By George Chen

'WHAT DO YOU think of as the San Francisco sound?"

It's like the Sphinx's riddle to me, probably loaded with an obvious answer I can't see. I could point out the clusters on my cognitive map, but the question deserves a sound-bite solution, along the lines of "Seattle had grunge" and "Detroit had techno." It also speaks to a character trait of San Francisco in general, its perpetual anxiety about its cultural status and the sense that S.F. is overlooked by Los Angeles and New York. Why is it we need a label for a sound?

Maybe I'm taking it all too personally. When I visited New York this summer, an old roommate from Oakland put me on the spot about San Francisco music, asking me who in the Bay Area was better than the current crop of New York musicians. This wasn't as neutral a question as it sounds – it was my first return trip to the city after a short stint living there four years prior. His question circled the idea that I had made a judgment error in moving back to the Bay Area, that I should have "toughed it out" in N.Y. longer.

I'd pondered this myself, with the assumption that my personal endeavors – musical, literary, and romantic – were hindered by a small imagination and thinness of skin that had me packing to go back home after experiencing the first tricklings of winter.

While I had no immediate response for him, I had to concede that there was, as always, excellent music coming out of New York and a sense of community. I thought of the NorCal transplants who'd taken well to New York soil, like TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone, whom I recently saw on The Late Late Show, or the Sac posse of !!!, who are everywhere except on TV. There was a chance that by reliving the past four years, I would be living some weird parallel N.Y. life, writing for the Village Voice or playing in a Vice-endorsed haircut band, assuming I'd lost a few pounds.

This discussion continued along the lines of me mentioning a Bay Area band and my companion trumping it with one of his local favorites. We agreed to disagree, though there's no way to really win that subjective game. He'd just never heard of anything happening in the Bay Area that I mentioned to him other than the acts on New York labels.

I could be flippant and say the San Francisco sound is defined by the likes of Third Eye Blind, Journey, and Counting Crows. These may be our biggest exports in volume. There are too many subcategories to break down into any sound, genres and micro-scenes that occasionally wander across each other's turf but mostly remain in their enclaves. Is there any way around this question without talking about the inherent exclusion in defining a scene? When one is fighting for a perceived scarcity, in this case press, it replicates the mechanics of competition, which we would otherwise move to N.Y. or L.A. to partake in.

My last night in New York was spent going to see Pig Destroyer and Octis, Mick Barr's solo project, at the Knitting Factory. It was a meathead kind of show, with mosh pit action by large, scary men whose potential for violence kept me watching from the bar. A few other S.F. expats and I gathered outside, and I made a crack about the sausagefest going on inside and how it "brat the wurst" out in everyone. I went home after trying to drum up some writing work and continued much as I have for the past four years, struggling financially and trying to contribute to my notion of a community, even if it's an illusion, in the small ways that are available to me.

I worry about becoming a dilettante, a professional amateur – a lifestyle that seems endemic to San Francisco. It's that interdisciplinary or antidisciplinary streak that seems to define the culture and the music produced here, a characteristic that can be mistaken for "quirkiness." I see the pitfall of remaining too vague, but after a full decade living here, I have yet to get a grasp on San Francisco, let alone its sounds.

I'm happy to report that Barr is planning a move from New York to San Francisco or Oakland in a few months. It seems to indicate we're doing something right.

Top 10 no. 1s

• No. 1 protest song: Wives, "Mountainous," Erect the Youth Problem (Cold Sweat)

• No. 1 song about food: I Hate You When You're Pregnant, "Furr's Is Gone" (MP3)

• No. 1 equivalent of having the war in your living room: three minutes of Cock ESP

• No. 1 heavy rock trio with organ, turntable, feedback, Ron A. on drums, and no guitars: Get Hustle

• No. 1 Rock the Moat event: Bands Against Bush, July 31

• No. 1 form of relaxation: Adam Forkner and Honey Owens's "White Rainbow" chill-out room, California College of the Arts

• No. 1 sing-along: darkened Berkeley basement with Phil Elverum

• No. 1 insane record whose full title deserves to be in print as much as possible: Kites, Royal Paint with the Metallic Gardner from the United States Helped into an Open Field by Women and Children (Load)

• No. 1 self-referential pat on the back: Oakland Tropics

• No. 1 reason to not move to Canada: ?