Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
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am unravelling the articulation of industrial musicscapes and deindustrialisation in the context of European industrial cities by comparing four case studies: Manchester (UK), Düsseldorf (Germany), Torino[1] (Italy), and Tampere (Finland). Music played a slightly different function in each of these cities; it developed and disappeared along slightly out-of-sync temporal lines, roughly between 1976 and 1984 (with a coda until the 1990s in Manchester), and with very different outcomes. Some Manchester musicians, like New Order and Morrissey, achieved global success and careers that today span four decades, while some Torino bands—like Nerorgasmo, for instance—rarely played outside the city borders. However, we find in all the above-mentioned cities a certain ‘industrial’ music-related dynamism during the time of deindustrialisation, one that left tangible and intangible heritages behind. The four cities have been chosen because they represent different regions of Europe and play different roles in popular music history and canonisation. Moreover, they represent different typologies of industrial cities, ranging from one-company town to commercial hub, from prototypical to peripheral. They are cities I am familiar with, have emotional bonds to, have spent time in for shorter or longer periods of time, and where I can interact in their respective national languages, although with some difficulties due to industrial city slang and accents. Using interviews with musicians and record-label owners and examining artefacts such as fanzines, records, tapes, and posters—all largely but not exclusively related to punk, post-punk, hardcore punk, and electronic/industrial music cultures—I am aiming at understanding the relation among economy, culture, and place under the particular contingency of deindustrialisation. I am more interested about time (late 1970s–early 1980s) and place/theme (industrial city) than about definite music genres. My main aim is to disentangle industrial sounds from industrial places and rebuild their affinity, not from the perspective of cause and effect, with crisis giving birth to ‘industrial’ music, as in the nostalgia journalism discourses, but rather as articulation, where music was able to anticipate dramatic societal changes and affect the context where it was taking place, both as social practice and as performance. What matters to me is that the relation between place and sound (in this case, popular music) is an articulation and, as such, is arbitrarily constructed but at the same time reflects a particular ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1980) from a social point of view and a ‘urban ethos’ (Krims 2007) from the spatial one.
Setting the Scene
The spatial and social context where music ‘takes place’ is not given; it is created via identities, representations, and practices; it reveals aspirations, fears, and individual perceptions of reality; it shows power relations and worldviews. Moreover, this context can be material and tangible, in form of a shared rehearsal space or a club, and at the same time intangible and affective, related to these places’ histories, reputations, stories, and atmosphere.
Interviewing individuals who were actively making music in industrial cities under deindustrialisation was challenging on a variety of levels. First of all, it is difficult to overcome the ‘punk habitus’ that some of them took up immediately when questioned about their past. Diffidence towards researchers and ‘adults’ (even if the majority of my informants were approximately ten years older than I was) was sometimes difficult to overcome, but my own engagement with music often provided help in constructing a communicative and emotional bond. In addition, it was mostly discussing places and moving across them that provided me the most interesting material for this book. All this revealed to me that punk and ‘post-punk’ worked in sociological terms as glocal forces, able to create bonds across class, national, and sometimes racial divides on a cosmopolitan scale but at the same time maintaining strong local contingencies. It is fascinating to see how industrial city scenes networked and transferred signifying practices, sometimes embedding them into very different local environments. Will Straw has been examining for years the way ‘scenes’ can be implemented to study tight urban communities and their visibility, especially at night. In this book, I am referring to music-based communities in industrial cities as scenes and preferring ‘scenes’ to ‘subculture’, on one hand, and ‘music world’, on the other.
The so-called Chicago School of sociology first introduced the idea of ‘subculture’ (Gelder 2007), but its formulation became more consistent within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), based at the University of Birmingham. The CCCS examined subcultures in connection to working-class youth and the ‘spectacular’ community making that appeared in British cities and towns after the Second World War. The CCCS examined youth urban communities in materialistic terms, as based on rituals and style, that is, the music they listened to, the clothes they wore, the territory they claimed for themselves. Subculture was understood as being in a double articulation, with the working class as a whole and with the dominant class, therefore, always a subset of something more complex and organised (Hall and Jefferson 2003). This positioning was widely criticised in the late 1990s because of its lack of flexibility in addressing highly volatile community making among youths in postmodern and post-industrial times.
‘Scene’ has found fertile ground in popular music studies since the early 2000s, for instance, with the publication of the edited volumes Post-Subcultures Reader (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003) and After Subculture (Bennett and Kahn Harris 2004) and in the extensive work of Andy Bennett (Bennett and Peterson 2004; Bennett 2004). As said already, in the early 1990s Will Straw had begun using the concept in reference to popular music (Straw 1991; 2001). Straw’s style is rich in references to public press and public spaces, across cultures and across the whole twentieth and twenty-first centuries, creating historical contingencies and genealogies in relation to urban culture in general and towards nightlife in particular. Moreover, he connects the existence of scenes not only to music making and to the flexibility of postmodern identity building but also to cosmopolitanism, legislations, commerce, local traditions, and to their interaction. According to Straw (2001), a scene expands and contrasts within two extremes in urban cultural analysis. On one hand, scene invites to the analysis of visibly social cityscape, providing the means to dig beneath the spectacular surface to look for its ‘grammar’ (Blum 2001). On the other, it loosens up social morphology, liberating the study of urban communities and allowing a richer understanding of varieties and mobilities within and across them.
Crossley (2015) has criticised the term scene for being too familiar and too loaded to be used in scientific research. He prefers to adopt the term music worlds in examining punk and post-punk in Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield between 1975 and 1980. Crossley justifies his choice by first referring to ‘social worlds’ (Blumer 1986) and to the fact that they are built on shared collective meanings, concerns, and interests, which enable spaces of interaction. Crossley brings this further by adopting the work of Danto (1964) and Becker (1982), who analysed the social aspects of art making, through the term art world. For instance, Becker (1982) saw art first and foremost as an activity carried out by a complex network of people, including audiences, in particular places, following certain conventions, and exploiting certain resources. However, the term world can be criticised as being as compromised as scene by its common-sense use; furthermore, it creates self-sealed sociological systems, which fit into rigid methodological frameworks but fail to reveal the porous and precarious dimension of their existence and the affects attached to it. In addition to this, the term undermines one of the most significant elements of music making: performance, which ‘scene’ states clearly, especially when we refer to its secondary meaning as ‘stage’.
This book approaches music scenes as embedded not into a class or a world but into the ever-changing, fragile, and porous life of deindustrialising cities and into a complex system of mutual cross-fertilisation. Too often cultural urban research on music has been based on one city only or on a comparison of cities within a single national framework. In the first case, there is a clear risk of relying too much on local historical continuities; in the second, there is a tendency to explore music making as a mere national project. In the four industrial cities I am considering, punk and ‘post-punk’ were the music genres, became social practices, and built tight scenes, being at the same time both local and embedded into international ‘networks of friends’.
Raymond Williams made sense of this temporal and generational commonality with the concept of ‘structure of feeling’.