Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
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cultural practices and the consequences of uneven urban developments. ‘Post-punk’ bands were usually born in industrial cities and were rarely design-intensive products of a corporate music industry. The step from the Clash to Joy Division or from the Ramones to Black Flag has more to do with the disproportionate impact of the changes in economic regimes affecting bands in Salford differently than in London, and in Hermosa Beach differently than in New York City, than with mere genre-related conventions.
In my view, the notion itself of ‘post-punk’ should be reexamined. In the seminal Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds (2006) gives a definition very much based on a certain canon formed by the British media (the New Musical Express in particular) and arising from a certain cultural capital. Recognising the uniqueness of Pere Ubu or Television, praising the work of the Fall and Arto Lindsay contributed enormously in recognising certain artists as part of the cultural history of popular music. Nonetheless, in my view, the English-speaking and canon-based focus limits a lot what ‘post-punk’, for instance, in continental or Nordic Europe has been and the impact it has had on an enormous range of industrial cities around the world. This book extends the definition of post-punk, for instance, to hardcore punk, proto-techno, electronic body music, and noise experimentations, all sharing a common origin in industrial towns and trying to respond and/or ‘dramatise’ real urban crises under different geographical, social, and economic circumstances.
Book Structure
In this introduction, I laid out some personal and academic reasons for writing this book. I described my own fascination with industrial cities and the music arising from such environments during deindustrialisation. I also explained why I am referring to music scenes. Aware of the potential extent of this topic and its related expectations, I also narrowed the field of research in time and space.
Chapter 1 defines the industrial city and discusses its history, role in urbanisation, and its crisis in the 1970s. It addresses issues related to urban planning, economic paradigm changes, and the step from industrial to post-industrial society. It also identifies the major discourses surrounding industrial cities, their inhabitants, and deindustrialisation by looking at architectural and urban studies literature; at industrial city representations in film, novels, and art; and at their dystopian associations. Industrial sensibility and atmosphere are a central concept for this chapter, dealing with the creation of a certain kind of cultural fetish for brutalism and decline. The chapter is partly based on a revision and extension of my article, ‘Dead Industrial Atmosphere: Popular Music, Cultural Heritage and Industrial Cities’, in Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2015).
I am aware of the fact that a genre called ‘industrial’ exists and that it takes its inspiration from the aesthetics of the industry, especially in its most dystopian connotations. However, in my view, this genre represents one possible cultural enactment of the industrial sensibility and should be considered among others. I am presenting an explanation of this choice in chapter 2. That chapter introduces the relationship between the industrial soundscape and music making. It starts this by questioning, via aesthetics and musicological theory, the binary notion of music and noise. It then deals with the industrial soundscape, its history, elements, and regulation within cities. I then describe a genealogy of industrial city music by giving examples and exploring the features of music genres, artists, and pieces that have been directly inspired by or that are understood as being linked to industrial sounds. This is divided into two main branches. One is related to art music and to the way futurism and the Russian avant-garde adopted industrial sounds as aesthetic references. The second branch encompasses popular music, from eighteenth-century industrial folk to Chicago electric blues and Detroit soul and all the way to Kraftwerk and library music.
Chapters 3 to 6 present four case studies.[2] Chapter 3 is partly based on revising and extending my article, ‘The City That Was Creative and Did Not Know: Manchester, Pop Music and Cultural Sensibility’, in European Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2009): 349–65. It explores Manchester’s successful music scene from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, including major bands such as Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths, and the Fall. The formation of a local music scene is analysed through the notion of an urban creative milieu, stating its historical debt to the city’s industrial heritage; place images produced by the local popular music scene are examined as visual, aural, and lyrical productions. The chapter also stretches to the late 1980s and early 1990s, examining the consolidation of the local popular music scene through bottom-up and entrepreneurial projects and the regeneration of some areas of Manchester. It also looks at the role of the ‘New Left’ local authority, its difficulties in recognising the city’s creative capital, and its attitude towards the production and consumption of popular music. The conclusions present some general reflections on the Manchester legacy, the city’s successful regeneration towards a ‘post-industrial creative city’, and its significance for a definition of creativity at the urban level.
Chapter 4 is about Düsseldorf and the Ruhr, a polycentric and highly dense conurbation, among the biggest in Europe, whose vast industrial heritage was celebrated when the Ruhr was named the 2010 European Capital of Culture. Düsseldorf lies outside the Ruhr geographical area and has been nicknamed its ‘office desk’ (Schreibtisch des Ruhrgebiets) because many administrative headquarters of the Ruhr’s metallurgy firms were located in the city. The Ruhr has been a cluster for German hardcore punk and heavy metal, while Düsseldorf has been a hotspot for the development of punk and electronic music. Bands such as Mittagspause and Die Krupps are from Düsseldorf and often used their proximity to the Ruhr as justification for their sound and image. I am considering both the Ruhr and Düsseldorf together because of their proximity and the hybridity of their music scenes. Of great importance to this chapter is the relationship between sounds and materiality, art and architecture.
Chapter 5 examines the Collettivo Punx Anarchici (“Anarchist Punk Collective”), active in Torino (Italy) in the early 1980s. The chapter is partly based on a revision and extension of my ‘Lo spirito continua: Torino and the Collettivo Punx Anarchici’ (2014). I reveal how the Collettivo was dramatising Torino’s decay and social unrest, a consequence of the crisis affecting FIAT and the automobile industry. Bands such as Contrazione, Declino, and Negazione were able to ‘sound out’ urban alienation and decay, creating original, nonprofit, and self- organised forms of musical production. At the same time, they were naively trying to reclaim public space, after the dramatic ending of the anni di piombo (the years of lead, a 1970s era of political violence) and the middle-class retreat into the private sphere. Torino is the case with the least bibliographical material, apart from some articles in music magazines and fictionalised memoirs. Interviews and ethnographic observations are therefore more abundant in this chapter than in the others.
Chapter 6 is about Tampere, known in Finland as the country’s own Manchester and nicknamed Tampester and Manse. In the 1980s, bands such as Bastards, Riistetyt, Kohu-63, and Kaaos were playing fast and furious hardcore punk, which one musician described as känninen saundi (drunken sound). Their work was mostly based on independent, oppositional and DIY ethics, and some of these bands were the first Finnish bands to tour continental Europe and the United States. I focus specifically on issues such as the relationship between sound and place in the specific context of Tampere as an industrial town. I consider the soft and hard infrastructures that allowed bands to proliferate in Tampere more than in other Finnish centres, and I outline the international networks that made touring and distributing music outside Finland possible. I also consider the soft deindustrialisation happening in the city as a result of social democracy. In conclusion, I look at the legacy of these bands on a local, national and global scale. This chapter is also based on interviews and first-hand observations.
Chapter 7 addresses the ongoing heritage-making of European industrial landscapes, both at the individual/local and at the national/supranational level. It addresses the existence of industrial cities’ lieux de memoir and examines the leading or ancillary role of popular music within the intangible cultural heritage category. It also problematises the heritage-making of popular music because of the latter’s embedded cosmopolitanism. It also considers its risks to a city, including the creation of inequalities and gentrification, and the fetishising of decline.
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