So Much to Answer For

Not wanting to pre-empt the F.J's long-promised post on the late Anthony H. Wilson, but a post impelled by (coincidentally) reading I.T's typically ostranenie-inducing photo essay on Manchester and watching Grant Gee's Joy Division (far superior to the abortive Control) in the same afternoon. At the end of Gee's documentary, Wilson re-iterates his claim that Joy Division made Manchester what it is today, to the visual accompaniment of the rising office blocks and yuppiedromes. The first industrial city became the first post-industrial city. To gloss it in terms Wilson might not have approved: the city that was once a modern, cultured metropolis had declined by the late '70s, but through an unspoken covenant between art and commerce - the final destruction of the old factories under Thatcher, alongside Wilson and Factory's building-up of a new, 'creative industry' - it somehow entered the millennium as a shinily modern metropolis all over again. The old rapacious Manchester liberalism adapted neatly to neoliberalism, and the city of dreadful night became Britain's immaterial capital. Since the 1990s Manchester's overwhelming and mainly malign influence has been everywhere. Certainly there's something ineffably Manchester about New Labour's arrogance, swagger and cynicism, appropriately coinciding with the rise of Manchester United to multinational colossus. The curious thing is that in actual cultural terms, what has been produced is pretty negligible.



In architecture, there's the luxury flats - seemingly even more than in London, on a brief visit a few months ago - reaching their apotheosis in the Beetham Tower; or you have the morally-improving-googie of Salford Quays, and Urban Splash's loft colonies; while in music, the city hasn't produced a genuinely innovative record since A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology 13 years ago. What else has there been? The student slop-hop of Mr Scruff? The Ting Tings? Anyone? I was linked a very interesting essay a while ago by City of Sound about the relative declines of Sheffield and Manchester, with the former lacking the polyglot blagging instinct which made Manchester adjust so well to the new circumstances (well, excising the vast gap between rich and poor and the rate of violent crime). Yet Sheffield produced bleep&bass and bassline house, and Manchester has pioneered nary a single musical idea since 1980, aside from the continuum of retro vainglory intitated by the Stone Roses and Oasis, with its ever-diminishing returns. So on its own terms, the cultural capital is nondescript. Yet, from the near-bankruptcy of United's sponsor AIG onwards, it'll probably be one of the first places to really suffer from the collapse of immaterial capital. Now all those yuppiedrome rentiers are already suddenly finding their capsules near-impossible to let, there will no doubt be a new wave of decay, the future dying in Manchester first, again. But could the sight of the Urban Splash Dystopia inspire something as strange and beautiful as did the aestheticisation of the dying city of the industrialists and post-war planners?

nb most of these criticisms could be levelled at London also