Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
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my best to decipher what the guests were talking about, and they were mostly chatting about Tanztheater or national politics, while smoking and drinking Rhine white wine. At the end of the evening, as the artist was leaving, she decided to give us a small performance; she took out of her bag a small bar of metal and started banging on one of her rebar artworks on the stairs. This went on for minutes. The noise was loud, repetitive, and mesmerising. I didn’t understand exactly what was happening, and I was not aware of the fact that not far from there (actually just 30 kilometres from there, in Düsseldorf), Die Krupps’ Jürgen Engler was banging on something quite similar onstage. However, I sort of understood that the particular noise of rusty metal on rusty metal had something to do with what surrounded me, with the empty factories, the red brick walls, the rusty iron bridges, the towering chimneys, and the Schwebebahn (suspension monorail) I was taking every day to school, as well as with the people who had lived and were living there. I was fascinated by industrial materiality and by the patina of the past that covered industrial architecture; at the same time, I could sense its atmospheric appeal and ability to inspire and enable cultural production in general and excruciating noise in particular.
What I experienced on a staircase in Wuppertal somehow shaped my understanding of what I will call here ‘industrial sensibility’ and my interest towards sounds, noises, and places, without even mentioning my record collection. In fact, popular music genres such as hardcore punk, house, industrial, ‘post-punk’, and heavy metal share a common origin in the decaying industrial cities of the late 1970s, in and outside Europe. Music critics and fans alike canonised and understood these genres as cinematic scores for grey, gloomy, depressive industrial environments or for their evocation. It is apparently logical to think of an organic relationship between deindustrialisation and this kind of music production, and to establish it through a reference to decaying industrial cities, industrial noises, and rhythms of the factory.
Later on, already a working adult in 2008, I survived the global financial crisis, although its effects still linger on today in many countries in terms of political instability, the adoption of austerity policies, and the European sovereign-debt crisis. Especially in the beginning of the crisis, several articles and cultural commentaries about a so-called recession culture appeared (Shaw 2009; Senior 2009; Linn 2009). According to these articles, the economy was apparently inspiring a lot of cultural production, ranging from The Simpsons episodes to whole new HBO series, and was influencing lifestyle choices, revamping DIY, and making people more civic-minded. These articles envisioned a connection between ‘bad times’ and a vital and exciting cultural production, although sounds in general and music in particular were somehow missing. Other articles, which also started appearing in connection with the recession, looked at cultural signifiers from the so-called roaring twenties and from the late 1970s deindustrialisation, hinting impatiently at the chances of pop history repeating. Journalists and bloggers welcomed the return of punk fashion (McVeigh 2012) or compiled playlists of past recession songs (Waitt 2009).
The British newspaper The Guardian published a piece in 2008 with the title ‘Things Really Must Be Bad: AC/DC Are No. 1 Again’. In the article, the author relates the Australian band’s appearing in the charts with economic downturn and explains it like this:
AC/DC’s appeal in unpredictable times is straightforward. People crave something uncomplicated and dependable in a time of uncertainty, and rock music has never produced a band so uncomplicated and dependable as AC/DC. . . . Small wonder that people turn to AC/DC in their millions when the world appears on the brink of chaos. Here is escapism into a world untroubled by sub-prime mortgages, record public finance deficits and the baleful state of the FTSE 100, but escapism of the most comfortingly consistent kind. (Petridis 2008)
In times of crisis, music might even be a so-called affordable luxury, just like red lipstick, that is, something simple and at hand to find solace in, thanks to its immediate availability and its simplicity, but also deeply connected to the past; it would have been difficult even in 2008 to see AC/DC as a ‘new’ band.
Another 2009 article in the same newspaper, entitled ‘Artists’ Creative Use of Vacant Shops Brings Life to Desolate High Streets’, reports the words of an artist:
“Rather than letting lots of pound shops appear, we are encouraging people to start up businesses,” said Firmin. “We know recessions are awful but can be a good time for artists as creative ideas start appearing while otherwise redundant people are sitting at home fiddling and doing creative stuff.” (Booth 2009)
Similarly, in 2010 an organiser of raves described how
in a recession, as we’ve seen with the dawn of acid house and with New York in the 1970s, anywhere where’s there’s been a really good underground clubbing scene, you get into buildings. When you get into a building you’ve got the potential to have raves. Instead of gentrification, you’ve got empty buildings and construction projects are never finished and that creates a vacuum. If the recession continues then history indicates that the underground illegal club scene tends to thrive. (Townsend 2010)
The AC/DC article’s thesis implied that in times of crisis, we aim at something basic and uncomplicated; however, artists in the other two articles undermine this thesis and refer to new and exciting cultural expressions getting born in troubled circumstances.
Journalism offered very simple explanations, linking economic crisis and cultural work in a cause-effect relation. At the same time, the nostalgia towards past recessions and their music worked as a sort of coping mechanism. However, linking unemployment and vacant spaces with creativity and resourcefulness, or even better with hedonism and resistance, is a risky business. It puts the relation between empty spaces and creativity upside down, as if emptiness in itself would evoke ideas and inspiration and not, for instance, depression and desolation. However, these articles also show the impact that deindustrialisation had in framing a certain basic understanding of the ‘industrial structure of feeling’ (Byrne 2002). It also frames the elective affinity between economic and social distress, on one hand, and cultural production on the other, as a powerful narrative.
Apparently, after being questioned several times about the matter, even music journalist Simon Reynolds felt compelled to write something about it. Deconstructing the simplistic casual relation between bad times and good music through some straightforward logic, he affirms that ‘at some point along the way music and the social/economic became uncoupled’ (Reynolds 2009), an intuition that he developed further in Retromania (2011).
What Reynolds calls ‘uncoupling’ happened in particular circumstances, an unwanted consequence of deindustrialisation. Since the mid-1970s, this abrupt structural change has erased a vast range of industrial production from European industrial centres, relocating it in less-regulated countries with cheaper workforces or stopping it altogether in the name of economic restructuring. Deindustrialisation has considerably changed the structural forces at the basis of working life and production. Sherry Lee Linkon (2018) describes this form of economic restructuring as a half-life, still affecting US communities, places, and individuals across decades and generations; she denies the post-industrial thesis as a lie, as ‘we are not yet “post” anything’ and ‘people still make things’ (Linkon 2018, 5). Several contemporary studies (Emery 2019; Nettleingham 2019; Kohn 2009; Strangleman 2013; Strangleman, Rhodes, and Linkon 2013; Cowie and Heathcott 2003) share this view and examine deindustrialisation as a process that is still unfolding, very much present in working-class life as memory, affect, and in material terms, generation after generation.
In this book, I argue that popular music was a powerful instrument for dramatising the crisis of industrial cities in late 1970s Europe and the subsequent step to post-industrial societies because it was somehow able to anticipate the post-industrial shift and foresee the future fascination for industrial atmosphere and symbolic consumption by adopting industrial ‘musicscapes’. During the high time of deindustrialisation, music became a ‘vanishing mediator’ (Jameson 1973), bringing industrial societies, worldviews, and values towards the post-industrial and disappearing in the process. Music vanished, at least in this role of mediator, once industrial cities tried to move on and embrace the post-industrial promise of a new paradigm. When ‘deindustrialisation music’ came back, lately, it was assigned a completely