers haul out to Black Rock City every summer.

Sure, we sifted polychromatic lodes of platinum-selling psychedelia from the blues' muddy waters. Our tattered Joplin rags and Jeffersonic airports launched a thousand cultural zeppelins. When asked for the next big thing in middle-American apocalypse, we gladly whipped out our glistening Cockettes. We piped the nation's children into the Dead's ghostly caravans. Thousands of our citizens died for disco, even more for jazz.

But we're too busy stuffing the fourth dimension into our third ears, cruising the arena parking lot hoping to score a dime bag of chakra alignment, a heavy red balloon, a lime-wired iPod, or a twig of unburned sage for our next rave prayer circle to rest on our vinyl laurels or look back. Our speaker stacks could too easily be transformed into pillars of salt.

For me, the San Francisco sound is a Herculean effort to locate the inner self, a liquefying frenzy of repurposement through music, movement, being, and sound. We lose ourselves to find ourselves. We've already located our Holy Greil (Marcus) – but, alas, we're still lookin' for girl. We're the windows, not the Doors.

The result is an indefinable vibrato, an existential yowl encompassing the heaven and hello of personal transcendence, firmly modulating in our throats.

The three most recent musical rowboats said to have shoved off from the Bay Area's shores – East Bay punk, blip-hop, and turntablism – are self-empowered, sonically warped vehicles covering three decades of innovation in their respective genres, rearview mirrors tilted crazily upward at their either/oarsmen.

EBP kicks and whines against punk's political atonality, math rock's cold intellect, emo's runny mascara, and grunge's howdy-doodyism to create a one-size-fits-all shattered pop persona that reached its postironic apotheosis when Seinfeld's sappy sayonara was scored by Green Day.

Del's funky homosapienism, crying out like Schrödinger's lost little pussy in a world of Quannum mechanics, pelted by a thousand Brooklyn backpacks, followed the roll of "authenticity" 's Eurydice back to the Orphic Hades of his bedroom eight-track. And turntablism? It'll get back to you once it's done skratching its invisibl pikl.

Still, all three were their own divine maelstrom of illusive sonic truth. We may never find ourselves – or lose ourselves completely – but it's surprising how divinely well paved the aural journey within is.

Top 10

• Goapele, "Closer," Even Closer (Columbia/Skyblaze)

• Donnie, "Cloud 9 (Quentin Harris Mix)" (Giant Step/Motown)

• Interpol, Antics (Matador)

• Jill Scott, "Golden (Yuki Shimotakahara Mix)" (Strada/White Label)

• Mos Def, "Ghetto Rock," The New Danger (Geffen)

• Blu Cantrell, "Sleep in the Middle (Dance Mix)" (White Label)

• DJ Gregory, "Elle" (Faya Combo)

• Earth, Wind, and Fire, "All in the Way (Reel People Mix)" (Kartel)

• Mis-Teeq, "Can't Get It Back," Mis-Teeq (Warner Bros.)

• Red Light Sting, "That's Not My Girlfriend, Those Are Girls Shaving" (Sound Virus)