Slavoj Žižek remarks somewhere that the most common cinematic representation of industrial production is in the Bond film. In those moments where the secret lair of the villain can be seen churning out some fearful weapon of mass destruction, with our hero dragged along as an unwilling witness, the real of production is uncovered, as something shadowy and sinister. Certainly, there's little doubt that the place of work, particularly the factory, is a dirty secret on-screen. Not the least interesting thing about Wang Bing's West of the Tracks is that it spends a large chunk of its 9 hours looking coldly, if not dispassionately, at the usually unrepresented or unrepresentable.
The hypnotic depiction of Shenyang's Tie Xi district in West of the Tracks owes very little, however, to any previous industrial film, a genre which begins with Frank Gilbreth's creepy time-and-motion studies, films of mundane work tasks designed to be viewed by scientific managers for the purposes of rearranging how the worker undertakes the task. However a more influential example provides an instructive contrast – Dziga Vertov's 1931 'industrial symphony' Enthusiasm, a touchstone, along with the likes of Viktor Turin's Turksib, for the British documentary movement, itself a pivotal moment in industrial film. This hour-long montage of industrial scenes is notable for the way in which it consciously (and unambiguously) forms the industrial material, montaging the scenes of physical extremity and industrial sublimity, but leaving out the boredom and the drudgery. This isn't to say that Vertov prettifies, or imposes a smooth, glossy aesthetic on the process of production. The film has a loud, lumbering power which the fast-cut montage doesn't wholly efface, and the work that is seen frequently appears to be difficult, no matter how much it is formed into a Taylorist ballet. Yet the machines, like the people, are tightly organised, aestheticised – something very unlike the ruination and listlessness of Wang's Tie Xi.
Two of the artists very influenced by Vertov – Joris Ivens and Hanns Eisler - developed the idea of 'blast furnace music' while making a film about the industrial new town of Magnitogorsk. This idea of harnessing the brute power and noise of industry into something coherent is precisely what Wang Bing repudiates here. Instead of organisation and fast-cutting, the tracking shots and unobtrusive scenes of canteens and waiting rooms are notable for their directorial hands-off approach. In an interview with Robert Koehler on the later Fengming, he claims to be 'concerned that I don’t impose a message, as I don’t want to visually force anything on viewers. In other words, I want to make it as loose and open as possible (...) eliminating any possible obstacles, especially those that could be created by the filming itself.' While boredom and rumination are the things which Vertov avoids at all costs, these are integral to West of the Tracks' seeming non-technique, where the drift of the camera across the dilapidated factory seems designed, in his words, 'to let the audience freely roam and observe details at their own leisure.'
Accordingly, one of the most odd and jarring elements in West of the Tracks is precisely this unobtrusiveness. Wang's camera tracks up and down factories, sits unassumingly in bathrooms full of naked men, films shocking examples of unsafe work practices, with temp workers clearly taking no precautions amidst stalactites of solidified industrial fluids littering the factories, yet nobody ever seems concerned – or, indeed seems to notice Wang at all. There are isolated examples, such as a moment in Ruins where a worker in one of the bankrupt factories makes a 'get out' gesture at the camera, or casual interjections ('quick, get that on camera! Running around, bare-arsed...'). In Rails, there is a rare direct address from the scavenger 'one-eyed Du', introducing his shack in the freight yard: 'this is my son, and this is our little house'; and near the end, when flares on the tracks are used as impromptu fireworks, a valedictory 'we wanted you to see this, a real railroad experience. Now he knows all about the fun of signal flares!' Yet overwhelmingly, it's remarkable how little Wang is noticed, and how easily he assimilates himself into this mundanely apocalyptic landscape.
Brecht, in a dig at the industrial photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (one of whose collections was entitled The World is Beautiful) claimed that a mere photograph of a factory tells us nothing about that factory, and instead just presents a meaningless aesthetic object. Accordingly, the element of West of the Tracks that stops it being a bizarre industrial metamorphosis of Albert Speer's 'Theory of Ruin Value', a poignant journey through the rusting detritus of an obsolete industrial model, is his attention to the workers themselves. While in an Enthusiasm the workers chant the occasional exhortation or pledge themselves to produce a given amount of coal or pig-iron, in West of the Tracks the workers are allowed to speak at will. They speak at length, sometimes inconsequentially, sometimes scatologically, but mostly as people who are intelligent, conscious and wholly aware of their predicament, yet almost entirely without hope.
Letting the Workers Speak: Boredom and Class Consciousness
When most of us think of Chinese industrial capitalism, the immediate thought that comes to mind – usually mediated by photographs in anti-corporate literature – is a shiny white plant devoted to producing various kinds of consumer goods for the Western market. Machines and tat, produced at an astonishing rate to satisfy the bored desires of the neoliberal west. So in a sense China itself takes on the role of the hidden factory that Žižek talks about. Except this is given the lie by West of the Tracks, especially Rust's apocalyptic, monumental depiction of a dying industrial district. The Shenyang factories Wang charts are for heavy industry, the remnants of the first industrial revolution rather than the third. So when, as a Westerner, I watch the destruction of the Tie Xi district, it's impossible not to think of what was done in the 1980s to South Wales, to Sheffield, to the East End, Detroit, Ohio...we've heard the angry plaint of one worker, sent home with no pension after 30 years of service, who tells one of the film's many shabby offices that 'they said we had a job for life. Pensions, health care, a safety net. Doesn't seem likely now. They don't care if you get sick, much less if you die – and forget about a pension...Next thing you know, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) will be renaming itself the Republican Party'. In China, too, the neoliberal restructuring has destroyed similar lives, thrown similar people on a similar scrapheap, with a similar total lack of support.
The workers of Shenyang have few illusions about what is being done to them. As one says, commenting on the vast canyon between rich and poor that is opening up, 'we're not what you would call 'educated', but we read the papers, we watch the news. We know how we compare.' At another moment, a Robert Tressell-esque ragged trousered philanthropist patiently explains how much of even these failing factories goes on profit. Later, snatched moments of a canteen discussion show the clarity, anger and hopelessness: 'I'm telling you, this is the bosses' fault'...'what kind of society is this, anyway?'...'survival of the fittest...'. There's a sense of shame at what they've been reduced to, from workers at one of the state's 'first rank' factories, given (relative) prestige and privilege, and now: 'does this look first rank to you? Have you ever seen a sorrier bunch? We've all got lead poisoning.' Another worker insists that his children will have to 'study hard so they don't end up like us'. These people are remarkably clear-headed in their bitterness at the new grotesqueries created by the 'restructuring'. Someone explains that prostitutes are going extremely cheap, and notes that there is only one reason for this: 'layoffs. That's why there's a glut. It makes me so angry'. Similarly, the inhabitants of the soon to be razed shacks at Rainbow Row are under no illusions about the collusion between state and business that, not content with destroying their jobs, is now destroying their homes.
History and education both lurk in the background. Although the current corruption of the occasionally mentioned Party cadres is acknowledged by everyone, what came before it is acknowledged seldom, or in flashes: as when one worker, noting the lack of education that helped to leave them all at the mercy of the state and the market says that 'we didn't even learn phonics at school. If the teachers made us work, we'd struggle with them, put up big character posters', a strangely casual memory of the Cultural Revolution, something also obliquely referenced when, in Rails, it transpires that two railwaymen went to the same school – 'yeah, and Lin Biao was our teacher', one replies ironically. All this might imply that these people are merely political ciphers, shown only when they have something significant to say about their dire predicament. On the contrary, perhaps hours of digital stock are spent on seemingly endless games of cards or Mah-Jong and exchanges of insults, with the boredom reaching a kind of nadir as a group of smelting workers spend interminable days being treated for lead poisoning, in countless hours of listlessness and conviviality, where watching hardcore porn together in a shabby hospital waiting room and (an eventually deadly) spot of fishing is about all that can while away the hours.
'Great Leaders, Past and Future, Lead us into A Great New Age'
West of the Tracks is marked by an extremely mordant streak of irony, something which comes out particularly sharply in the use of songs and televisual background noise. Rust features a grim New Year's Party, where the factory boss confides, in-between toasts, that the factory has gone bankrupt: 'we've got to privatise everything we can. Will it work? Maybe not.' Yet blaring out in the corner are old revolutionary and patriotic songs, like the one quoted above, the tragicomic spectacle of a worker blaring into the microphone, searching for the tune, 'here begins the future!' Wang plays knowingly with the imagery of these old songs, with their imagery of a future at hand, provided through struggle and the efforts of the heroic Communist Party. The future as a workers' paradise, although no doubt not a freethinker's one. Yet although it's very clear that the workers of Shenyang are in no doubt about just how severely they're being screwed over, and the absurdity that it is all perpetrated by a 'Communist' Party, there's never a deliberate comment about the irony of these songs of the heroic proletariat being sung by now-destitute proletarians. These are the old songs you remember from childhood. Nursery rhymes. One person might sing a mawkish Sinopop ballad, another (as happens in Rails) might consolingly sing to themselves of 'the hardships of revolution', or melodically mutter 'my heart grows wider, as I walk towards the future'. Soon after the smelting workers arrive in the hospital to be treated for their lead poisoning, one of them plays a revolutionary song on a saxophone. We see a brief shot of an acne scarred face wincing, singing 'we welcome the liberation army'...
Yet the actual future is faced with trepidation. The tenants of Rainbow Row, for instance, who wonder how on earth they could possibly pay the rent on the new flats that they're being resettled in, as their brick and wood shacks are levelled. The young Wang Zhen, one of the most listless of the film's many listless youths, asks his father (while no doubt knowing the answer) 'why are you so fucking worried about my future?' Although these are people intent on hanging onto the little they have, and unsurprisingly suspicious of state largesse, some are guilty at going from being favoured industrial workers in a peasant country to becoming obstacles in the way of the parade of progress. As one tenant puts it, 'you can't hold back the tide of progress...but at least this place is rent-free'. What the future actually holds in store for these people is symbolically illustrated by the later shots in Remnants, after the supplies and the electricity have been cut and most of the houses are flattened, leaving something resembling Warsaw in 1945: 'what the fuck. Did everyone die or something?'
Industrial Surrealism
There is undeniably a sublimity about the sheer vastness of destruction in this film, with the criss-crossing sheds, walkways, power lines, tracks, chutes of Tie Xi presenting themselves as the ruins of a previous future. Nonetheless, what seems enduring in Wang's film is something rarer and and peculiar than the romance of the future ruin – a new Surrealism, one inflected by industrial film and cinema vérité , and based on careful observation, as opposed to the free play of images and ideas. What lingers in the mind, as the camera drifts through the derelict sheet metal factory, along the freight line or the doomed shacks of Rainbow Row, is the sheer weirdness of the short images and comments that flit past. The notion of excavating industrial waste when the whole place is levelled, as when someone notes 'there must be a metre of steel sunk in that soil. They'll be digging it up for years'. The hellish, grimy and steamy baths, where naked men discuss their unpaid wages with anger or resignation. The 'six months of winter' that someone complains about, which becomes painfully beautiful in the vivid 'night' section of Rails, where the snow is pervaded by smoking oil, lurid sodium lights, bright violets and pinks. The horrendous cold that overtakes the factories, with workers in woolly hats and gloves hacking ice off the production lines. The glimpse of a steam train. A man in a medical white coat rollerskating up the frozen wastes of Rainbow Row. The inexplicable final sequence of Remnants, where a phone rings, and with the words 'you've got a call', a man walks through an open door into a roofless house. The men of Rainbow Row dragging along tangles of wire, with slabs of metal placed on them, to sell off to anyone who'll pay. The bizarre, horrible fight between the scavenger Old Du, finally arrested, after he returns from prison, and his son, whose mood swings from supplication on bended knee to 'I hate you...fuck you all' within seconds.
Although this is the tragedy of a whole community, and one that has no need for any stars or 'human interest stories', it is Old Du and his son, with their makeshift house in a shed on the freight yards, whose small tragedy is played out in its last two hours, who encapsulate what is unprecedented in Wang's film. That is, letting those who are usually banished to the periphery, ignored, or redesigned to fit into an industrial-positivist montage, actually speak, at length. These are people who cling onto modernity at its fringes, trying to survive by staying one step ahead of those with money and power, until the inevitable time that they are found out. 'I've got no job, no home, but let me tell you, I've got connections, I've got files and records...', until he realises that none of that is relevant anymore. 'Now they've got a file on me!'
'Brutalist' architecture was never just an aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it's divided between 'eyesores' and 'icons', fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients. When the heritage industry lays its hands on Brutalism, it unsurprisingly gets its fingers burnt.
English Heritage was formed in 1983, at the height of the reaction against the new face grafted on to England by old Labour's technological 'white heat' - Brutalism's aesthetic and the heritage ethic would seem inherently opposed. Romancing the Stone, the second episode of English Heritage, a grimly funny BBC2 series on the quango's activities, incongruously following a Jacobean mansion, profiles the 'regeneration' of Sheffield's vast, Grade II* listed Park Hill council estate. At Park Hill preservation experts worry over 'historic fabric', while Urban Splash, the property developers who are transforming it, threaten to paint the whole thing pink. Stereotypes are rife: the English Heritage contingent speak in RP, the developers are flash Mancunians, the restoration's architect a middle-aged Frenchman who dresses in lime green, and locals are presented as bluff Yorkshiremen who don't know much about architecture, but know what they like.
Enjoyable as these tensions are, they obscure a deeply complex story, one which perfectly exemplifies Britain's tortured relationship with its recent past. We would never know that Park Hill was an early response to what were considered, even in the 1950s, to be Modern architecture's failures. Empty spaces, isolation, a lack of street life, a middle-class 'this is good for you' ethos – all were fiercely critiqued by its planners and architects. Unfortunately for its advocates, the style of these buildings – reliant on 'béton brut', unpainted concrete - was christened 'the New Brutalism'. The New Brutalism's chief propagandist, Reyner Banham, pondered in a 1966 book whether the idiom was an 'Ethic or Aesthetic', so firmly marked was it by social concerns. He claimed that the Brutalists were the architectural equivalent of the 'angry young men' of the '50s, of Arnold Wesker or Alan Sillitoe. Banham wrote that these architects were of 'red brick extraction', products of post-war class mobility, usually Northerners.
Park Hill was, and still is, along with London's contrastingly affluent Barbican estate, the largest scale application of Brutalism's ethic and aesthetic. It cleared a violent slum by Sheffield's Midland Station nicknamed 'little Chicago', but rather than rehousing the residents in isolated towers, the architects – Jack Lynn, Ivor Smith and Frederick Nicklin, selected by the City Architect Lewis Womersley – attempted to replicate in the air the tightly packed street life of the area. The New Brutalists were enthusiasts for the close-knit working class life supposedly being broken up by the new estates and new towns. Books that documented these communities from the outside, such as Willmott and Young's Family and Kinship in East London, or from the inside, like Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, were required reading. So claustrophobic walk-ups or corridors were rejected in favour of 12ft wide 'streets in the sky'. These 'streets' were almost all connected with the ground, on steeply sloping land. Street corners were included where the winding building twisted around, with the spaces around the blocks filled with shops, schools and playgrounds. It even had its own tenants magazine, called Flat.
Meanwhile the architectural aesthetic was shaped by a rejection of the clean geometries of mainstream Modernism, in favour of roughness and irregularity. The marks of concrete shuttering were left on the surface, showing the imprint of manual labour rather than imitating machine production. The bricks were yellow, red and purple, its abstract patterns aided by artist John Forrester. The blocks rose from 4 storeys at the highest point of the hill to 13 at the lowest, giving a continuous roof line visible from much of the city. Despite – or because of - its aesthetic extremism, early responses to the blocks were very positive indeed, as you can see in Romancing the Stone's footage of children and OAPs praising the place's modernity and community. Over old footage of the playgrounds, a South Yorkshire voice intones 'there's no stopping this collective thinking. It's the future'.
Encouraged by these responses, the architects clearly thought they had solved the problems of Modernist housing. A 'Park Hill Mark Two' was built just behind the site – Hyde Park, which rose to an 18-story 'castle keep'. Later, a mark three, Kelvin Flats, was designed by other architects west of the city centre. In 1962, the book Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, documenting Lewis Womersley's tenure as City architect, was published in English, French and Russian – Sheffield's council housing was world-famous. Streets in the sky were only one facet of its housing programme. The less futuristic but equally remarkable suburban counterpart to Park Hill's urbanity was Gleadless Valley, a collection of houses and flats making remarkable use of the hilly landscape, resembling a strange socialist South Yorkshire version of '50s Southern California. By the end of the '70s, nearly half of Sheffield's housing was council-owned. This is a reminder that council housing was never intended to be the emergency measure it is now, but something which was genuinely 'mixed'.
Perhaps Park Hill was too successful at recreating the space of the old rookeries - like them, it was full of escape routes and shadowy spots. Romancing the Stone mentions that the 'dream turned sour in the early 1980s', but not why that might be so – the collapse of the steel industry, which in a matter of years turned Sheffield from a prospective City of the Future into a remnant of the past; or the 'Right to Buy' council housing, which would turn unpopular estates into refuges of last resort. In an optimistic time it looked confident; as that world collapsed, it looked intimidating. In the 1990s Hyde Park was partly demolished, its remnants tackily re-clad. Kelvin flats were levelled completely. It's almost certain that Park Hill would have suffered the same fate had it not been listed in 1998. Practically inescapable in Sheffield, it is an overwhelming reminder of what it once wanted to be – the capital of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, a rough but sociable metropolis; rather than what it wants to be now, a local service industry centre.
On a recent visit to Sheffield I interviewed two interested parties: first Ben Morris, a local Defend Council Housing campaigner, and then Simon Gawthorpe, of the property developer Urban Splash. Morris wasn't all that interested in Park Hill - though he liked the building, he had a wider story to tell. He took me to Modernist estates like Womersley's Woodside, now almost completely demolished; and to traditionalist inter-war garden suburbs like Parson's Cross and Shirecliffe, pockmarked with demolition sites. Sheffield's New Labour Council, under the administration of the unelected Bob Kerslake, was proud of its policy of demolishing council housing to create 'Housing Market Renewal', i.e to artificially stimulate a property boom. Whether tower blocks or houses with gardens, nowhere was safe. The policy, intended to invite 'mixed communities' through new buildings that seldom arrived, had created a huge council waiting list – between 2001 and 2007 it quadrupled from 14,301 to 58,706, and Morris estimates that the recession may have pushed it as high as 90,000. If you don't want council estates to become emergency refuges inhabited mainly by the desperate, this a weird way of going about it. Park Hill will lose around 600 council flats, with roughly 300 being run by a Housing Association – a fraction of the thousands lost under Kerslake.
On the basis of his 'success' in Sheffield, Sir Bob Kerslake was appointed chair of the Homes and Communities Agency, a super-quango merging the PPP sponsors English Partnerships with the Housing Corporation. This proud demolisher of council housing is now head of the agency that intends to sponsor new social housing to help people through the property crash. Appropriately, the HCA has 'frontloaded' its £14 million sponsorship of Park Hill's redevelopment, most of which is funded by Urban Splash. This Manchester-based property developer is best known for turning derelict mills, office blocks and factories into city-centre 'lofts'. It grew out of founder Tom Bloxham's record shop, and is an interesting amalgam of two New Labour fixations – the 'creative industries' and property speculation, as opposed to Old Labour's heavy industries and social housing.
This is apt in a sense, as the streets in the sky have always been a presence in Sheffield's electronic music - Kelvin Flats were referenced in the sleevenotes to The Human League's 'Dancevision', Park Hill was on the cover of their Golden Hour of the Future compilation; and later, Park Hill features as utopia and Kelvin as dystopia in Pulp's early '90s work. Urban Splash's brochure for Park Hill was elegantly rendered by The Designers Republic, who made their name as sleeve designers for Warp Records and Pulp - themselves recently claimed by the recession. It's full of quotations from Sheffield bands like the Human League and ABC, all written in infantile music-press clichés, promising to restore 'the love' to Park Hill.
Walking around Park Hill today is a surreal experience. At one end it's still inhabited, and people were indeed chatting on the streets in the sky – at the other it's a monolithic, empty frame. I asked Simon Gawthorpe why Urban Splash took so drastic an approach, and he replied that the intention was to transform the place from a 'sink estate' into 'a place where people would want to live and invest'. Some of their ideas are sensible, such as opening a four-storey entrance to relieve the block's wall-like appearance; others seem designed to make Park Hill as brightly tacky as any other piece of Regeneration architecture. In a move decided upon before market failure made money scarce, they stripped the entire North Block at great expense, when this structurally sound building could have been refurbished simply enough.
I had assumed it was space standards that dictated the stripping, but Gawthorpe says they will mostly keep its internal proportions. What they are doing is removing all the bricks, to be replaced by anodised aluminium panels, replicating John Forrester's colour scheme, if entirely abandoning truth to materials. Romancing the Stone shows English Heritage eventually reluctant about the redesign, then giving in. This might be a repudiation of Brutalism's rough Aesthetic, but neither developers or conservationists mind destroying its Ethic. Reyner Banham claimed that Park Hill was the culmination of a 'moral crusade'. Urban Splash certainly find this 'utopian' rhetoric attractive, and Gawthorpe proudly talks about about a woman who has lived there since the '60s telling them 'people think we live in a slum. They don't realise that I live in a penthouse looking out over the city'. He can't tell me where she lives now. Already 300 of the residents who were cleared have registered an interest in returning, but only 200 flats will be available for social rent.
The feeling is inescapable that a whole claque of publicly funded bodies have become subject to a property developer's whims. Perhaps the only sympathetic figure in the documentary is the estate's caretaker, who drives along the streets in the sky in a golf buggy, picking up refuse bags and drug paraphernalia. In the face of this astonishing structure, patronised by heritage and property, he comments 'I love the old girl. She's an old lady who's fallen on hard times.' Here, at least, Park Hill has inspired the sense of belonging its architects tried to create. Park Hill is a battered remnant of a very different country, one which briefly turned housing for ordinary people into futuristic monuments rather than shamefaced little hutches. The ideologies of Regeneration and Heritage, when applied to the very different ethical aesthetic of the old New Brutalism, can only destroy the thing they claim to love. Nothing in the rest of this series, back in the familiar heritage England of Victorian railway stations and Elizabethan gardens, is anywhere near as tragic.
'Director's cut' of piece originally published in The Guardian. 2009 photos by Joel Anderson, 1960s photos by Iqbal Aalam.
(shameless plug: some of the below is taken from the first chapter of the forthcoming book Militant Modernism, published in April)
The next three Pulp singles were released on Gift Records, from 1992 to 1993. Gift was a subsidiary of Warp, and it's an interesting counterfactual to imagine the 1990s, and Pulp's 15 minutes of fame, if they had released it on Warp proper. Given that they've since besmirched their techno rep by signing all manner of indie bands, including the utterly nondescript Maximo Park, they perhaps missed a bit of a trick here. Obviously Pulp didn't make straightforward Sheffield techno records, with the exception of the so-so 'This House is Condemned', but you can't imagine them without house and techno. In a sense this is true of lots of Britpop. Noel Gallagher was, along with Pulp's members, perhaps the only ex-raver in that mileu (with Pulp and Oasis interestingly its only working class bands), and Oasis' endless, insufferable exhortations to 'shine', take me higher and so forth are really an application of rave's vague, all-purpose, non-specific euphoria to the pub and the muddy music festival, rather than the club or the orbital rave. This meaningless positivity became the perfect soundtrack to the rise of New Labour, more on which in later parts. Pulp did something far more intriguing with these forms, though, using their least classicist possibilities, taking the expansive space, non-verse/chorus song structures, and the layers of artificial textures, and applying them to a rickety glam-disco band.
The city is a woman, bigger than any other
With the major exception of 'Common People', you can't necessarily hear this in their singles, which are perfectly structured, melodramatic three minute capsules, quintessential 7" records - 'O.U', 'Razzmatazz', 'Lipgloss', 'Babies', all of them charged yet controlled pop songs. But you can hear it in the albums and in the B-Sides, and you can hear it especially on what vies with 'Common People' and 'This is Hardcore' to be their masterpiece - 'Sheffield: Sex City', b-side to the 1992 release of 'Babies'. When I was 16, I and my girlfriend were completely obsessed with this song, and we walked round Shirley in Southampton as if it were the teeming, simmering, carnal city described, peering up into the windows of its tower blocks, past the twitching curtains of the semis, imagining the couplings and perversions inside. It also soundtracked something fairly momentous between us. It's a record so improbable that even to describe it sounds fantastical. Jarvis intones a series of Sheffield place names, with luridly sensual relish - from 'Intake' onwards. The next voice you hear is Candida Doyle, deadpan and Yorkshire, reading - of all things - from one of the sexual fantasies in a Nancy Friday book. Here, as in 'My Legendary Girlfriend' (to which it is, according to the sleevenotes, 'the morning after') the city itself is the focus for all the libdinal energies. 'We were living in a big block of flats...within minutes the whole building was fucking. I mean, have you ever heard other people fucking, and really enjoying it? Not like in the movies, but when it's real...'
The most important sounds in it (aside from Jarvis' own increasingly astonishing groans, howls, gasps and ecstatic squeals) are hers, too - the banks of synths, either taken from the same jumble sale ransacked at the same time by Stereolab, or more recent sounding noises - regardless, it's these arpeggiated synths, repetitious house vamps and Russell Senior's queasily treated violin, which seem to simulate the vertiginous feeling of nervousness, anticipation and mania which underpin the ridiculous, magnificent lyric. As the metronomic kick drum pounds, and deep, relentless bass throbs, the whole city is 'getting stiff in the building heat', and Jarvis walks through its entire extent trying to find his lover. So overwhelmed is he by the sheer sexuality of Sheffield that he finds himself 'rubbing up against lamp-posts, trying to get rid of it'. The sheer detail of the places made sexual - the semis, the gardens, 'years' in the housing benefit waiting room, 'grunts from a T-reg Chevette - you bet...you bet...' and in a particularly memorable moment a 'crack in the pavement', it all builds and builds and builds until in a final explosive moment they 'make it', and they survey the wreckage left over - 'everyone on Park Hill came in unison at 4.13AM, and the whole block fell down.'
This was probably our favourite line in the song, and we always imagined it taking place in the vast slab block Shirley Towers, which loomed over this particular courtship. I was absolutely ecstatic a few years later when, as an English & History MA student developing a part-time interest in architecture, I found out just how famous and important Park Hill was, and I saw photographs of this enormous, snaking collective housing block, with its wide streets in the sky, its gradations of colours, its form rising to different storeys depending on its place on the hill. It was absolutely perfect, a sort of visual emblem of the familiar 1960s-built city turned into a utopian, libidinal megastructure, and I can to a large extent blame my interest in brutalist architecture and the city to this specific song and our reaction to it as oversexed teenagers.
Shirley is a pretty typical but nonetheless odd place, in that Victorian terraces and 1930s semis are right next to vast 1960s council estates. Because of this it was a deeply class-conscious place. As an illustration, around this time she moved with her parents to the other side of St James Road, to a semi - which counted as going up in the world, given that the street here became the more prestigious 'Upper Shirley', although the difference was a matter of yards. I lived in a short cluster of terraces at the bottom of a street of semis, and was equally keen to maintain that I wasn't in the Upper part. So the other major urbanist song on Intro was, if not as world-shattering an experience as 'Sheffield: Sex City', something which seemed to describe our environment perfectly: 'Styloroc (Nites of Suburbia)'. The detritus of the 70s was everywhere, in the many, many local charity shops and in the furnishings of our houses, and here it was described as something richly perverse - black hair, sprouting beneath bri-nylon underwear. The song actually dates from the 'Little Girl' era, but appears here as a cranky yet sweeping Stylophone epic. It's all much more mordant than the ecstatic 'Sex City', pitching itself as a vicarious tour through a 'strange land', and it's this sort of thing that leads to the accusations of voyeurism, seediness and so forth. We didn't take it as such. It was far more a way of making the city and suburbia interesting, of making our (built) environment and the people in it more than a random collection of buildings and people tediously grafting - we knew they were absolutely full of intrigue behind the fences, at the end of the plazas and above the hedges, had to believe it in order not to give way to the consumerist tedium which was then remaking our city. We were fascinated by the 'thousand fake orgasms every night, behind thick draylon curtains', and listened out for them.
Regardless of whatever we took from these songs and imposed on a Southern city, there's an undeniably a certain - if not nostalgia as such, then something nearer to the now-familiar plaint of 'nostalgia for the future', in which Pulp were paradoxically ahead of the game by a decade or so - in these city songs. In a 'Guide to Sheffield' that Pulp did for NME in the early 90s (reproduced on the invaluable Acrylic Afternoons site) there's mentions both of its role as centre of the 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire', when the red flag famously flew above the town hall (which comes out in a particularly quotidian way in the songs: ' I remember when the buses were only 10p to go anywhere. That's why buses are mentioned quite a lot in our songs. Anyway, it all stopped in the mid-'80s. There are about six different bus companies now, like Eager Beaver, Yorkshire Terrier... it's, ridiculous - if the driver sees the stop they're supposed to be going to hasn't got any people at it, they change the number and go to one that has. People came from Japan to see our bus service - it was the end of the Western World.") and, more particularly, the city's failure to become the modernist metropolis that Park Hill, the Miesian Sheffield University, Park Hill's more disputed successors Hyde Park and Kelvin, and the noted Castle Square 'hole in the road', and the 'peace garden!' squealed of in 'Sex City', all promised. One interview makes it especially clear: '"Sheffield's full of half-arsed visions of cities of the future that turn into a pile of rubbish," Russell Senior reflects, standing on the biggest traffic roundabout in Europe. "We grew up reading the local paper and seeing 'Sheffield, city of the future,' with a map of how it's going to be and pictures of everyone walking around in spacesuits, smiling. But we're the only ones who took it seriously..." "When I was younger I definitely thought I'd live in space," says Jarvis Cocker ruefully. "But when you realise you're not going to, it colours your life; you can't think, 'It's alright if I'm signing on because I'll be on Mars soon', you have to try and get it down here."
No-one ever really got inside Susan
It's this that lies behind all the obvious retro signifiers - the Farfisas, Stylophones and Moogs, the jumble sale clothes, the tower blocks, space hoppers and luridly bright artificial fabrics that pervade the videos - a sense of being cheated out of the future, responding by fetishising the last time that a viable future appeared to exist. Yet the songs delve deeply into 1970s nostalgia, not least as a way of talking about the stripped-pine compromises and bland conformities of the 1990s. You can hear this especially vividly in 'Inside Susan - a story in three parts', which concludes the Gift singles and B-sides collected on Intro. This tale of a 'Rotherham puberty' followed by 'wild teen years in Sheffield' and eventual middle-class stability in Camberwell, is another example of Jarvis' obsessive/sympathetic studies of women, although here with a detail and wit that shouldn't obscure how it eventually ends up, as they all do, to be about whether or not she'll sleep with the narrator. The first, 'Stacks' is Pulp at their most straightforwardly retro, albeit with the 70s parts all assembled in the wrong order. It's cheap, fizzing, and absolutely riven with nostalgia, all sports halls, gropings on the bus and 'sky blue trainer bras'. It's an enormously enjoyable bit of tat, but rather pales in comparison with 'Inside Susan', the centrepiece of the story.
The only obvious precedent for songs like this, with their detail and sympathy for their mundane protagonists elevating them into something almost mythical, is Scott Walker circa 'Plastic Palace People', but even he was never as sharp or poignant as this. Dispensing with actual singing of any sort, bar a refrain of muffled yelps and cries, this is all monologue, over a dense, bright, vividly exciting motorik pulse which intensifies at key moments in the plotless narrative. It's a bus travelogue, and develops according to where the bus is at any given point, sparking off Susan's alternately bored or intrigued thoughts, with the most mundane details easily transformed into something extraordinary -
The bus is waiting on the High Street when it suddenly begins to rain torrentially, and it sounds like someone has emptied about a million packets of dried peas onto the roof of the bus. "What if it just keeps raining?", she thinks to herself. "And it was just like being in an aquarium except it was all shoppers and office workers that were floating past the windows instead of fish."
As the bus drives on, she thinks of a party where she was hit on by 'some German exchange students who were very immature', and finally wonders: "maybe this bus won't stop", she thinks, "and I'll stay on it until I'm old enough to go into pubs on my own, and it'll drive me to a town where people with black hair are treated specially, and I can make lots of money from charging fat old men five pounds a time to look up my skirt, and they'll be queuing up to take me out to dinner'. As in Daniel Clowes' Ghost World - which is often evoked by Pulp's songs of this period, an awkward, urbane man's idea of a melancholic teenage girlhood marked by attempts to romanticise the mundane - Susan could easily be a feminised version of the author himself. Regardless, it ends with a hint of bitterness at the reactions of others towards Susan - 'they put her in a corner and let her heat up the room, warming their hands and backsides in front of her, and then slagging her off around town.'
This bitterness continues in '59 Lyndhurst Grove'. She's managed to get out of Yorkshire, is enjoying a comfortable but loveless existence with an architect in south London. The scornful lyric - delivered in a heartbroken but sly falsetto - is the first essay in what will become a major theme, the sexual politics of domestic interiors. 'There's a picture by his first wife on the wall. Stripped floorboards in the kitchen and the hall...they were dancing with children round their necks, talking business, books and records, art and sex. All things being considered, you'd call it a success, you wore your black dress.' The sound is very close to Stereolab, a droning Moog Muzak that evokes both the Romantic Moog albums of an earlier period of domestic conformity, and sounds like a sad echo of the synthetic excitement of 'Inside Susan'. Here, Susan snatches whatever fun she can in this stifling yet successful environment ('oh he's an architect, and such a lovely guy...') by having an affair with someone presumably rather more exciting, a role that Jarvis will assume many times in the next few years, Regardless, Jarvis himself claimed in the sleevenotes that the whole thing was motivated by jealousy anyway - 'I played these songs to Susan the other day - she just laughed and said I was being spiteful because she wouldn't sleep with me when we first met. She also said to tell you that she's perfectly happy where she is at the moment, thank you very much.'
Adultery & Interiors
His 'n' Hers is perhaps the only pop record which largely purports to be about domestic interiors. Or at least, uses them as a metaphor for sex, class and the usual things which are latent or blindingly obvious. It exists in a similar landscape to the Martin Parr photographs for the BBC Signs of the Times book/documentary, of matching towel sets, ornamented light switches, of carefully chosen signifiers of individuality which end up as signifiers of conservatism and conformism, of status and success. This is all filtered through a luridly 70s-damaged fixation on the erotic properties of the artificial fabrics of an earlier era. What we have here is a suburban record, where Intro was mostly vividly urban, and one marked by all the boredom and frustration that entails. The obligatory sleevenote communique links together the smugness of coupledom, the horror of interiors and the awesome tedium of the shopping malls that replaced the futurist city keenly and distortedly remembered on the earlier singles. The ballads on here - 'Happy Endings', or 'Someone like the Moon' - sound like they're coming out of some kind of supermarket tannoy, with the four-note synth chimes in the latter seeming to precede an announcement, 'could Mr Cocker come to the checkout please...', with the cavernous, reverb-drenched production implying the vast ennui-filled space of an out-of-town Asda.
It's a beautifully produced record, precisely for how far from 'live' it sounds. With a collection of antique synths (eight of them, from Korg to EMS, according to the credits) wafting around a huge, airy space. Ed Buller's piling on of effects intersects with the keyboards to create some breathtaking moments - the first few seconds of 'Do you remember the first time?', where the whines and chirps of the antique machines flutter with all the quivering nervousness of a couple of teenagers tentatively asking each other the pointed question. Odd moments and riffs abound, such as the echoed children singing at the start of 'Acrylic Afternoons'. Which is one of the strangest tracks on a deeply strange record - another slab of sexdisco, although here punctuated with high-pitched squeaks which take this approach even further from its eventual roots in, say, Isaac Hayes. All this effeminacy, Jarvis as Donna Summer orgasmatron, is dedicated to a scenario where he is the bit of rough, the bit on the side of, a suburban housewife. This isn't necessarily as part of some bit of 'Mr Jones'-bashing though, but seemingly based on a libidinal cross between the objects - the acrylics, the 'pink quilted eiderdown', the settee with the TV humming in the background, and the table set for tea for when the children come home - and the act. The atmosphere is feverish, delirious. It's weird, to say the least, to see (in the clip above) a crowd clapping along to this particularly furtive little tale, a tea-fuelled bacchanalia where the stifling, overfurnished suburban living room becomes a claustrophobically overheated space of sexual obsession.
'She's a Lady', 'Lipgloss' and 'Pink Glove' continue in this general vein, the making-sexy of all manner of quotidian tat, with the protagonist alternately attracted and repelled by the paraphernalia of suburban sexuality, almost always from an outsider's perspective, either looking in on the relationships of others or as an invasive interlocutor into the exurbs and cul-de-sacs. 'She's a Lady' is especially torrid, enlivened by the frustration and resentment of 'Countdown' - while not obsessing over the lady of the title, the protagonist is staying in bed all day, moaning about 'all this crap that holds me down'. What ends up happening is that this world, with all its ambiguities and dubiousness ('I don't know why you pretend that it causes you pain', etc etc) becomes something deeply exciting, the model of adolescent fantasies. Certainly the world of 'Lipgloss', for all its grim cuckolding and inertia, seemed so to me, although maybe less so a few years later when all that I lived on actually was the proverbial lipgloss and cigarettes.
This doesn't make it any less brutal, mind you, and these songs are marked both by a fierce erotic fascination, with women's clothes, make-up, and obviously with sex itself (all combined in 'She's a Lady's fantastic line 'wore her body back to front') and some ferocious put-downs, whether they're put into the mouths of particular characters or not: 'Lipgloss' pivots on a woman too scared to leave the house in case other women notice 'that your stomach looks bigger and your hair is a mess, and your eyes are just holes in your face'. Here, women manipulate men and vice versa, as in 'Pink Glove's tragicomic fetishism, where the lover of rayon and acrylic sneers 'it's hard to believe that you go for that stuff - baby doll nighties, synthetic fluff...' The brilliant b-side 'Street Lites' meanwhile, one of the most breathlessly sexy things they recorded, has more cuckolding - 'it wouldn't be the same, if we didn't know it was wrong', this time accompanied by a shimmering, neon-lit vision of London seen from the back of a taxi couriering illicit liasons, as opposed to the album's suburban Sheffield.
The Sisters EP is maybe this version of the group, the Spectorian stylophonic glam-pop group of Separations, Intro and His & Hers as opposed to the mostly more conventional Chris Thomas-produced thing which followed, at their absolute peak, three songs ('Seconds', 'Your Sister's Clothes', 'His 'n' Hers') which pass in a blur of flickering keyboards, yearning choruses and almost tossed-off one-liners (these are probably the songs he would later refer to as 'just another song about single mothers and sex'). It's 'His 'n' Hers', the unused title track for the album, that is most stunning. 'One man's fear of domestic interiors set to music', the clip above doesn't quite do it justice, missing the stomach-churning, pre-orgasmic synth that drones through the chorus. Here, we are again in suburban Sheffield, and with a scenario of class conflict expressed through sex and domestic interiors: 'I wanna wipe you down, and lick the smile off your face...Though we know that it's wrong: towel sets, matching combs...oh it looks so good but does it turn you on?' The track is deeply uncomfortable, queasy, with moans and wails of excitement and disgust punctuating, rising into the guiltily ecstatic chorus, where DIY, bourgeois IKEA smugness is turned into sexual metaphor - 'pull the units down!' 'shove it in sideways!' and so forth. It all spills over into absurd comedy, when the unnerved narrator, led by his clearly assured bourgeois lover, is asked what he's so afraid of, leading to a litany of '90s middle-class tat: Belgian chocolates, James Dean posters, endowment plans, figurines, 26" screens'...and obviously her straightforward response is to put his hand somewhere intimate - and we leave the scene with his defeat.
Mister, we just want your car
This is developed from an earlier song called 'Frightened', included on the reissue of His 'n' Hers, some of which also ends up in 'The Fear' a few years later. The fear of the middle classes and their design choices is not the only one here. It would be incomplete to concentrate just on the libidinous and scathing portrayals of middle class life in these songs, as there are others which talk about lumpen proletarian habits and mores with much the same ambiguity and disgust. 'Deep Fried in Kelvin', the B-side to 'Lipgloss, is like a ten-minute reversal of 'Sheffield: Sex City'. Like the latter, it centres on one of the huge collective housing blocks planned by Jack Lynn & Ivor Smith for Sheffield City Council. Park Hill got Grade II listed and is being prepared for an Urban Splash-led regeneration/gentrification, but the apparently identical Kelvin Flats - mentioned in the Human League's sleevenotes for the sublime 'Dancevision' - were demolished in the 1990s. There's little interest in the utopian possibilities of brutalist megastructures in 'Deep Fried', with its tale of a man destroying his flat by trying to turn it into a garden, and talk of walking 'on promenade with concrete walkways, where pigeons go to die'. It's a vision of a consumerist, barely literate proletariat destroyed by Thatcherism, where children are 'conceived in the toilets of Meadowhall'. It has equal disdain both for the 'fizzy orange and chips' youth of this 'ghetto' and for those who might improve it (memorably, 'we don't need your sad attempts at social conscience based on taxi rides home at night from exhibition openings. We just want your car radio and bass reflex speakers. Now'), and eventually maybe for the narrator himself and his social concern.
'Joyriders' excises the angst over exactly who is speaking, as the bored teenagers are now in the first person. It's difficult to say, though, whether it's all satire or a genuine expression of class disdain (as if it would matter) - 'we can't help it, we're so thick we can't think - can't think of anything, but shit, sleep and drink'. The bleakest of all of these songs of working class boredom and casual violence/idiocy is 'Mile End'. Here it's the old East End, repository for proleface sentimentality, which is, when surveyed from the top of a tower block as the 'pearly king of the isle of Dogs', 'just like heaven, if it didn't look like hell'. While I'm trying to avoid biographism here as much as possible (except for my own, hah), they're all songs that are more or less autobiographical, tales of dole life when you could still get a council flat without having to lose an arm or a leg or have a family in double figures. Sometimes these spaces are rather romantic; the video to 'Babies', for instance, takes place in Camberwell's Sceaux Gardens Estate, where Jarvis and Steve Mackey were living at the time, somewhere with much architectural rep: Ian Nairn writes of it that 'the magical transformation has happened, an estate transformed into a place'. The block called 'Voltaire' gets a particularly wry shot in the video, a place perfect for the song's rum, giddy nostalgia.
The council flat dystopias are, for all their justified bitterness, the correlate of the failed utopia that is re-imagined in 'My Legendary Girlfriend' and 'Sheffield: Sex City', indicators of what has happened to the working class after (then only 15 years of) Thatcherism. While Oasis took this and played up to it, constantly stressing just how bovine they were with their beery anthems to nothing in particular, Pulp were in the context of britpop, the last gasp of a literate, articulate, arty working class pop, at least in terms of bands and self-publicising acts rather than bedroom producers and MCs. Yet the unstoppable urge to get out, while very different to the latter's dreams of Champagne Supernovas and guitar-shaped swimming pools, leads to its own uncomfortable contradictions and outbreaks of sheer, resentful rage. As well it should.
(...which will bring us onto the next two albums, after a much longer break than the one between the first two)
Park Hill images taken from here, and PulpWiki was very helpful.
I've been promising a post on Pulp for as long as I've been blogging (which will be four years, soon enough) and the self-imposed pressure of this means that what follows shouldn't be considered as anything other than tentative steps towards some eventual completed opus on the subject (that way, I'll actually be able to write the damn thing) - so, this is unfinished, unformed stuff, which at some point in the future will be pulled together. At least, this post at Aloof from Inspiration and the replies give it some sort of currency. I wanted to write about Pulp and wanted to put it off endlessly for the same reason - I feel far too close to this stuff, to a somewhat uncomfortable and unintentionally amusing extent. Some of the reasons for this I might end up confessing here (oh, losing my virginity at 16 to Intro, that sort of thing) others are none of your sodding business.
It needs to be said, and people are reluctant to say it - Pulp were not only by some measure the finest British group of the 1990s, but they compete with their more obvious forbears. Roxy Music, even at their most chillingly Helmut Newton-esque ('In Every Dream Home' etc) never created as terrifying a vision of success and opulence achieved curdling into anomie and psychosis as 'This is Hardcore'; Morrissey never managed anything as perfectly vengeful as 'Common People', and the world created on their records from 1990-1994 is easily as obsessive, lyrically dense and inspired as The Fall at their peak. There's a certain sense in which The Smiths, or maybe My Bloody Valentine, were allowed to be some sort of last gasp of British pop (not Britpop, obviously, but as a serious, non-retro phenomenon), a critical consensus which wholly ignores the fact that in 1995 a group managed to send a motorik epic about class warfare to number 2. Some of the reasons for this critical timidity are quite understandable - their collaboration with the horrible spectacle of Britpop, the notion that Pulp were dominated by their 'retro' signifiers (although frankly, I can't see what makes their 1970s any less acceptable than Roxy's 1930s - both groups made music that could only have been made at that precise moment), and most of all the ambiguous victory of Jarvis Cocker, pop celebrity. Nonetheless, this is a group that need to be taken seriously, very seriously indeed. So what I'll be doing here, over several posts, is attempting to take them as seriously as possible. The way to do this is, of course, via the three things which run through all their best work - class, sex and psychogeography.
A hole in your heart, and one between your legs
Let's start at the beginning, which in Pulp's case is a very murky thing. They start out in 1981 as a quintessential minor post-punk group, a 'John Peel band', and their first Peel session shows them trying out various modes (Aztec Camera, Pigbag, Joy Division) to quite enjoyable but hardly world-shaking effect. Then there's the first album in 1983, It, which in sound and subject matter is basically Leonard Cohen without the sex. This was never a good idea, although it's not without a lush, gawky, Gregory's Girl charm, songs about a love which has clearly never been actually experienced, with the extended metaphor of 'My Lighthouse' being the most charming and ridiculous moment. However, as detailed in their Do you remember the first time? documentary, Jarvis loses his virginity around this point, and they become an immeasurably more interesting group very quickly.
The 1985 single 'Little Girl (with Blue Eyes)' is some sort of mid-60s Eurovision entry gone awry, with the pederastic title referring to a young woman charmed into marriage and childbirth, cheated into domesticity - 'so just forget about the paintings, cause you've got to get the washing done'. What makes it especially interesting is the luridness of the delivery, and with respect to the girl with 'a hole in your heart, and one between your legs...you've never had to wonder which one he's going to fill' you wonder, not for the first time, whether the singer is an observer of the woman's plight, or a participant. The other songs from the time show a grim view of sex as either torture (the frantic punk-funk of 'Mark of the Devil', with its plaint 'your past is just a bedroom full of implements of cruelty'), or as an element in bleak little observational dramas, with remarkable attention to detail: '97 Lovers', featuring a woman who joylessly sleeps with a builder beneath a poster of Roger Moore.
I'll keep you and I'll throw myself away
This bleakness becomes particularly unpalatable on Freaks, surely one of the most lugubrious records ever made. Sex here is universally horrible. Interminable, claustrophobic relationships ('The Never-Ending Story'), masturbation and megalomania ('Master of the Universe'), anorexia, the act itself as something horrifying. 'They Suffocate at Night' is surely the peak/nadir of this, and from the opening lines - 'his body loved her/his mind was set on other things' - there's something of a dualism problem here. It's also quite a bad record, mannered, dirge-like, appallingly produced. Songs which threaten to make some sort of Walker-esque grandeur or menace out of it all stumble on strained crooning and some decidedly icky lyrics. 'I Want You' (a song performed as late as 2002) is as good as it gets here, drawing on some of the subtlety and detail of 'Little Girl', and what's most notable is that it's desire itself that is most worrying. The awkward croon sings of something which is irresistible but which nonetheless should be resisted, the asceticism summed up surely in the declaration 'you've got to stamp upon its head!' Without ever being a particularly good record, Freaks is at least worthy of a chapter in The Sex Revolts all of its own, documenting very pungently and honestly a certain fear of coupling which runs through decades of pop.
Oh, Pitsmoor Woman!
It's incredible that two years later in 1989, almost the same group recorded the Separations LP (which wasn't released until 1992, however). The first single from the album, 'My Legendary Girlfriend' is a pounding disco opus clearly informed by acid house. Candida Doyle's array of old synthesisers dominate here for the first time, as they will all the group's finest moments. Italo-house pianos, shimmering, swelling synth-strings, strange whines, burbles and hums at the track's threshold, all conveying the sheer excitement of sex and, without wanting to evoke any other connotations of the phrase, the city. Out of Sheffield and living in London, the former hometown becomes the subject matter - and this is a sexualised city, where the post-industrial landscape is suffused with carnality in its every twist, turn, alleyway and precinct. The song begins with the protagonist in bed, listening to the titular girlfriend's breathing, then they wake up and take an oneiric walk through Sheffield. The temptation just to quote huge chunks of lyric here is unavoidable:
So I woke her...and we went walking through the sleeping town... down deserted streets... Frozen gardens grey in the moonlight...fences...down to the canal... Creeping slowly past cooling towers... Deserted factories...looking for an adventure... I wandered the streets calling your name... Jumping walls...hoping to see a light in the window... Let me in...let me come in...let me in tonight ... Oh I see you shivering in the garden...silver goose-flesh in the moonlight...
The strained croon is replaced by something which really, really shouldn't work - the breathy, spoken monologue, taken from Isaac Hayes or Barry White. Now that it's fairly familiar, we should remember just how unprecedented it actually was for a skinny, pale, indie rock singer to assume such a role completely without irony, without nudging or winking, and not only that but to pull it off, and to add a vocabulary of pants, yelps and squeals to the repertoire, which build and build to orgasmic proportions. The effect of house and techno on the group is not to attempt (in that clumsy, Mancunian baggy style ushered in by the Stone Roses) some sort of fusion based on lumpy funk-rock, but to take an only ostensibly backwards step to the disco from which house emerged. Except here Jarvis himself takes on the Donna Summer role, he becomes himself the sex object, only a couple of years after 'They Suffocate at Night'. And what seems to drive it is the city itself, only before mentioned in Freaks' horribly believable tale of a beating, 'Being Followed Home'. If Sheffield itself can be sexy, then so can he.
Separations is divided into two halves, one of which continues, vastly more successfully, the tortured balladry of Freaks, and the other of which descends into the urbanist sexdisco of 'My Legendary Girlfriend'. The first half is still full of tales of broken relationships and anguished couples, only here with a passion (and compassion) which is completely absent from the earlier record. 'She's Dead' is its peak, where a chorus of cheap synthesisers - modifying Noel Coward's quip about the 'potency of cheap music' into the sheer sadness of cheap instruments - creates a charity shop requiem, rendering all but unbearable this tale of death in a northern town, with the overtones of kitsch not toyed with, as so many lesser lights would, but embraced - here, Jarvis is heaven's own mobile disco crooner. The title track is almost as good, with a fantastic, vertiginous moment where a huge, absurd swell of Slavic violins suddenly gives way to Chicory Tip soundtracking early Antonioni, aided by the new vocabulary of heavy breathing and yelps. The second side includes one reasonably straight and not entirely successful Sheffield techno effort, 'This House is Condemned' - and more interestingly, two other disco epics attempting to follow the single. 'Death II' restores the sense of tragedy to the genre which the ironists had removed - this is disco in the same way as the bleak, dead-end world of the original Saturday Night Fever: 'watch my spirit melt away, down at the D-I-S-C-O'. In fact, the song seems to catalogue some sort of attempt to break out of the world of Freaks and the record's first side, where he tries to 'fill his head with other women', with a world of glamour, music and sex, but is constantly pulled back by poverty, and, perhaps uncomfortably, by a particular woman, reminded of it at the end of the night, with the ignominious return at 2am.
'Countdown' - the superior single version of which is above - is where for the first time you hear one major theme of the next few years. That is, disco as vehicle for proletarian (over)ambition, for the imperative to escape - and not just at the end of the week, but as a means of getting out, out of the provinces, out of poverty. This is melodrama as Fassbinder made it, courting ridiculousness, cruel, lurid and cheap, where the protagonist's overwhelming ego and jealousy leave only the option of self-advancement. Yet while Saturday Night Fever documents the more familiar working class 'Friday on my Mind' mentality of work/weekend, 'Countdown' is the disco of the dole fantasist - 'it could be tonight, if I ever leave this room'. That it actually did occur is worth a book or several in itself. This is the sound of someone accentuating his most absurd features in order to make himself into a superstar, in the best Warholian manner. The dancing and hand movements are to accentuate just how tall and thin he is, the effeminate yelps and breathiness court accusations of seediness (and 'pop perv' is as far as most analyses of sexuality in these records tends to go). This is 'vengeful self-creation' of a similar, but far more ruthlessly effective manner to that of Morrissey, who in the end opted for staying in his room. Pulp were clearly more interested in conquest, with all the dubiousness that entails.
Next up, in a week or so: Intro, His & Hers and the Sisters EP...
green urbanism and the politics of urban offsetting
Amidst the horror over the living arrangements of Josef Fritzl, one small detail emerged that, while seemingly confirming the thesis of the banality of evil, was not given much attention. The plan of his notorious basement has been anatomised in the press all over the world, in a rare foray into the rarefied world of interior design – we all know about this windowless space, the ceilings where the prisoners could not stand up, the placing of the televisions, the pictures on the wall. The photographs of the exterior, meanwhile, reveal the seeming conscientiousness of Fritzl's obsessive DIY. At the top of the house was a 'Green Roof'. Although it is obviously crass to extrapolate from the life and inclinations of this inhuman character to the wider issues of 'green' urbanism, it does suggestively make a certain connection. On the surface we have a sign of civic-mindedness and environmentalism, and on the inside – in the darkened space which apparently no-one but the jailer and the prisoners knew about – we have an unimaginable barbarism.
The history of the green roof, or the more total version, the 'living façade' (where the frontage of a building is entirely overtaken with vegetation) goes back to Romanticism, and the simultaneous shock and wonder felt by the Enlightenment consciousness at the ruins of the Roman Empire. Buildings as large, as technologically advanced (if not more) than our own, were reclaimed by nature, overrun by the very thing over which mankind thought it had achieved a victory. Accordingly, this led to the phenomenon of new buildings being designed as if they had always, already been overtaken by undergrowth, fronds, weeds cracking cement and stone. John Soane, who was very influenced by Piranesi's images of Paestum and other Roman sites in a state of ruination, commissioned the draughtsman Joseph Gandy to render his new Bank of England – an institution for the nascent, advancing force of imperial capitalism – as a crumbling, overgrown relic. The images include one of the dome with bushes growing out of it, and another wherein woodland seems to have infested the trading floors.2
The aesthetics of the intersection of vegetation and architecture were given a somewhat less morbid and decidedly more positivist spin after the First World War. The grim situation of post-war Vienna – starving, beset by hyper-inflation and grossly overcrowded housing – gave rise to a proposal by Adolf Loos for blocks of flats with a terraced design, so that each tenant could tend their own garden in an already dense scheme, in order to provide themselves with the food that a collapsing economy could not. This suggestion has many outgrowths, from the gardens in the sky of Moshe Safdie's Habitat to the design of many blocks of luxury housing, such as the Barrier Point development in East London, which borrows particularly unimaginatively from Loos. A less urgent version was featured in Le Corbusier's Immeuble Villas, where gardens on balconies were flung up into skyscraping structures. The common factor with Loos and Le Corbusier's green roofs was a clear demarcation between technology and nature. Neither had any interest in simulating the natural by clothing their buildings in creepers or wooden panels, and instead heightened the contrast between on the one hand their faith in technology, and on the other their relocation of nature from outside of the city into the buildings themselves.
Another strain, however, aimed at something rather more exotic. The landscape gardener Roberto Burle Marx was regularly hired by the Modernist architects of Brazil to provide a surprisingly untamed outgrowth of nature to embellish their buildings. Burle Marx talked about this process, in which his curved, abstract gardens would be either atop or surrounding some uncompromising concrete building, as a deliberate intervention against an overly rationalist, colonial conception of the city. He specifically claimed that 'the penetration of the caatinga, the Amazonian rainforests, the mountains of Minas Gerais, into the heart of the city, even onto the skyscrapers, would help modern man to become more human, to belong to his land, to be more than a simple machine for living'.3
Meanwhile, contemporary descriptions of the effects of these skyscraper gardens had their own particularly colonial tint: contemporary descriptions of roof garden atop Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Le Corbusier et al's Rio's 1936 Ministry of Education depicts it as an incursion of the jungle into the metropolis, perhaps giving off the threat that eventually, this 'penetration' would not be so benign. This is something that is posited as specifically Latin American: one couldn't imagine vegetation growing out of Mies van der Rohe's curtain walls.
At least, not until the ever-present possibility of technological annihilation set the imagination to work. In the dystopian imaginary the ever-less 'natural', ever more rectilinear and technologically advanced form of the city becomes subject to a destruction which then becomes a renaissance of nature. While this can become a deeply reactionary fantasy of rural revenge (or morph into Albert Speer's 'Theory of Ruin Value'), it can elsewhere provide a strange and eerily beautiful perspective on the city itself. J.G Ballard's The Drowned World is perhaps exemplary here. This apocalyptic, and clearly deeply prescient 1962 novel, is set after a disaster in which melting ice caps and climate change lead to the inundation of most of the world, with mankind emigrating to the polar regions en masse.
The fascination in Ballard's novel is not the apocalyptic destruction itself, but the aftermath: a climate returning to the Triassic, in which plants and creatures not seen for millions of years return to colonise the cities, in which the atavistic creeps up upon and decisively claims the world of technological rationality. This is explicitly set in terms of exotica, of an excursion into a brashly beautiful but savage and unforgiving territory. Indeed, Victor Gollancz told Ballard he had 'stolen it all from Conrad' – news to the author, who had never read him.4 Yet there is also something curiously colonial about the tale, with its scientist-protagonist surveying the swamped cities from a luxury hotel. An intriguing work clearly deeply indebted to Ballard's story is the techno-pop composer John Foxx's fragmentary story 'The Quiet Man', in which the titular character walks round a completely deserted London, a landscape where ruination has infested every corner. Denuded of people, assaulted by nature, the city has a haunting beauty.
Another Green Roof
'Above him the sky was bright blue now, and the light was going golden across the top edges of the crumbling buildings. At the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint tower, its remaining upper windows glinting, while most of the base was covered in vines. (mile-a-minute vine especially had grown out from many of the gardens, and living up to its name, had swamped quite a number of roads and buildings in the city).
He often strolled through Hyde Park then on to Victoria station where thousands of birds had nested in its cast iron structure. The ammoniac stink of their droppings was choking, and the platforms and remaining carriages were covered in a greyish foot-thick crust of excrement.
Each year the city became more verdant, and each time he walked through the streets he noticed new erosions as front walls or roofs fell, revealing sections of rooms with different patterns of peeling wallpaper and furniture, often tangled with plants that had grown from seedlings blown through shattered windows.'5
John Foxx, 'The Quiet Man'
'The people need houses on the ground, not greenhouses in the sky'
Alleged response of a Liverpool politician to a proposal for a 'green' high-rise
The green landscapes that a certain kind of urban design is concocting upon the seemingly far from verdant settings of the 21st century city would seem to have little to do with either the Ballardian or romantic terrors at losing the war with nature, or for that matter with Loos and Burle Marx's belief in the potential of a tamed nature to help mankind to be less 'machine-like' and to provide for itself. However, it is a curiously under-investigated phenomenon. The accepted view is put across in a feature in A10 – New European Architecture entitled 'Flourishing Façades'.6
It starts with the words 'the term “explosive growth” has never been more appropriate than over the last fifteen years', immediately conflating the growths on the roofs with the brutal, tumultuous economic growth ushered in by neoliberalism, the very growth which commentators like George Monbiot argue has to end before climate change can be seriously tackled. The piece charts the development of apparently environmentally friendly urban design via the familiar green roof, or the encasing of a building seemingly underground underneath a cave-like capping of foliage; and the 'living façade', the programming into a building of its being overtaken by nature. It claims, citing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, that the greening of architecture is not just an aesthetic question, but a moral one, something necessary. Some of these proposals seem eminently sensible – no doubt, there are few better ways of insulating a building than chucking a few layers of sod onto it. Nonetheless, looked at in detail, what we have here is a rather superficial phenomenon – something which we could call, with a nod to the similarly vacuous policy of atoning for pollution by engaging in a bit of philanthropy, 'urban offsetting'.
Two of the projects covered in the A10 feature even seem to have emerged fully formed from the mind of JG Ballard – two designs for multi-storey car parks (by Bystrup Architects in Copenhagen, and Theo Termond (Architecten aan de Maas) for Helmond in the Netherlands). Both of these are, on the most basic level, straightforwardly technological, late capitalist structures – concrete decks, connected by ramps. Naturally, to actually leave it at this, or even to rely on the building's own material for expression (as in, say, the Brutalist car parks of Paul Rudolph or Rodney Gordon) is by now extremely unfashionable. We have to minimise our impact, no multi-storey blocks of weathered concrete this time. So the buildings are fenced, with climbing plants placed adjacent, ready to do their work. This quintessentially Modernist structure then becomes an unobtrusive, semi-rural place, not announcing its function. However, one has to be a particularly credulous kind of environmentalist to be even remotely convinced by the 'necessity' of this measure. Vines or no vines, this is a multi-storey car park, designed to store then spit out the very carbon-belching vehicles that create the problem in the first place. To build a 'green car park' is an oxymoron. The rationale here seems to be two-fold. One, the frisson of exotica, the threat of nature's revenge, a peek into a post-apocalyptic future when climate change has done its work; and two, a remarkably superficial covering of environmentally unfriendly function with an apparently 'living' facade. Morbidity and mendacity, with a hint of self-righteousness.
This is a remarkably common phenomenon. The very institutions which, with their intolerance for anything other than the bottom line, are the major destroyers of the 'environment', and whose oil and capital economy, based on the transportation of materials over huge distances by truck and jet, is exacerbating the catastrophe, are of course highly keen to use the 'living façade' and associated methods as a way of making their work of destruction look warmer, more in tune with nature – to make it seem like they're doing their bit. The weblog Landscape and Urbanism recently profiled a few instances of 'green branding' in street furniture. A McDonald's billboard with 'Fresh Salads' written in actual greenery. An iPod advert with plants growing out of it. A moss-covered vending machine.7 Elsewhere, there are instances like Sainsbury's in North Greenwich, London, where a minuscule 'nature reserve' and a couple of wind turbines attempt a minor 'offsetting' of that ridiculously unsustainable institution, the supermarket.
Versions of this can also be seen in the ubiquitous 'stunning developments', luxury flats and boxes for bankers which litter British cities. The days when buildings 'expressed' their structures are long gone. Every block is clad and dressed in pine, with little wooden accoutrements and, if especially privileged, a green roof encampment on the top. These are of course deeply exclusive, replacing the public spaces of parks, squares and gardens with privatised spaces, in which one needs authorisation to enjoy the lushness. Many of these buildings are placed in ex-industrial 'brownfield' sites, which frequently have their own, often extraordinary wildlife – the future site of London's 'Olympic Park' in London's Lea Valley is a prime example. The genuinely unique, extraordinary landscape created by the conflict between nature and industry is effaced in favour of a kind of garden international style, wherein the roofs of interminable luxury flats are decorated with the same creepers, around the same pools, the towers and blocks trimmed with the same stripped pine.
This is a remarkably transparent semiotic strategy, wherein by sticking natural materials onto a building's façade, the impression is given that it is somehow 'in tune' with nature rather than a hugely expensive, un-sustainable waste of energy and resources. It is by no means clear that renewable technology itself is so picturesque. Many of those whose houses desperately attempt to look au naturel have been implacably hostile to the genuinely important and useful technology represented by wind turbines: these pugnacious forms, sticking up out of the landscape are habitually blasted as 'eyesores' in Britain. Real 'green' technology will not necessarily be 'in keeping', will not announce itself as natural – because it isn't. Nature has no interest in our survival.
The Australian weblog Mapping Melbourne analysed an interesting example of this, the 'Council House 2' or CH2 Building, a municipal office block. They point out that the way this building has been received has been in terms of its apparent 'naturalism': 'as is the fashion with many green skyscraper projects, the Council and its cheerleaders do not promote the building in technological terms. Instead we find hippyish justifications and celebrations of the buildings being 'in tune with nature'. Who are they trying to kid? Are we expected to think that if nature were allowed to dominate the environment freely we would find neatly clipped hedges in window boxes and self-sustaining air conditioning systems? These projects are the ultimate example of man's domination of nature, the taming of it to meet our needs.'8 The building's artificiality is denied, its metallic forms are encased in pine. Infantile as this is, the face of green urbanism has to 'look' green, and straightforwardly technological solutions to the problems of climate change are loath to actually appear as they are, as this would shake the cosy belief that the catastrophe is somehow the fault of technology itself, of humanity getting ideas above its station, as opposed to the irrational, destructive economic system that wields it.
As it is, green urbanism reveals its true nature as a class project – a means for the metropolitan middle classes to make themselves feel better, to morally absolve themselves for the disaster they have created. As in so many cases, the best place to see this is in China. Steven Holl's 'Linked Hybrid', a determinedly futurist structure of interconnected neo-brutalist walkways, has at the top of its blocks the obligatory planting, the heaps of sod and the insulation that apparently offsets the costs of the structure. While an economy that once gave pride of place to the bicycle embraces the private car and the barbarities of 19th century industrialists are repeated en masse, and several huge industrial towns spring up at lightning speed, a 'zero-carbon' city is pioneered at Dongtan. In essence, whether surveying the strange forms infesting the ruins or watching from the top of a newly built gated complex, the end result will look much the same. The teeming city will be viewed, by some, through a roof garden's screen of lush vegetation. Beneath that will be the asphalt, the exhaust smoke, and the ugly, disavowed reality.
1Valerie Fraser, Building the New World – Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960 (London, 2000), p179.
2These images can be found at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/71/45
Perhaps the most impressive of neoliberalism's many sleights of hand has been, since the mid-1990s – from John Major's avowed intent to create a 'classless society' to New Labour's dedication to fight 'social exclusion' - the creation of a neoliberalism with a human face. The misinterpretation of this among liberals has long been that this proves the existence of some kind of 'progressive consensus', some kind of continuation of social democracy, albeit in a more realistic, less 'utopian' manner. In the built environment, the thesis of a social democratic continuum that connects, say, the Labour of Clement Attlee to the New Labour of John Prescott has appeared to be supported by the resurgence, after an eclectic postmodernist interregnum, of Modernist architecture, and an apparent focus on the city rather than the suburbs.
Postmodernist architecture is, in a superficial sense, very much on the defensive, and has been for most of the last decade. Although it persists as the dominant aesthetic for speculative house-building outside the large cities, it is a style by now almost wholly absent from the architectural magazines and the metropolitan centres. This decline could be dated to the late 1990s, when two huge postmodernist buildings in London – the Mi6 Building designed by Terry Farrell, and Michael Hopkins' Porticullis house in Westminster – were so aggressively statist and weightily bureaucratic in form, that the signifiers given out, always important in postmodernism's sign-fixated discourse, were deeply unattractive. On the contrary, the paradigmatic buildings in London since the late 1990s have been those of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, once vaguely avant-garde technocrats notable for their seemingly modernist lack of deliberate architectural-historical references and jokes, with an accompanying rhetoric of transparency and sustainability. This is leads to something we could call 'pseudomodernism', which would be defined as postmodernism's incorporation of a Modernist formal language. Pseudomodernism can be, on the one hand, the cramped speculative blocks marketed as 'luxury flats' or 'stunning developments' with an attenuated, vaguely Scandinavian aesthetic, and on the other, the architectural spectacles generated by 'signature' designers, most of whom were once branded 'deconstructivists' – Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and a legion of lesser lights such as Make architects, who manage to combine formal spectacle and moralistic sobriety. Here we will concentrate mainly on the more aggressively 'iconic' examples of this phenomenon.
Many former postmodernists are now Pseudomodernists. The most notable is Sir Terry Farrell, designer of a multitude of quintessentially Thatcherite buildings in the 1980s, from Charing Cross station to Mi6. His most Pseudomodernist work is the new Home Office building, which appropriately was a PFI scheme. With its combination of Weimar republic curves and De Stijl patterns with eager-to-please colour – which here is provided, as per the Blairite fetish for the 'creative industries' by the artist Liam Gillick - it provides a calm, ostentatiously friendly face for perhaps the most illiberal administration in British history. Nonetheless, the Home Office is merely an example of this idiom in its more domestically scaled version. Unlike most of its contemporaries, it does not aspire to that most essential of 21st century architectural aspirations: the icon. The icon is now the dominant paradigm in architecture to such an extent that at least three different buildings erected in the last few years – one in Hull by Terry Farrell, one in London at Canary Wharf, and another in Glasgow – have opted for the name 'the Icon Building', although they range in use from nondescript blocks of flats to an aquarium.
Here we see an entire skyline of competing 'icons'. The skyscrapers announced under Ken Livingstone's tenure as mayor of London – named, in a manner Charles Jencks would appreciate, after Gherkins, cheesegraters, walkie-talkies, Helter-Skelters, a shard - make none of the eclectic gestures and mashings together of different historical styles that characterised postmodernist architecture - and stone has mostly been replaced by glass. Yet one thing that survives from Postmodernism is the conception of the building as a sign, and here as an easily understandable, instantly grasped sign, as opposed to the formal rigours and typological complexities of Modernism. While it's possible that the original Gherkin received its nickname spontaneously, there's little doubt that the other towers, all announced around the same time, had a ready-made little monicker designed to immediately endear them to the general public, in order to present them as something other than the aesthetic tuning of stacked trading floors. Accordingly, by being instantly recognisable for their kinship with a household object, they would aim to become both logo and icon. Perhaps eventually they might become what Jencks describes as 'failed icons', more Millennium Dome than Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, although always trying for the status of the latter, whose success in bringing well-heeled tourism to the Basque port has made it into a boosterist cliché, where the 'Bilbao effect' transforms a mundane city into a cultural capital, replacing unionised factory work or unemployment with insecure service industry jobs.
The other major change from the suburbanism of the Thatcher and Reagan version of neoliberalism is a new focus on the cities, something which is usually encapsulated by the under-investigated word 'regeneration' – indeed, any form of building in an urban area is usually accompanied by this term. The vaguely religious air is appropriate, as this often accompanies a fundamentally theological conception of architecture, where by standing in proximity to an outstanding architectural work, the spirit is uplifted, and the non-orthogonal geometry and hyperbolic paraboloids manage to, for instance, simulate the experience of war. One appropriate English example would be Salford Quays, where the docks of Greater Manchester were transformed into a combination of a cultural centre and a development of luxury apartments, combining both elements of pseudomodernism. Two of the architects who most exemplify these ideas are represented there. There is Daniel Libeskind, whose tendency towards memorialising piety is so pronounced that he was described by Michael Sorkin as a 'virtual, self-igniting yahrzeit candle'. His Imperial War Museum North, with its sloping ceilings and its form which apparently represents a world divided, is supposed to formally incarnate the experience of war. Meanwhile, nearby is a bridge by Santiago Calatrava, who is the infrastructural embodiment of pseudomodernism, his structures seemingly always placed in areas that are busy being transformed from proletarian spaces of work or habitation to 'regenerated' areas of bourgeois colonisation. These transformations of space are, it should be remembered, fundamentally different in their social consequences from the superficially similar 'comprehensive redevelopment' of the postwar period. Once, a slum clearance scheme would involve the slum-dweller being rehoused by the state in something which was, more often than not, superior in terms of space, security of tenure, and hygiene, irrespective of the decades of criticism these schemes have been subjected to. Now that this sort of naïve paternalism is absent, the slums are cleared so that the middle classes can settle in them, something usually excused with a rhetoric of 'social mixing', dismantling what had become 'ghettoes'. The many schemes in London and elsewhere, where 60s council blocks have been replaced with PFI blocks with their wood cladding and ostentatious irregularity, are to urban planning what pseudomodernism is to architecture.
That is, the Modernism of the icon, of the city academies where each fundamentally alike yet bespoke design embodies a vacuous aspirationalism, a Modernism without the politics, without the utopianism, or without any conception of the polis - a Modernism that conceals rather than reveals its functions, Modernism as a shell. This return of Modernist good taste in the New Labour version of Neoliberalism has turned architectural Postmodernism, rather surprisingly, into a vanishing mediator. The keystones, references, in-jokes and alleged 'fun' of 80s-90s corporate architecture now evoke Neoliberalism's most naked phase, the period when it didn't dress itself up in social concern. In the passage from Norman Tebbit to Caroline Flint, the aesthetic of social Darwinism has become cooler, more tasteful, less ostentatiously crass and reactionary, matching the rhetoric.
However, it can be seen that the Pseudomodern takes many of its fundamental ideas, if not its stylistic tropes, from Postmodernism, and at this point we will take a historical detour. Postmodernist architecture was most intelligently formulated by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972's Learning from Las Vegas. This focused, via a critique of a caricatured corporate Modernism, on the alleged inability of Modernist architecture to adequately communicate with its users. In response, they privileged first of all, signage – the advertising signs of roadside architecture – and secondly, formal references to earlier, most often classical, styles of architecture as a means of providing an architecture outside of the 'dumb box', as they described it. Charles Jencks' Language of Postmodern Architecture, meanwhile, turned to full-blown neoclassicism, with an accompanying narrative of Modernist hubris, where the dynamiting of one of the US' rare forays into social housing in St Louis became the precise date for the 'death' of Modernism. One element of Venturi et al's argument, was, regardless of their protestations, a Modernist one – a call for an architectural montage of neon signs and jarring formal clashes. Their praise for the chaos of signage that made up Vegas is, in essence, not vastly different to the rhetoric of the Russian Constructivists, whose work was motivated by a 'component fixation' where designs were always presented with affixed billboards, posters, slogans, transmitters and tramlines, as if to plug them into the city's dynamism. Much of the architecture and signage they describe was itself in a kind of Pulp Modernist idiom. Specifically, a 1950s style usually called 'Googie' to distinguish it from the apparently more rigorous Modernism of the International Style.
Googie was usually used to draw attention to burger bars, car washes, coffee shops - the name comes from one such, designed by John Lautner. It was an architecture that adapted itself to suburban sprawl and the sheer speed of the freeway, by providing dynamic forms which seemed to mimic speed in their formal distortions, and attracting the attention of the prospective customer travelling at 80 miles an hour via stretched, angular forms and lurid colours. Alan Hess, in his book on the subject, places the style in direct opposition to the 'high-art Modernism' of Mies van der Rohe and his disciples, the classicist glass skyscraper school that became the spatial lingua franca of even the most conformist parts of American capital. What's interesting here is that in the American context, where Modernism was not as associated with Social Democracy as it was in Europe, the debate was purely aesthetic. While the opponents of 'Googie' accused it of being crass and commercial, Mies' Seagram Building was given tinted windows the colour of their client's brand of Whisky. While its outrageous geometrical illusions and structural expressionism were being criticised as mere dressing-up, Mies' towers 'expressed' their structure by entirely decorative I-beams.
So in essence, the debate between classical and pulp Modernism in the US was one of taste. On the one hand there was the luxury aesthetic of the wing of the bourgeoisie that aspired to finer things: New York's successful attempt in the 1950s to wrest from Paris the accolade of world fine art capital, with some CIA assistance. In order for this to occur it had to set itself against a more straightforward capitalist hucksterism. In fact, with their deliberate defiance of the rules of gravity and geometry, their brashness and lack of formal precedent, googie buildings were more true to the original Modernist impulse – futurists or constructivists would have recognised themselves in commercial designers such as Armet & Davis, in the architecture of McDonalds, Denny's and Big Boy, more than in Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Seagram or Lever. It's also a reminder that the idea of Modernism as 'paternalist' imposition on the benighted proletariat, upon which Postmodernism based much of its self-justification, makes sense only if we begin with an extremely limited definition of Modernism. Principally, one that was restricted to the International Style, itself a pernicious legacy of Philip Johnson & Henry-Russell Hitchcock's dual depoliticisation and classicisation of modernist architecture for American consumption. The Modernism that made it to New York was missing both the crass Weimar commercialism of Erich Mendelsohn and the socialist fervour of those Weimar architects who proclaimed their work an anti-architecture, such as the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer.
It was not, of course, commercial Modernism which was critiqued by Postmodernists, but it can be seen in retrospect as the mediator between postmodernist theory and pseudomodernist practice. The work of Frank Gehry was, from the early 1980s, an adaptation of Googie's Pulp Modernism for the purposes of architecture-as-art. The style of which he was one of the leading lights, and which was termed 'deconstructivism' by the mid-1980s, retained many of the formal strategies of the roadside architecture of the 1950s. These architects – Daniel Libeskind among them – were notable both for ignoring the postmodernist imperative to genuflect before neoclassicism or baroque, and for a vocabulary of the non-orthogonal, the exaggerated and the audaciously engineered, that owed more to LA diners than it did to the Bauhaus. This style has been applied in the last decade almost entirely for the purposes of museums, galleries, or self-contained theme park-like environments such as Gehry's Experience Music Project in Seattle, or Nigel Coates' National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. Chin-Tao Wu's Privatising Culture lists a few of those that were erected in Britain around the turn of the Millennium:
'You can experience...a simulated journey into space at the National Space Science Centre in Leicester, find out about Geological evolution a the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, have fun and learn about science at '@Bristol' in Bristol, or get hands-on experience of the steel industry at the 'Making it! Discovery Centre' in Mansfield'.
In terms of their combined Disneyfication and intensification of the city's museum culture, these are deeply postmodernist buildings, regardless of their form.
The influence of Googie in contemporary urbanism is a largely unspoken one, but it is, I would argue, key to understanding exactly why the 'signature' wing of Pseudomodernist architecture takes the form it does. It seemingly paradoxically aligns itself very closely with the heritage zones of the old capitals. Across the road from St Paul's Cathedral is a tourist information pavilion by Make architects, formed by Ken Shuttleworth, job architect on Norman Foster's 'Gherkin'. In its improbable geometry, its jagged zig-zag showing zero interest in function or taste, it could easily be imagined serving donuts in 1950s Anaheim. There is a huge amount of architecture like this, serving most often as a key component of urban regeneration strategies. Buildings for living in are more often in an attenuated, mild, asymmetrically patterned form of Scandinavian Modernism, while buildings for culture are allowed to make somewhat wilder gestures. This process can be seen in various buildings for the creative industries in Britain, with their logo-like names: Urbis in Manchester, The Public in West Bromwich, Magna in Rotherham and so forth. Its most extensive expression is not, however, in the UK, with its remaining vestiges of representative democracy, but in the oligarchies of Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi, for instance, has set aside a district solely for 'iconic' cultural buildings by Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel (who has designed a branch of the Louvre). Barry Lord, the 'cultural consultant' for this cultural zone, claimed in the AJ that 'cultural tourists are older, wealthier, more educated, and they spend more. From an economic point of view, this makes sense'. No doubt this applies equally well in theory to West Bromwich or Salford.
Much of this architecture has in common with Googie the reduction of the building to a logo, to an instantly memorable image - one which is appreciated in movement, as from a passing car, while quickly walking through an art gallery or museum on the way to the gift shop, or indeed while shopping, as in Future Systems and Rem Koolhaas' work for Selfridges and Prada, respectively. Although it may accompany exhibitions of art or simulations of war, it is not an architecture of contemplation but of distraction and speed. Yet it also continues the moralistic rhetoric of postwar Modernism, without any of the actual social uses – local authority housing, comprehensive schools, general hospitals – to which it was put. The new Modernism, like the new social democratic parties, is one emptied of all intent to actually improve the living conditions of the majority. Instead, the social use of the Pseudomodernist building, forever groping for the Bilbao effect, appears - in a rather Victorian manner - to be the uplifting of the spirit via interactive exhibits and installations.
Nobody ever suggested that roadside diners had hyperbolic paraboloid roofs in order to make us better people or induce them to 'aspire', let alone to simulate the experience of war or the holocaust. Nonetheless, the formal links between Googie and today's apparently radical architecture does suggest a truth at its heart - its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption, advertising, in forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of quietism, conformism and technological acceleration. It also enables us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption. In the computer-aided creation of futuristic form, today's architects are producing enormous logos, and this is only appropriate. The architecture once described as 'deconstructivist' owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonalds.
A Short History of the Refusal of Work as a Revolutionary Strategy
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilisation holds sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.'
The industrial equation will bring about a condition where, within a century, the word ‘worker’ will have no current meaning. It will be something you will have to look up in an early 20th century dictionary.'
One of the greatest tragedies of socialism, a movement which has had its fair share, is the in the way that, for one reason or another, it has become inextricably associated with work. Hard, manly work, the kind of work that makes you virtuous, with the early death, asbestos poisoning or desultory retirement that might entail. This is the case pretty much everywhere, although is particularly grim and acute in Britain, where the very name of the (one-time) socialist party speaks of its commitment to toil, no matter how grim or pointless – Labour. Unsurprisingly, an enthusiasm for the ennobling qualities of toil, and a concomitant contempt for the intellect, for the non-utilitarian, and for any human activity which doesn't end in profit, is the only thing retained by New Labour. Only today, it's the neo-Taylorist 'total control' of call centre software and the servile indignities of the service industry that form the definition of a hard day's slog for the managerial class of a stagnant neoliberalism, as opposed to the old model of time spent actually producing stuff.
There are, of course, some good reasons for this fetishism of labour: a statement that society will be run in future by those who actually work to produce the objects and goods society runs upon, a statement that wealth is not created by the wealthy – and as most attempts at socialism made in the 20th century were made in parlous material circumstances, the millennium of non-work was always somewhat difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, it always rested on a huge misunderstanding of what the bourgeoisie actually is. By the time socialism existed as a serious and workable idea in the mid-19th century, the ruling class was no longer the profligate, aesthetically inclined, amoral, inbred and licentious aristocracy, but the middle class, whose own commitment to a (less physically exacting) ethic of hard work was strikingly similar to that of the incipient proletariat. Thus did socialism get suckered into playing the bourgeoisie's own game of glorifying an increasingly undignified and rote practice.
Before socialism became synonymous with work, workerism and the sentimentality that came with it, there was much debate about what exactly work would become in a socialist society. One variant of the Workerist position could be found in the writings of William Morris. Although his socialism was remarkably unsentimental, work was perhaps his blind spot. In Useful Work and Useless Toil, he unsurprisingly condemns the machinic trudge imposed upon the worker by the factory system, and shocks his Victorian audience by the very suggestion that some labour was entirely pointless: 'It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-do people that all work is desirable...most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is only 'industrious' enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays in the sacred cause of labour.' Morris' contribution was – importantly – to insist that most work was mind-numbing, body-distorting and in no way noble. And with some prescience, he recognises that what we have here is a system in which work will be created regardless of any actual material need, a very recent dilemma.
'If we were to wake up some morning now, under our present system, and find it 'easy to live', that system would force us to set to work at once and make it hard for us to live: we should call that 'developing our resources' or some such fine name.'
This, in a nutshell, is the ideology of work under the hypertechnologised capital that would exist 120 years after these words were written. Morris recognises that every 'labour saving device', every innovation which could seemingly limit toil, is used by capital to expand the domain of toil. However, at the heart of Morris' socialism is the conception of a future in which work could be a 'pleasure', and it is incumbent upon the socialist to imagine ways of making work 'attractive'. Some of these measures include making sure that all physically unpleasant work is extremely short, and so forth. But, as can be seen in News from Nowhere – for all its wit, one of the drearier socialist utopias - Morris wants a revival of forms of work made obsolete by the machine: craftsmanship, ornament. Work as play. Work as part of a guild socialism in which, after the production of essentials, 'manly' labourers set to the production of beauty. The idea of a new kind of man being produced by technology would have horrified Morris, and his utopia is not too far from the Ludd island of Samuel Butler's Erewhon, after man's pre-emptive strike against the machine: steel bridges replaced with stone, women content, largely, with child-bearing and rearing.
At least on the rare occasions when the elimination of work has been considered, it has been Morris' version that has been accepted: a socialism of stick-whittling, stonemasons and wallpaper designers. Much less attention has been given to a near-immediate riposte to Morris' workerism, by Oscar Wilde in the criminally under-read The Soul of Man under Socialism. Although Wilde makes no particular bones about supporting class struggle, it is not the heroic toiling classes that he exults. Wilde's essay is the first in defence of the undeserving poor, making rational, calm and unhysterical arguments for avoiding work, for disdaining charity and philanthropy, for theft, for agitation, revolt, anger and resentment. In particular, Wilde fears a certain bourgeois arts-and-crafts exultation of hairy labour linking up with the workerism of the labour movement into something which sounds remarkably like a prophecy of Stalinism – the prospect of someone knocking on the door every morning to compel citizens to fulfil their quotas of manual labour.
'I cannot help saying that a good deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour'
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
Wilde wants to let the machines do it. While for Morris the industrial revolution is a worry, something which stands in the way of the conversion of useless toil into useful work, for Wilde (as for Marx) it is the very condition of socialism itself. The very fact that machines had achieved such incredible, inhuman feats under a repressive system ('there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man developed a machine to do his work he began to starve') meant that under socialism, they could be developed against labour itself. 'Man is made for something better than distributing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.' This is not some contrarian fantasy. Machines, pace a century of reactionary dystopias, will be our new race of slaves, and be especially developed to take on the most grim and laborious tasks: 'machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing'. The differences in Wilde's approach and Morris' are essentially cosmetic: both of them essentially want to abolish the litany of tasks listed above, and have no truck with hand-wringing Protestant justifications of them. Neither would regard any society as truly civilised that let them continue. However the difference in emphasis is very important indeed. Morris wants the human being of socialism to resemble the old one, only pacified, less brutal and exploitative, happier and more creative. Wilde, meanwhile, considers that such a loosening of the bounds of work and exploitation would fundamentally create a new kind of human being altogether. While Morris imagines everyone becoming village craftsmen, Wilde imagines them all becoming leisured polymaths.
There is a counter-tradition within Marxism of the refusal of work, something which begins with Paul Lafargue's tract The Right to be Lazy, a pamphlet which catalogues, horrified, the proletariat's (understandable) self-delusion that its work is in any way useful or dignified – and makes this critique from within the workers' movement, rather than as a sympathetic observer. Although Wilde is, foolishly, not taken as seriously as a socialist thinker, Lafargue's essay makes more or less the same points as The Soul of Man, only with one particular difference: he is one of the first theorists of the joys of sloth, of the pleasure of not doing, of drinking, eating, lazing, reclining, not producing. While the French revolution's Hellenism made it impervious to the cult of toil, their successors are caught in a trap: 'they proclaim as a revolutionary principle the Right to Work. Shame to the French proletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness. A Greek of the heroic times would have required twenty years of capitalist civilization before he could have conceived such vileness.' Wilde and Lafargue both remind us that, for the Ancient Greeks, the civilised man is the man who does not work. A society able to create truly great works of art, to devote itself to aesthetics, philosophy, creation of new selves and new objects, has to give its tasks to someone else, preferably some subordinate group. The new subordinate group is to be created, automated. This reaches delirious heights of rhetorical imagination: ‘Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labour. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudices of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty’
'We are talking about a surplus of refusal to directly valourise capital that today can be identified within the forms of class behaviour. We are talking about the fact that once workers have reached this level of productivity and 'refinement of their talents' (that, after all, is what productivity actually consists in) they 'want to enjoy it'. That is, they no longer imagine work as a discipline but rather as a satisfaction. Workers imagine their lives not as work but as the absence of it, their activity as free and creative exercise. We are talking about the massive flight of labour from factory work towards the tertiary and service sectors. We are talking about the spontaneous refusal to accept the rules of training for abstract labour and apprenticeship to unmediated labour.'
Antonio Negri, The Workers Party Against Work (1973)
What happens to the Right to Non-Work 70, 80 years later, when capitalism has reached a temporary truce with the labour movement and absorbed the Marxist critique? At this point, we will have to conflate two seemingly diametrically opposed thinkers – Buckminster Fuller with Antonio Negri. The latter was the theorist of the 'crisis of the planner state', anatomising in the early 70s the collapse of the Keynesian compromise between Labour and capital, seemingly unaware that a far more brutal form of capitalism would succeed it; the former, meanwhile, a polymath and super-technocrat who took Keynesianism to the extent of envisaging 'total world planning'. Fuller wouldn't necessarily have appreciated being read alongside a revolutionary Marxist. He frequently reiterated that ‘the concepts of Karl Marx are typical of the erroneous and inadequate way in which men at first pondered the industrial equation. They thought of men chained to the machines and grievously exploited by the machine owners. With automation an increasing economic reality, we see now that they industrial equation was heading towards the complete elimination of man as a worker. The industrial equation will bring about a condition where, within a century, the word ‘worker’ will have no current meaning. It will be something you will have to look up in an early 20th century dictionary’. Today this is a poignant passage: we are nearly as far from Fuller as he was from Wilde, yet the situation he describes only makes sense as a description of Blairite sleight-of-hand.
In fact, Fuller already anatomised the situation that would characterise labour after the partial annihilation of the industrial proletariat: the production of jobs entirely for their own sake, with no useful imperative: something finessed by the service industry in 'Anglo-Saxon' economies, where work is imposed to prevent the vertiginous shock of realising that technology has made labour obsolete. 'Instead of paying boilermakers not to work and to go to research school in Florida, for fear that this is socialism, we are giving them 5.50 an hour dole to sit up there and pretend to be capitalistic workers while putting nuts on bolts.' This 'self-kidding' safeguards the work ethic, it reassures capital that it is secure. Fuller makes quite clear two facts which contemporary capitalism rests on denying: that the growth in both wealth and productive technologies that characterised the post-war golden age proved Malthusianism to a fiction, via 'the industrial equation' of producing more with less; and that, accordingly, most work is entirely superfluous. Instead, he envisages a consumer economy without a service industry, where super-engineers would replace Wilde and Lafargue's industrial Athenian or Morris' new craftsman.
What he doesn't envisage is that a useless manual labour will merely be replaced with a useless service industry. Capital would never allow the abolition of labour. The rise of services was seen by Negri in early 1970s pamphlets like The Workers Party Against Work, written as interventions in working class struggle, as a sign of the progressive obsolescence of a certain model of work, where falling rates of profit and working class militancy were making traditional factory labour not just unnecessary but dangerous for capital – something that may have been forgiveable in the flux of the moment, but now seems an illusion: as if servility were an adequate substitute for production. Nonetheless, the solution proposed by Potere Operaio and Autonomia - the refusal of work as a sign of workers' power itself – marked perhaps the first adoption of the Right to be Lazy as a serious political programme. While most of the other thinkers mentioned here based their opposition to work on theoretical and personal disdain, Operaismo based it on actual observation of and involvement in working class practice, and the hatred, refusal, sabotage of and theft from work that characterised workers in areas like the Porto Marghera chemical works. Curiously enough, this was the working class behaving precisely as The Soul of Man Under Socialism insisted it should. The aggression and lack of humility in actions like 'proletarian shopping', where supermarkets were compelled by direct action to sell at reduced prices, would no doubt have pleased Wilde. This recognised that a great many workers, contra Lafargue, hated work, avoided it whenever possible, and had no belief in the inherent nobility of their plight. They would not wait for the 'industrial equation' to make this work obsolete – instead they would refuse it from within, and transform it into a workers' power that abolishes work.
The capitalist response, of course, was not to follow either Fuller or Negri's ideas of what might replace the old capitalism based on factories, factory discipline and an urbanised industrial proletariat. In fact, solidarity could be destroyed all the better in a society based on the inanities of the service industry and its communications appendages. Meanwhile, alienation from the product of labour would be replaced with not even knowing what that product is, or if it even exists. Yet still, work goes on, as controlled, brutal and idiotic as it ever was. Thatcherism with a human face claims to have abolished the working class, but it perpetuates work to an ever more ludicrous extent, particularly when it wants to remind the 'core voters' of its roots in the movement of the toiling classes. British jobs for British workers. War on the workshy. Work more to earn more. Work trials for the disabled, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for those who don't want to work. He who does not work, neither shall he eat. Today, the only response to this has to be – the party of the workers, whatever or wherever it is, must stand against work.
