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 to economic, social, or technological structures. They both rely on the classic Marxist division into base and superstructure.
These approaches neglect the role played by popular culture in ‘dramatising’ the crisis and making sense of it and, by doing so, in giving imaginary or material solutions to it. The aim of this book is to attain a better understanding of the impact of the crisis on the dreams, aspirations, struggles, expectations, activities, Weltanschauung, and feelings of citizens. On the imaginative level, popular music focused on the representation of the collapsing industrial space and on its effects on the individual. On the material level, it began appropriating and transforming space: dense local scenes began developing in many industrial centres.
This book aims at reformulating the relation between industrial cities and popular music, from homology-ridden narratives of rhythms and structures to a more multifaceted understanding of intertwining economic regimes and cultural expressions. It also takes into consideration distinctive sounds and scenes that are able to signify the industrial city as a socio-economic urban conurbation, and its crisis. Addressing the ‘elective affinity’ between industrial cities and certain forms of popular music is, therefore, a way to better understand the 1980s urban crisis.
Crisis under capitalism has been explained in various and sometimes discordant ways. Schumpeter’s thought has had a great impact, first of all, because it recognised that capitalism is highly unstable due to social and natural changes, but especially for technological reasons. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) Schumpeter affirms that technological growth is not steady; it is based on sporadic ideas, which are absorbed and implemented slowly along decades. When they reach the full integration, a ‘creative destruction’ occurs. The imaginative power of this term has provided much common sense in dealing with the material consequences of the crisis as some kind of ‘price to pay’, to restore a guiding development. In case of cities, the passage from industrial to post-industrial could be as well examined as a sort of creative destruction. The new organisation of work based on flexibility, growth of the third and fourth sector, the centrality of the information technologies, and specialisation has been described as the main factor behind cities’ transformations. Nonetheless, this shift occurred because of a precise political programme, implemented in the United States by Ronald Reagan and in the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher, in the name of liberalism (Harvey 2005).
Various thinkers and researchers gathered into the ‘Regulation School’ also address widely the concept of crisis in capitalism, focusing especially in its being embedded within the system itself. Their concepts of ‘regime of accumulation’ and ‘modes of regulation’ help in shedding light on the contextual elements at play during a crisis and during the consequent change in the mode of capital accumulation. Arrighi (1994) explains economic crisis by the contradiction between the goal of capitalist accumulation and the means used to achieve this goal. The author identifies the main feature of capitalism in the late twentieth century in the cyclical tendency to first expand on the material level, thanks to production. When this reaches its limits, capitalism offers a temporary solution by giving way to financial accumulation, which is unsustainable and eventually brings about the reorganisation of the whole global capitalist system. Industrial cities and their development served capitalist expansion at the material level, thanks to continuous production. Capitalism quickly dismissed European industrial cities and preferred to decentralise and move to countries where labour forces could be better exploited, and where there was a lower cost of means of production, while at the same time ‘financialising’ the crisis.
Looking at the economic history of the twentieth century, it is easy to identify business cycles and their impact. The Great Depression of 1929 towers as the longest downturn, while the economic boom after 1945 was the longest period of expansion. After the first energy crisis of 1973, it is possible to identify an increasing volatility in the proliferation of short crises and of short-term expansions (like the ‘dot-com bubble’ of the 1990s) around the globe, together with an increase in financialisation. It is therefore possible to identify a huge change, which the Regulation School describes as a shift in the regime of accumulation. From the 1980s onwards, economic instability affected the very nature of the industry in general and of industrial cities in particular, bringing a change in the very urban regime of accumulation. At the time, industrial cities in Europe started tagging themselves as ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-Fordist’, without exactly knowing the modalities and consequences of the ‘creative destruction’.
David Harvey in his analysis of the ongoing economic crisis started in 2008 (Harvey 2010) has identified four explanations used in media and common sense: human nature, institutional failures, failure of certain theories, and cultural origins. The first explanation relies on the animal spirit leading to excessive greed and therefore to the collapse of the market; the second looks at the possible reconfigurations that the global market should accomplish in order to work better. The third explanation appeals to the reprise or dismissal of certain theories followed by investors and governments. The fourth identifies specific foreign countries (for instance, Greece or Italy within the European Union) or specific political cultures (the ‘Anglo-Saxon disease’) as the causes of the crisis. Building on classic Marxist theory, Harvey argues that capitalism is never able to solve its problems; it just moves them around the globe, in areas that are unevenly developed. Cities are, at the same time, the places where flexible accumulation takes place and the most important product of this accumulation.
