and standardise into a commodity. For instance, the cover of the first The Clash album (1977) is a black-and-white shot by Kate Simon that was taken outside their rehearsal space. The three members of the band are standing in a narrow concrete alleyway, surrounded by brownstone walls. The path probably leads to an underground parking lot or to the yard of a housing project; it hides them and doesn’t reveal anything spatially relevant. Authenticity is ascribed to the Clash via their nonironic facial expression, posture, and clothing, and not via a particular real or imagined locality. It tells of an urban environment that is not yet able to produce anything and that was built with the mere purpose to lodge anonymous urban crowds that had no future or past to long for but just grim, everyday boredom. Central to the picture is not the landscape but the heroism of the band members, standing as urban cowboys in front of glimpses of an anonymous, unfriendly environment, ready to be reproduced in posters for every teenage bedroom in the country.
In my view, punk was able to express its potential only in connection to the activities of scenes in industrial towns and during periods of decline. Always using the British experience as an example, it is in Manchester and Liverpool that punk ‘mutated’ from a London aesthetic experiment into a powerful instrument to communicate and dramatise urban decline (Cohen 2007a).
It is surprising that what was happening in the North of England and in distressed areas of the United States was later labelled ‘post-punk’, even if happening chronologically at the same time of what in New York City and London was called ‘punk’. In fact, like any other post-something mentioned in this book, ‘post-punk’ is both a continuation and a radical break from what was simply called ‘punk’. I think that a possible key to read this shift has a lot to do with the democratisation of certain 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
