metaphors of the urban-industrial backbeat

In 1979, the late great music critic Ellen Willis gave a brief yet compelling explanation for how rock and roll sounds like the city, writing about "rock-and-roll's oldest metaphor for modern city life—anarchic energy contained by a tight repetitive structure." Her formulation has two components. First, rock and roll functions as metaphor, not the lyrical or vocal narration of stories or emotions, as the music simulates by sonic suggestion the experience of urban life. Second, this metaphor operates through the tension of opposites: chaos and order, uncontainable noise and inescapable rhythm.

These opposing terms and their juxtaposition would seem to be necessarily indefinite and unfixed; what sounds like anarchy to one listen might seem predictable to another. I think the listener's relativism can be understood through a historical perspective, as rock 'n' roll at any one point conveys novel sensations that, for subsequent generations, might recede into the background of "modern city life." My point here invokes Adam Krims' concept of the urban ethos, a framework for analyzing musical representations of social life:

[T]here is a range of possible, and more or less likely, representations of the city in the corpus of… commercial popular music, and… certain representations call for framing at certain times… It is the scope of that range of urban representations and their possible modalities, in any given time span, that I call the urban ethos. The urban ethos is thus not a particular representation but rather a distribution of possibilities, always having discernable limits as well as common practices. It is not a picture of how life is in any particular city. Instead, it distills publicly disseminated notions of how cities are generally, even though it may be disproportionately shaped by the fate of particular cities…

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Willis's formulation appears from her entry on the Velvet Underground in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, a 1979 volume edited by Greil Marcus's 1979 edited volume. I read this piece in the fantastic new anthology, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). It's worth requoting the passage in its original context, in which Willis makes her case for the Velvets' essential contribution.

The Velvets straddled the categories [of art rock and rock-and-roll art]. They were nothing if not eclectic: their music and sensibility suggested influences as diverse as Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, Peter Townshend and John Cage; they experimented with demended feedback and isolated, pure notes and noise for noise's sake; they were partial to sweet, almost folk-like melodies; they played the electric viola on "Desolation Row." But they were basically rock-and-roll artists, buidling their songs on a beat that was sometimes implied rather than heard, on simple, tough, pithy lyrics about their hard-edged urban demimonde, on rock-and-roll's oldest metaphor for modern city life—anarchic energy contained by a tight, repetitive structure. Some of the Velvets' best songs—"Heroin," especially—redefined how rock-and-roll was supposed to sound. Others—"I'm Waiting for the Man," "White Light/White Heat," "Beginning to See the Light," Rock & Roll"—used basic rock-and-roll patterns to redefine how the music was supposed to feel (pp. 55-6).

Many others have of course heard the urban in the Velvets' sound, no doubt without having read Willis's piece. The group's first two records, 1967's Velvet Underground and Nico and 1968's White Light/White Heat, provide especially fertile material for this kind of analysis. Invariably, the sound and feel of subway trains are mentioned:

Notice how the song’s rhythm mimics the subway train this neophyte would surely have taken up to Harlem to score drugs. “I’m waiting for my man / twenty-six dollars in my hand / up to Lexington, 125 / feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive.”
—Nicholas Taylor, "Guest Playlist," 2011

There were songs where Lou's guitar would conjure the screeching sound of the N.Y. subway and the sensory overload of the modern city experienced by the amphetamine eyes of its residents as their minds split open.
—William Crain, "The Modern Lovers: Despite All The Amputations," 2002


Even more noticeable when he switched to electric viola, Cale's sound evoked the terror of Reed's compositions, with the bowed strings screeching like a runaway subway car.
—CD Universe review, undated

As I listen to track after track, I can feel a tinge of the city’s seedy side: the risqué narrative in “Venus in Furs,” the sound of air blasting through subway vents in “Black Angel’s Death Song,” and the nervous intense jonesing in “Run, Run, Run.”
—Lindsay Sanchez, "You've Never Heard 'The Velvet Underground and Nico'?", 2011

THE STOOGES

Maybe it's best not to focus too narrowly on the urban landscape of NYC circa 1967. Placed in its broader historical context, we're talking about what sociologist Chris Rojek has called the "urban-industrial backbeat" against which modern pop music emerged over the 20th century. In regards to the industrial element of this backbeat, a frequently referenced touchpoint is the Stooges, particularly the early material they developed in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Like most "godfathers of punk," Iggy Stooge (later Pop) was a wired fuck-up liable to bring his whole crew down in the broken glass with him. But his cohorts, especially guitarist Ron Asheton, framed Iggy's self-destruction in such pointedly blasted, assembly-line riffage that the whole thing ended up as classic Detroit folk art: auto-plant noise and Motown shimmy, meth jitters and wah-wah groove—the blueprint for everything fast, sexy, and grungy to come.
—"The Stooges," Spin Magazine, February 2002

        In early interviews, Iggy used to claim the Stooge's uniquely brutal, industrial sound was inspired by the noise of Detroit's mighty car plants.
       "Absolutely," he says, "I didn't realize it then how unusual that was then to live in an environment where really cars were the only things goin' on. When I was little we went on a field trip to River Rouge which was an industrial park of immense size. If I went there now it would probably look nightmarish but to me then it was great. You heard how they pressed the metal, saw the catwalks, and all this was very impressive."
—Richard Fleury, undated

As is well known, the Stooges' 1969 eponymous debut album was produced by John Cale not long after he was kicked out of the Velvets. The clip below (from 2002's "Lust for Life" documentary, a.k.a. "Jesus? This is Iggy?") indicates the Stooges had formulated their sound before Iggy Pop ever "made my first trip to New York, or to any big city." So, to continue with Rojek's notion of the urban-industrial backbeat perhaps the Stooges' first record comprises an ideal type for an early industrial backbeat, distinguished from its urban element.

MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS

I wonder how useful it is to limit the metaphoric medium to rock 'n' roll, since urban-industrial connotations of the kind Willis had in mind arguably can be across across the pop-music spectrum. How could "anarchic energy contained by a tight repetitive structure" not have been an apt or at least adequate description of early rhythm 'n' blues? Imagine what unsuspecting and unprepared ears, white or black, would have made of Joe Turner's "Shake Rattle & Roll"? How else to describe the culturally unprecedented sounds emanating from into radio stations like Cleveland's WJW 1210 AM, home of Allan "Moondog" Freed, or Memphis's WDIA, "73 on your dial," America's first radio station with an all-black format?

Another potentially relevant musical signifer is Detroit's Motown sound. Consider for instance Martha and the Vandellas' 1965 single, "Nowhere to Run." In homage to Detroit's auto plants (the same inspiration for the Stooges), producer Lamont Dozier fortified drummer Benny Benjamin's beat with the sounds of car chains. The urban metaphor for "Nowhere to Run," ostensibly a song about love gone wrong, was hammered home by a promotional video filmed in the Ford River River Rouge Plant that was broadcast on the CBS music show "It's What's Happening Baby," hosted by popular NYC disc jockey Murray "the K" Kaufman.

In Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Harvard University Press, 1999), Suzanne E. Smith offers an acute interpretation of the Vandellas' video in its historical and geographical contexts:

The use of car parts to create the song's apprehensive tone complimented the "Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide" lyrics, which recount the loer's inability to free herself from a tortured romance. The staging of the television shoot on the factory shop floor accentuated the eerie quality of the song as Martha and the Vandellas tried to navigate their way through the mechanics of an unfamiliar assembly line. The performance concludes with "Murray the K" driving a fully assembled Mustang out of the auto plant while Martha and the Vandellas stay behind with the autoworkers and wave good-bye.
       In this television appearance one of Motown's musical products disrupted the Ford assembly line in order to promote Motown's sound, Ford's Mustang, and the summer employment campaign of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. The moment exemplified James Bogg's assertion that automation and modern technologies carried "the contradictions of capitalism to their furthest extreme." "Nowhere to Run" became more than a song about a tormented love affair when Martha and performed it in the Ford River Rouge Plant, a performance televised to a national audience of teenage consumers. The audience of autoworkers at the filming of the song often had "nowhere to run" from the tedium of assembly-line work and nowhere to go if automation displaced them from their jobs. The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity broadcast the show to encourage teenagers to look for part-time summer work but did not offer any long-term solutions to the employment crises that automation and deindustrialization had produced in cities like Detroit. For the Ford Motor Company, the "Nowhere to Run" segment offered free publicity for its new and popular Mustang. For Martha and the Vandellas, their appearance on the television special represented what had become a critical stage on Motown's own assembly line, which strengthened the record company's position in the larger record industry (pp. 129-30).

JOY DIVISION

As Out of the Vinyl Deeps makes clear, Ellen Willis' critical paradigm was indelibly associated with countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. Her musical reference points were the Stones, Joplin, Dylan and the Velvets, whose artistic agendas drew pointedly (if not always sympathetically) upon the generational and gender revolts of the day; tellingly, when these revolts dried up by the late 1970s, Willis turned away from music criticism. 

Such bygone origins do little to diminish the analytical productivity of Willis's formulation of "rock-and-roll's oldest metaphor for modern city life—anarchic energy contained by a tight repetitive structure." So vague yet so provocative—unhinged from her 60s rock references, it invites listeners to critically perceive the urban through a variety of musical sounds and genres. Obviously hip hop, industrial music, electronic dance music etc. provide ample fodder for such analysis.

Instead, I conclude with another recording much closer to the years Willis wrote music criticism. To my thinking, Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" evokes the city of post-industrial decline. Here, 'anarchy' reflects not the (white) heat of population/infrastructural pressure and subcultural clash, but rather an immoral policy of urban disinvestment and workforce redundancy. In this city void of material function and social solidarity, the music's 'tight repetitive structure' traps the listener into an isolating echo chamber of the mind.

don't cross a Scottish new romantic

I've always loved Ultravox since I first heard "Vienna" in the early 1980s. However, my musical education from the New Musical Express (which, as I mentioned before, kind of fucked me up) quickly impressed upon me that Ultravox were actually fey pompous bourgeois muso popstars. (Just earning three of those five modifiers would ensure a critical death sentence in the NME.) So Ultravox stayed a guilty pleasure that I shared with others only in complete confidence until a couple of revelations changed my impression of them.  

The first was learning about how Detroit techno's pioneering DJs, the so-called Bellville three — Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and Juan Atkins — were deeply influenced by Ultravox.  The minimal "Mr. X" is an obvious template, but even Ultravox's lofty, pseudo-classical passages can be heard in the more, er, romantic sounds of Detroit techno, such as May's "Strings of Life." It's easy and tempting to overstate how exotic Ultravox and other music from Britain's new romantic scene would have been to Detroit techno originator's; the Bellville Three were in fact suburban, middle-class American teenage boys when they encountered Ultravox, just like I was. Still, the geographic and racial distances between British pop music and Detroit's funk scene at that time were substantial, and their musical crossing was both unanticipated and inspired. Detroit techno's inheritance from the new romantics constitutes one of the great musical examples of cultural appropriation or (to cite Umberto Eco's book) misreadings.

The second thing that changed my mind about Ultravox was one of the funniest anecdotes in Mark Paytress's Siouxsie & The Banshees: The Authorized Biography.  It's told by bassist Steve Severin, relating an episode with their second guitarist, John McGeogh, circa 1981:

I went over to John's house for dinner one Easter, when I was first getting to know him, and all his mates from Scottish bands were there — [The Skids'] Richard Jobson, [Ultravox's] Midge Ure, the lot. Halfway through the meal someone lobbed a scaffold pole through the window and all the Scots, John included, got up as one, ran out of the house and started chasing the bloke who'd done it down the street. They came back with an assortment of bumps and brusises, but you just knew that the other bloke would have been a lot worse. We found out as we got to know him better that John did like a brawl from time to time, and once he'd got a few drinks inside him he'd usually find a way of getting himself into some sort of a fight. He never went looking for one, but wouldn't shirk one if it came his way. He definitely wasn't someone to cross.

Having never been to Scotland or investigated their culture in any serious way, I won't even begin to speculate what this display of Scottish masculine aggression means. I just love imagining Midge Ure, with his pencil moustache and slicked hair, suddenly jumping out the door with his mates to beat the shit out of some "cunt." 

Now that I have that image stuck in my head, Midge Ure's resemblance to a certain fictional Scottish pipsqueak with a psychotic rage is a little uncanny...

adventures in arts-based urban revitalization: the RoboCop statue in Detroit

On February 7th, someone tweeted the mayor of Detroit with a passing thought: “Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.”  The city’s mayor (and former NBA all star) Dave Bing replied, “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.” Thus an idea was born and, as these things happen, took off like wildfire.

First a Facebook group was set up with a name that couldn’t miss: Build a statue of RoboCop in Detroit.  Then a local art/technology community group donated a site on Roosevelt Park, in front of the derelict Michigan Central Station. A sculptor with experience in producing massive iron works for artists like Matthew Barney offered to oversee the statue’s creation.  The project would require money, an estimated $50,000, so an online fundraising effort was launched. In just eight days it raised about half its target; in one more day, it went over the top.  

Here, then, is a glimpse of what arts-based urban revitalization may look like in the age of the internet meme.  I’m of at least three minds on this topic.

Why not! A 1987 sci-fi action movie directed by Paul Verhoeven, “RoboCop” is loved by many for its mix of robots-on-steroids FX, social commentary, extreme violence, and cop-movie clichés.  If the film lacked the prophetic vision of “Blade Runner” or edge-of-your-seat pacing of “The Terminator” (both I and II), it compensated with its B-movie sensibility, trashy dialogue, and the cheesy-but-I-like-it look of its titular protagonist, played with just the right level of humor by Peter Weller. Gen Xers and Yers are likely to have seen the movie at least a half-dozen times in bits and parts; many a quote (“Well, give the man a hand!”) has been recited over bonghits and text messages. “RoboCop” puts Detroit on the map in a world where the culture of basic cable TV comprises the common frame of reference.  Sure, it’s not Detroit in its best light, but that’s not the film’s fault.

More to the point: a statue of RoboCop would be awesome! Yes, it takes a sense of humor to see that—but shouldn’t Detroit have pride in its willingness to laugh at itself? Imagine all the people who would travel just to see it! (As one funder wrote, “I will pilgrimage from Australia to see this statue, it will be one of the proudest moments of my life.”)

Why not? Because have you watched “RoboCop”? Closely? Does a city where police suppresion has had a hand in urban revolts since 1863 need another memorial to a cop, much less a fictional cyborg cop? Sure, the movie purports to take the little guy’s side with its story of a dedicated public servant besieged by a corrupt local power structure, but its drama—indeed, the emotional charge delivered by entire dystopian city genre of that era—draws upon a fucked-up conventional wisdom in which America’s urban crisis stems from the deterioration of social order and decency among the urban population. The fearful gaze that frames the viewer’s perspective in “RoboCop” is deracialized in some respects (for instance, the ruthless criminal boss is played by the white dad from That ‘70s Show), but in the real world its object is unquestionably a black face. In this sense, “RoboCop” hates Detroit’s majority population as much as the racist cops who started the 1967 riots did.

And $50,000 for a statue?! How many hungry people could be fed, how many after-school programs could be funded, how many small businesses could stay afloat with that kind of money?

Why this isn’t really about Detroit at all. In truth, I don’t know enough about the people behind the RoboCop statue or their opponents to assign them these contrasting viewpoints. I confess that whenever I read about community development via “the creative use of digital technology and the arts,” I’m tempted to project the gentrification framework on them: they are the outsiders, dispossessing the locals of their own cultural representations (if not their actual homes, which were probably taken from them long before). But in this case, I don’t know who is newcomer and who is old-timer. The statue’s proponents hail from the creative class, hardly the principled opponents of gentrification, but they advocate an uplift of and upgrading for Detroit that’s desperately needed. Maybe the statue will really set in motion the virtuous circle that one organizer envisioned:

Beyond the statue even, there's every chance that this crowd funding experience will go on to kickstart the kickstarting of other amazing things in Detroit. Imagine that? Your kickstarting of a RoboCop statue cascades into greater positivity and more connections coming into Detroit...

 

Personally, I don’t find the joke made by the RoboCop statue to a particularly mean-spirited one. It’s kind of funny, and I’ve had a few good chuckles sharing the story of the RoboCop statue with friends and colleagues.  It is, however, not a joke being told by Detroiters. That is, the background of experiences and worldviews its humor draws upon isn’t Detroit. It’s the teenage world of late-night TV, beer and bonghits, and B-movie sci-fi/action fandom.

In a smart and compelling review essay, John Patrick Leary situates recent photography and documentaries of Detroit’s scarred landscape within a genre of ruin porn. “All the elements are here,” Leary writes (with specific reference in this quote to Julien Temple’s documentary “Requiem For Detroit?”): 

the exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction; the unembarrassed rejoicing at the “excitement” of it all, hastily balanced by the liberal posturing of sympathy for a “man-made Katrina;” and most importantly, the absence of people other than those he calls, cruelly, “street zombies.” The city is a shell, and so are the people who occasionally stumble into the photographer’s viewfinder.

Not all Detroit aesthetes subscribe to the ghoulish fetishism of this genre. These days, “well-meaning defenders of the city’s possibilities,” Leary explains, “are often politically active, often young, and, it should be noted, often white. This class of Detroit story chronicles Detroit’s possibilities, with a heavy emphasis on art and urban agriculture on abandoned land.”

I’m not sure which side the proponents of the RoboCop statue fall on, but in either case what both views on Detroit share is the “evacuation of context”: real histories and community relations are traded out for the particular obsessions of the beholder. With the RoboCop statue, the cultural references of the college dorm-room now constitute a strategy for arts-based urban revitalization. (That, and the internet-based fundraising technique of “crowd funding.”)  The self-serving, narcissistic thrust of creative-class politics, so often just below the surface of proposals to create bike lanes or questions about “what would Jane Jacobs do?", now appears to huff the fumes of 80s nostalgia and adolescent humor. Where is the ‘real’ Detroit in this picture?