Wealth & Money Quote by Les Claypool

San Francisco gets framed here as a city with a split personality: still “interesting,” still “culturally diverse,” but now filtered through the glare of money. Les Claypool isn’t doing a policy argument; he’s doing what musicians do best - taking the temperature of a place by describing how it feels to live inside it. The repeated “still” is the tell. It’s reassurance and elegy at once, a way of admitting change without surrendering to pure nostalgia.

Claypool’s phrasing makes the shift sound almost like a weather pattern moving in: “a lot of money,” “a lot of dot com’s.” Those aren’t neutral details. They’re shorthand for a new power structure - who can afford space, who gets heard, what kinds of weirdness are permitted. In a city that once marketed itself as a haven for misfits and scenes, the tech boom becomes a cultural force not because it invents something better, but because it prices the old ecology out. Diversity becomes something you can celebrate in theory while eroding it in practice through rent, closures, and homogenized taste.

The cleverness is in the restraint. He doesn’t say “ruined,” doesn’t moralize, doesn’t posture as a gatekeeper. That understatement reads as credibility: a local voice recognizing that San Francisco’s brand of creative freedom has always been in tension with capital, and that the dot-com era just turned the dial. “A little different” lands like a musician’s version of grief - the groove is off, the room still exists, but the sound has changed.