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’. In Marxist language, Williams defined a ‘structure’ to describe ‘a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or a period’ (Williams 1977, 131). Deindustrialisation and its culture can be examined as a structure of feeling because the term has both a material and an affective dimension, apt at making sense of temporalities. Moreover, Williams adopted the concept in reference to lived experiences, combining the social, the generational, and the historical to provide a framework to read and interpret, for instance, literary conventions (Williams 1977).
With this aim in mind, I developed a multilayered analysis of popular music artefacts or ‘musicscapes’. Popular music is in fact able to convey meanings in three layers: textscape, soundscape, and landscape. With ‘textscape’, I am referring to lyrics and song titles; with ‘soundscape’, to the use of certain sounds, melodies, chords, and rhythms; and with ‘landscape’, to the use of certain visual imaginaries in record covers, photo shoots, and merchandise.
In this book, I am especially interested in showing how popular music worked with places, and industrial urban spaces in particular. In this specific field of analysis, attention to textscapes will focus on street names, toponimies, landmarks, architectonical features, social stereotypes, local prejudices, reputations, and hegemonies. Under soundscapes, I will concentrate on real or perceived industrial sounds and noises; the use of local slang, accents, and dialects; and of traditional local melodies, rhythms, or harmonies. Landscape will address the pictorial or graphic use of industrial elements.
Krims (2007) used the concept of ‘urban ethos’ to explain the limits and borders of the spatial discourse in music. Through a limited set of examples, he envisaged the tendency of specific narratives to become the representation of the city in general in certain historical periods. Urban ethos doesn’t apply to a city in particular, despite being shaped by the fate of certain prototypical ones like New York City and Los Angeles. Krims also identified ‘genre systems’, gender and race, as factors contributing to the framing of a particular urban ethos, and
as all of these factors change as cities themselves change and play host to new kinds of capital accumulation, such differences are always registered as profoundly historical facts. They will originate in real, material social relations and the changing spatial strategies by which cities adjust to accumulate capital. But they will then be imagined in representational strategies and sometimes even used to refashion cities themselves. (Krims 2007, 24)
Krims described how popular music representations become very important and can even turn into instruments for planning and branding cities. This is a strategy that has had successful results, for instance, in the case of Liverpool, in the United Kingdom (Cohen 2007a), or Austin, Texas, in the United States (Wynn 2015), and that continuously affects municipal discussions around the world.
‘Place’ has become a catchword, whose relevance can be at best grasped by the stigma asserted to its contrary, formulated by the French anthropologist Marc Augé with the term non-lieu (‘not-place’).
Industrial cities are places with short or no history at all in traditional European perspective; they are saturated by non-places, ranging from high-rise blocks to malls, from factories to railway stations, from motorway nodes to underpasses.
When I first started analysing popular musicscapes from industrial city scenes, I was amazed by the lack of direct references to places. It took me some time to understand that the urban ethos I was looking at was very different from the one I was looking from. My fascination for the industrial atmosphere is in fact linked to the consumer perspective of someone living in a post-industrial society and continuously searching for places based on buzz, authenticity, and distinction. As a tourist, I expected the real Manchester (to cite one of the most researched and represented industrial cities) to be simply a reproduction of the represented one, allowing me to recollect and mediatise on Instagram the atmosphere of the black-and-white photos by Anton Corbijn and Kevin Cummins and the sound of Joy Division, the Fall, and the Smiths. What these bands and these photographers, among others, were doing was exactly the opposite: they were running away from Manchester, the deindustrialising city, and visualising otherness by occupying, editing, twisting its spaces through excruciating noise and by ‘looking at the light through the pouring rain’, as the title of a Kevin Cummins book (2012) suggests.
Dramatising the Rhythm of the Factory
The rhythm of the factory has been used to explain a variety of genres, ranging from soul to house music, from industrial to heavy metal. Depending on factors such as the kind of production, the presence of classic Fordist chain work, robotisation of the machinery, and the organisation of work, a factory can produce very different soundscapes, at different levels of volume. The impact of the factory on popular music is very much based on the idea of repetition and serialisation of rhythm, which has a lot to do with our understanding of mechanical work and with its fictionalisation in music and with the increase in the use of electronic sound machinery (such as drum machines and computers) from the 1970s onwards. Partly responsible for this is the German band Kraftwerk, who consistently made use of a certain imaginary, developed long before by the Bauhaus movement or early science fiction in Weimar Republic Germany (e.g., Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) that was connected to modernity, post-human societies, and robotisation.
In this book, however, it seems more fruitful to determine the connection between popular music and the industrial city under different terms. In fact, the first often provided human, imaginary, and material means for the second to survive. Especially in times of economic crisis and consequent urban decay, music has channelled creative forces and often provided unexpected ways out. I think it is, therefore, important to examine deindustrialisation as a key element in the evolution of the relation between industrial cities and popular music. Industrial cities are to be understood as articulations of space more than as articulations of place; their music is therefore less romantically bound to a certain local pride and more interested in conquering and ‘making space’ in a variety of cultural expressions. Dick Hebdige talks about punk’s ability in ‘dramatizing’ the crisis (1979, 87), but at the same time he notes that ‘it was predicated upon a denial of place’ and ‘it was blank, expressionless, rootless’ (1979, 65). For him, punk lived in the paradox of being local and at the same time of being ‘nowhere’ really. This is true of much of the punk music produced around 1976–1977 in Great Britain: it was locating itself into a TV drama (or worse, into a soap opera) performing the crisis. This was very much connected to the ‘filtering’ of punk statements
