Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances

Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism

Owen Hatherley

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781839762215
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839762239
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

From the grandiose histories of grand state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner pubs, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. Combining memoir, history, portraits of particular places and things, Hatherley argues for those who have tried to create and imagine a better modernity, both in terms of architecture, such as Zaha Hadid or Ian Nairn, in terms of the urban space, like Jane Jacobs or Marshall Berman, and the way we see the world more widely, like Mark Fisher or Adam Curtis. Together, these outline a vision of the city as both as a place of political argument and dispute, and as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us.

1

Soundscapes

If I ever imagined myself writing about anything while I was growing up, it was music. As a professional writer, it is the art form most important to me that I write about least. As a music journalist manqué, the approach I took to writing about places and buildings owes at least as much to Simon Reynolds or Jon Savage as it does to Ian Nairn and Reyner Banham. What ‘modernism’ means to me – an excitement for novelty and transformation, a dissolving of the divides between high and low art forms, a meeting point between pulp and trash, the avant-garde and experimental – comes much more from popular music than it does from a reading of twentieth-century literature or art. When I first visited the city of Sheffield, I read it through Pulp or Forgemasters; Bristol through Tricky and Massive Attack; Glasgow through Orange Juice; Manchester through Joy Division and New Order; South Wales through the Manic Street Preachers. The reason why I only ever wrote at length about the first of these – in Uncommon, published in 2011 – is that in every other case, other people were doing it better, and I had nothing to say that hadn’t already been said by Simon Reynolds, Ian Penman, Kodwo Eshun or Rhian E. Jones.

Another reason why I never wrote systematically about music is that it no longer seems to have this role, at least in Anglo-America (this is why the first essay here is on pop music from the decades before Little Richard invented rock and roll). But most of all, it’s because I ought to be too old for it. After publishing the essay here on the Pet Shop Boys in the German magazine Electronic Beats, an editor there asked me to contribute a monthly column along these lines – I very reluctantly said no, because I knew there was no way I would find it in myself to write about any new music, and I knew I would end up being, therefore, that guy. Now that I’m closer to middle age, I am less bothered about being him, and accordingly have recently published a literal obituary for Florian Schneider on the LRB blog, included here, and a moral obituary for Morrissey, in Grace Blakeley’s anthology Futures of Socialism. This collection also includes fragments of the two blogs I wrote in the second half of the 2000s: ‘The Measures Taken’, for longform writing, intended at first as a sort of academic CV; and ‘Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy’, personal writing aimed mostly at my own and my internet friends’ amusement. Both posts are I think fairly representative of what ‘the blog scene of the 2000s’ – K-Punk, Blissblog, Poetix, Entschwindet und Vergeht, Infinite Thought, the House at World’s End, Woebot, the Original Soundtrack, the Pill Box, Fangirl, the Impostume, Velvet Coalmine, the End Times, the Fantastic Hope, Beyond the Implode, Pere Lebrun, Voyou Desoeuvre, to name the greats – were about. That is, political despair, cultural obsession, and OTT writing – crammed with adjectives, sub-clauses, ten references per sentence, misappropriated terminology from theory and psychoanalysis – all applied to whatever you’d just found in the charity shop, the library, the remainder bookshop or the bargain bin. The critique of ‘youth’ in the first post, written though it was by a twenty-four-year-old, reads quite oddly in 2020, when Anglo-American politics is polarised so acutely between overgrown teenagers in their sixties and responsible, civic-minded twentysomethings.

Want to Buy Some Illusions?

Pop, Pre-Teen

Go into a remainder bookshop and look at the CDs, or go into the contrived fustiness of an HMV basement, and investigate the pre-history of an artform. The Ink Spots, Al Bowlly, Anne Shelton, the Andrews Sisters, the odd name that somehow survived history – Frank Sinatra, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich. There are people called ‘Ethel’, lacquered singers lumbered with un-pop names like ‘Vera’ or ‘Alma’. The scratchiness and tinniness, eerie and out of place on the cheaply packaged CDs, carries the odd power of extreme anachronism. An unsettling primness, the shoddy recording technology acting like a layer of dust. The music has an alien adultness, an effeminate formalism. This is the distant past, and they do things differently here.

Critique of Teenage Reason

LOGIC

I was brought up on Immanuel Kant, on the categorical imperative, and his teachings. (‘The logical form of all judgement consists in the objective unity of the apperception of the concept which they contain.’) Logic was demanded at all times. If there was no logic in my deductions, I was ruled out of any conversation. To this day I cannot get away from this strict adherence to logic, and I demand it of others as it was demanded then of me.

Marlene Dietrich, Marlene Dietrich’s ABC

The ideal consumer, first of pop music and subsequently of everything else, from coffee to washing powder, has, since 1956, been the teenager. This figure of illusory radicalism has presided over post-welfarist capital like a petulant despot. Capital’s administrators all aim to incarnate this figure, which is perpetually obsessed with its own veracity, like the teenage fetish for ‘realness’, for ‘meaning it’. A public schoolboy for PM, or the fratboy presidents Clinton and Bush. The teenager – a demographic created in the 1950s to define those who heard the thrill of the carnal in Elvis or in Little Richard, obsessed with ‘freedom’ yet utterly dependent – is the true subject of late capitalism, with its deliberate avoidance of actual adulthood, replacing it with an obsession with innocence’s violation and subsequent perpetual regeneration, an ever-present mental state of total ahistoricity. Think of the hundreds of times since 1945 the US has ‘lost its innocence’. Capital’s self-image is that of Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show, a perpetually blonde and baffled self-denying carnality, rather than the Kurtz it more precisely resembles.

I found, for 30p in a bin in Southampton Library, a tragically wrong-headed 1962 book that tries to lock the stable door long after the horse has bolted: Grace and Fred M. Hechinger’s Teen-Age Tyranny (on the cover a stunningly wholesome couple straight out of Bogdanovich’s film). What sinks its critique is an inability to understand rock and roll, a bizarre obsession with ability and proficiency that would subsequently be inherited by rock’s own internal hierarchy. After dismissing Elvis and Little Richard, they find a redeeming figure in Pat Boone, as he can ‘really sing’. Interestingly though, they place the appeal of pop before pop in the experience of twentieth-century horror, specifically War: ‘In the early 40s psychiatrists said that Sinatra came along at just the right time, during the war years when men were scarce and war fears had shattered women’s nerves. They called Frankie the “love object” of girls suffering from real or imagined war loneliness.’ If the subject for pop after 1956 is male, sexualised, independent, carefree and ideally exists in a car radio on an open road, before Elvis it is female, guilt-ridden and speaks through a radio in a tiny rented room. Listening to Al Bowlly’s endless professions of eternal devotion, you imagine its listener to be a seduced typist from an early Eliot poem. The pivotal song for this is ‘Lili Marleen’ – written in Germany during the war, nearly banned by Goebbels (‘trash with the stench of death’) and translated into English and Russian. A soldier’s lament for his wife (curiously never sung by a man), the song was the only point of unity between the opposing powers – stories abound of German battalions being lured to their death by hearing its strains and assuming those playing it must be German. The song is utter kitsch of the most compelling sort, deeply unnerving in its mingling of lachrymose sentiment with militarism in its later verses.

My Echo, My Shadow and Me

MELANCHOLY

Having the blues, or weltschmerz. Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.

Marlene Dietrich’s ABC

While he might have seen world-historical significance in the (post–Ink Spots) Orioles’ ‘It’s Too Soon to Know’, Greil Marcus is responsible for the term ‘Old, Weird America’ – and this is markedly not what we find in these records. This is the manufactured pop of its day – overproduced, slick, utterly commodified, with absolutely nothing of the grass-roots – an abnegation of jazz or ragtime. It would make absolutely no sense played acoustically. The Ink Spots are essentially about the microphone and its possibilities rather than some disguised protest, with their ultra-polished, ostentatiously bourgeois (all piano trills and elegance) de-spiritualisation of gospel. The very model of the vocal group is totally contrary to any notion of autonomous subjectivity, as these five men crowding around the machine all pledge themselves to, presumably, the same girl.

Every Ink Spots song is pretty much identical: the same guitar intro; the strikingly Anglicised, prissy falsetto; and the focal point of each record, where Hoppy Jones recites the song’s theme and lyric in a low baritone. The Ink Spots sang, perpetually, of an utterly morbid romanticism in the language of poems on Valentine’s cards. They create a kind of massified intimacy – the act of recording via the microphone becomes fetishised by the ‘closeness’ of the backing singers’ hums and burrs, providing a bed of abstract sound that is only made audible by its technologies – the personal serenading that their music promised is impossible outside the studio. The Ink Spots wallow, they luxuriate, in a sentimentality that constantly veers on the sinister. ‘Do I Worry’, pointedly used in The Singing Detective, piles on layers of passive aggression that seems to imply real pain in the silences between words in the obligatory spoken section – a quietly startling combination of anger and stoicism. ‘Puttin’ and Talkin’’, meanwhile, includes an extended dialogue between two of the singers in which they discuss the song itself in slow, low tones, with exquisite attention to the tiniest catch of the voice, the slightest brush of ambivalence.

In his 1980 cash-in book Blondie, Lester Bangs included a section advocating a re-mystification of pop’s libidinal imaginary, entitled ‘On the Merits of Sexual Repression’. Though he explicitly disassociates this demand from ‘the wimsy weasly pre-rock popular music our parents lived and loved to’, it describes aptly how this music works. Listening to the utterly ridiculous and utterly convincing affectedness of Al Bowlly trilling through the clichéd pledges of ‘The Very Thought of You’, the main charge is a kind of furtiveness of sound, almost seedy in its resolute unphysicality. The protagonist is never actually able to admit the purpose of these perennial courtings and serenadings – instead the pleasure is deferred, leaving behind a purposeless languor.

You Take Art, I’ll Take Spam

STANISLAVSKI, KONSTANTIN

Any ideas I might have had about the importance of an actor’s approach to a part were extinguished for good when Max Reinhardt, sitting in the empty theatre, listened to my prayer of Gretschen in Faust. When I got up from my knees embarrassedly brushing off the dust from my skirt, his voice rang out, ‘you did not make me cry.’ I lifted my tear-stained face and said, ‘But, Professor, I am crying!’ The answer was ‘I do not care if you cry or laugh or what emotion you harbour, your task is to make me cry, me, the spectator. I couldn’t care less what you feel! Make me feel!’

Marlene Dietrich’s ABC

When the very idea of writing your own songs is inherently ridiculous, and when interpretation is more important than authorship, something interesting happens with singing. The singer can slip in and out of character, comment on the song while singing it rather than having somehow to incarnate it. Mostly this is played out over extremely traditionalist songs, but these potentialities can let in a similar approach to the song itself. Friedrich Hollaender, another Weimar relocation, shows this perfectly in his songs for Marlene Dietrich. His lyrics, with their deflating sardonic twists, evoke a kind of bargain-basement Brecht, a premonition perhaps of the turn of the twenty-first century’s use of irony as an ideological confidence trick; though lacking the contempt that his attitude usually necessitates, an essential seriousness remains. Suddenly though, both singer and song are in every way knowing.

This knowingness is not, however, demystifying; instead it is a pose of world-weary elegance and sensuality. This accords with the odd status, vis-à-vis male fantasy, of figures like Dietrich or Mae West, and with the stunning variety of (often untrained) female voices in pre-pop pop. A compilation called, with an eye to its most-likely pensionable audience, Those Wonderful Girls of Stage, Screen and Radio gathers together some of this 1930s multiplicity (so much in contrast with the one-dimensional lovelorn male singers). The derisive snarl of Ethel Merman, Dietrich’s semi-spoken purrs, Helen Forrest’s bored, seen-it-all denunciations of man’s perfidy, or a barely in-tune Mae West barking a series of barely disguised innuendos on ‘I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone’. West (‘a milestone, a catchword, sex with its tongue in its cheeks’, says Dietrich’s invaluable ABC) was a kind of self-created fantasy figure, achieving fame when already into middle age as a symbol of cartoonish carnality – not to be desired necessarily, but constantly desiring. This is very much before the prizing of youth above all else.

Kenneth Tynan wrote in the seventies of trying to convince someone post-pop of what is interesting in a performance by Ethel Merman: ‘audiences nowadays expect strain and sweat, as provided by pop stars … she keeps her distance. What she sells is not the song, not herself – you never miss a syllable.’ This carefulness is precisely what makes attempts to revive this so incredibly irksome: think of Robbie Williams’ grotesque Swing when You’re Winning. Though these recordings are often riven with self-reflexivity, they are never ironic. They might step back from the song, but they’ll never wink at you. Recreating them for a supposedly less credulous age falls utterly short. Pop pre-pop does, however, represent a kind of group of alternate strategies, and a parallel world with its own attendant rules, strictures and kinks. It is an alternate history, whose illusions have ‘a touch of paradise, a spell you can’t explain’.

October 2005

Hurrah for the Black Box Recorder

New Labour’s liberal apologists like to claim that they’ve somehow established a ‘progressive consensus’ in Britain. Perhaps the best answer to this absurdity is the unstoppable rise of the Daily Mail under their watch, to the point where it leaves the Mirror (once the nearest thing there was to a truly ‘left’ paper, and unassailable) trailing. Sure, pointing out that the Daily Mail is rather right-wing is banal, the province of Have I Got News for You guests. But that doesn’t change the fact that the paper that once cried ‘HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS’ would undoubtedly do so again, were a similar force for order and barbarity to emerge again on British streets. The Mail would love a new Mosley, one they could truly get behind, the British Union of Fascists leader being too obviously a narcissistic, opportunist aristocrat – a product of the stately home rather than the semi – and suspiciously intelligent, not instinctive enough to convince as a potential dictator. The new Mosley would listen to Aretha Franklin at home perhaps, and would make quite clear that expulsions of migrants weren’t racist, much as did Rothermere’s editorials in the thirties.

This latent and not-so-latent evil at the heart of England, where Brimstone and Treacle could easily be restaged – but certainly not commissioned – without changing a line (except the Irish would become the Muslims), seems barely to leave an obvious trace on pop culture – a matter upon which, as Robin Carmody has ceaselessly pointed out, the Mail now proclaims its normality, dishing out free Prince CDs and all. The first Black Box Recorder album is a rare instance of the land of Rothermere put consciously onto record: Mail-type values pervade everywhere, but are musically cloaked in an inoffensive Americanism. BBR, meanwhile, expressed all that brutality, emotional atrophy and banal, weary fascism as a (kind of) pop.

The cover of England Made Me was originally to have been a photograph from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, in which the England football team give the Nazi salute. The record might, with that cover, have truly encapsulated British fascism by adding sport to the litany of untrustworthy outsiders, single mothers (see ‘New Baby Boom’), lurking paedos and pinched petit-bourgeois malevolence. So in the midst of (cough) cool Britannia, in 1998, a voice that spoke in purest Selsdon curtly declared, ‘we don’t like you, go away – we’re swinging’: Britpop’s politics of racial exclusion in a pithy phrase. ‘Ideal Home’ sets the cut-glass vowels on a sparse, freeze-dried evocation of the joys of property, wherein there is ‘never an awkward silence …’ The evocation of Mail-land here is always elided with, and slipping into, an earlier, inter-war, blackshirt-admiring incarnation. The Mail of today, the Daily Hell as Julie Burchill christened it, is hysterical, at a constant pitch of screaming neurosis in a way that its forbears were not, so BBR deliberately excise this edge of mania.

The blankness and poise evoke an earlier version of middle-class psychosis: ‘England Made Me’ was apparently based on the dispassionate self-hatred, seediness and moral turpitude of Graham Greene himself (rather than his novel of that title). The inextricable horror of Englishness is impossible to erase or escape: ‘I travelled all my life, / But never got away from the killing jar, / And the garden shed.’ By ‘It’s Only the End of the World’ a total fatalism takes over, like a British seaside version of ‘Is that All There Is?’, where the apocalypse is welcomed, but with none of the glorying in destruction of Morrissey’s ‘Everyday Is like Sunday’ or John Betjeman’s ‘Slough’. And one wonders what to make of the stripping of ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ into an anaemic, poker-faced march.

Luke Haines is always balancing crassness and egotism with flashes of genius: for every ‘Unsolved Child Murder’, there might be some blustery, Steve Albini–produced mess. He had made very enjoyable records: the blaxploitation/Red Army Faction concept album Baader-Meinhof, or The Oliver Twist Manifesto, where Tesco Destiny’s Child arrangements back tales of the Gordon Riots and the much-anticipated assassination of Sarah Lucas. But crucial to why England Made Me (written with John Moore) is in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Two Thousand and Five
• 1. Soundscapes
• 2. The Island
• 3. Elsewhere
• 4. Spaces
• 5. Screens
• Acknowledgements