Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
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landfills. For instance, Sheffield: City on the Move (Coulthard and Coulthard 1972), a documentary about the northern English city, was commissioned by the city’s publicity officer and released in 1972. The film starts by introducing what seems a striking innovation: the factory smoke ban, which made the city centre ‘smokeless’ and clear (Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information 2005). Sheffield factories are said to be producing steel, which is ‘still at the heart of the city’s heavy industry’ and which is ‘built into our modern life in countless essential ways’ (Coulthard and Coulthard 1972). In the early 1970s, environmental innovations were still understood only in their function of facilitating city life without putting obstacles to the most important element—once again, production. Very clear both in the structure and in the content of the documentary is the self-evident centrality of the heavy industry as able to ‘forge’ all the other cultural, social, and architectural elements of Sheffield. Like many other cities and regions in Europe, Sheffield organised and understood itself as an industrial city; it was bound to a specific kind of heavy production, which influenced and determined all other aspects of city life, ranging from its social structure to its cultural offerings. In addition, being known as an ‘industrial city’ since the post-war era seemed to overcome its traditional dystopian image, thanks to the interplay among technology, innovation, and welfare. The dreams, aspirations, struggles, expectations, activities, Weltanschauung, and feelings of its citizens were strongly linked to this understanding.
Throughout its history, down to the contemporary global spread of industrial conurbations over the Global South, material production is the main paradigm for the economic growth and spatial development of the industrial city. Paradoxically, an industrial city produces material goods, whose consumption further ‘produces’ the city. Technological innovations facilitate production, and other functions are secondary. For instance, the first electric lights in Finland (and in the whole of Northern Europe, according to the plaque commemorating this) appeared in the Plevna weaving shed of the Finlayson company, located in the centre of Tampere, on March 15, 1882. This innovation allowed more efficient working hours even in the darkest months of the Finnish winter. Following on de Tocqueville’s metaphor, it is the flow of gold that maintains and develops the dirty sewer, allowing the gold to continue flowing. This paradox shapes daily and yearly rhythms, planning, transportation, education, and the implementation of policies. For instance, an industrial city relies on swift transportation both of goods and people to and from production areas. This was refined overtime and achieved its technological climax in the construction of complex motorways and in the rise of the car as nearly exclusive regime of mobility, which is still negatively affecting cities today. The industrial city also relies on the education and training of certain professional figures and on their continuous availability, secured especially by continuous immigration from rural areas and from developing countries. Still today, certain materials and architectural styles are typical of industrial cities: functionalism and bare concrete.
Central for industrial cities is the idea of continuous growth and expansion, which is, however, sometimes achieved by political decision-making, which takes place elsewhere, namely, in capital cities (see table 1.1 for a summary of this dichotomy). Across Europe, we can find several examples of a clear dichotomy, if not a tension, between industrial centres and capital cities. Apart from the four examples mentioned in this book, we find similar patterns in Holland, between Amsterdam and Rotterdam; in Sweden, between Stockholm and Goteborg; in France, between Paris and Marseille; and so on, depending often on the size of the country and its history. Rarely have capital cities around the world been pure industrial cities, despite sometimes having had a strong industrial character (like, e.g., Berlin, New York City, or London). This is mostly connected to the fact that power (in political terms) resides physically in capital cities, and industrial cities depend on it. From the point of view of mental maps (Gould and White 1974), capital cities are always central (even if not in strict geographical terms), while industrial cities are in vague peripheries. Cultural institutions that perpetuate knowledge, such as national museums, archives, and universities, are in capitals; while in industrial cities resides technology in terms of research centres and polytechnics. Capital cities also tend to have a stronger ‘imageability’ (Lynch 1960) and individuality—a stronger brand, based on buzz, colours, and offerings—while industrial cities are bound to monotony and greyness and a more blurry focus. The idea of people immigrating from rural areas and finding quick enrolment into the working class also implies a clear imbalance in terms of social mix of the typical city population. Industrial city inhabitants are considered inferior in terms of manners, behaviours, free time activities, language, and cultural life. Rob Shields (1991, 207–45), for instance, identifies ‘the North’ in England as an imaginary industrial space on the margin, without a clear jurisdiction, under constant bad weather, and with a highly emotional population that is devoted to football and binge drinking. Shields deconstructs this myth by tracing its origins in intellectual and literary tropes built in the South of England that aim to reestablish via culture London’s privilege over the periphery of, for instance, Lancashire and the Midlands.
| Capital City | Industrial City |
| Power | Power-dependant |
| Centre | Periphery |
| Education, knowledge | Technology, innovation |
| Colours | Grey |
| Buzz | Depression |
| Wide offerings | Monotony, monofunctional |
| Culture | Without own culture |
| Sharp, individual | Atmospheric, suspended |
| Privileged inhabitants | Rough inhabitants |
Economic Crisis, Deindustrialisation, and
Industrial Cities
The price paid by industrial cities in the step from industrial to post-industrial society has been very high. It has not only implied a huge loss of workforce but it has also revolutionised the balance in inner centres and peripheries, in energy and circulation systems, and in self-images and understandings. Many places shrank or disappeared from the map, many districts suffered segregation or became gentrified, and people became unemployed, were displaced, or developed mental and physical problems. The full impact of a transition to a post-industrial economy can be recognised only in a few centres, and its consistency over time even less.
Michael Moore’s first documentary, Roger and Me (1988), tells of the closing down of an assembly factory of General Motors in Flint, Michigan, the director’s hometown. In one scene, an ex-worker, recovering in a mental hospital, is describing the day he ‘cracked’ after having been laid off five times in five years. He left the assembly line, got in his car and, driving towards home, he switched on the radio to see if it would cheer him up. The Beach Boys’ ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’ was playing, and he tried to sing the lyrics, but he got ‘an apple in my throat . . . trying to rationalise with those lyrics, trying to think “wouldn’t it be nice”, just wasn’t working’ (Moore 1988). The scene continues with the song scoring a streetscape of empty, run-down single houses filmed from a moving car.
This is just one of the many moving scenes of the film, where desperation and ironic distance are continuously intertwined, and it shows much more than an Adorno-inspired critique of popular music in capitalism could tell. This scene reveals the false promises and augmented romanticism the cultural industry is feeding to people in an effort to divert them from understanding their real condition. However, it also implies the idiosyncratic function of popular music as signifier of certain socio-economic contradictions. The Beach Boys could be analysed as a Fordist band: their songs were carefully assembled by a team of producers, arrangers, and musicians in an intricate studio work, thanks to modern technologies and craftsmanship. The band is forever linked to a time of economic prosperity and optimism, where popular music became the voice of an apparently careless youth who was, however, aware of going to live a life of full employment and the joys of a suburban lifestyle. It was not the music produced for people who were losing their job; it was not music meant for dramatising an urban crisis.
Deindustrialisation and economic crisis have been analysed widely, for instance, as ‘creative destruction’ due to a technological change (Schumpeter 1942) or as a cyclical moment of crisis, embedded in the nature of capitalism itself (Lipietz 1992). Both theories tend to ignore cultural expressions and merely see them as reactions