THE CITY
“This was the first country to turn its back on country life in favour of mass industrialisation and urbanisation, and is now the nation with one of the lowest percentages of its people working the soil, the most intensively mechanised farming practices, the least well-preserved rural culture and the most cosmopolitan metropolitan one. But we don’t acknowledge all that, instead indulging in a bizarre form of collective self-loathing. We’re urban and suburban souls in denial … “city bad, country good” is the almost universally accepted wisdom.
Thus spake Robert Elms about England, almost a quarter of a century ago. But it truly is grim in the heart of the industrialised city; which is quite distinct from the old market towns, on the one hand; and post-industrial urbanisation, on the other. It shouldn’t come as an affront to urban sensibilities that, contemplating the smokestacks of Lancashire, and questioning whether Joseph of Arimathea might have made it across the channel, William Blake asked the question:
‘Was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Elms spoke of England but it’s fair to say, listening in to our American friends’ commentary on city life in this episode that they don’t have a marked preference for UK urban life either.
Think of London, small city
Cities, Talking Heads
Dark, dark in the daytime
For some the condition of city living becomes so awful, they actually develop a malaise. This is from a group that grew up in Nottingham:
I’m crawling, I don’t know where to or from
City Sickness, Tindersticks
The centre of things from where everything stems is not where I belong
I have the city sickness, growing inside me
On the other hand, a rough romantic yearning for love among the ugliness persists. Ewan McColl composed this classic in 1949. He had Salford in mind, but sub in your own urban vista.
I met my love by the gas works wall
Dirty Old Town, The Pogues
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
I kissed my girl by the factory wall
And sometimes the heartless, careless city becomes a backdrop to life gone awry, a relationship that didn’t work out. The Dismemberment Plan’s narrator evokes a city he’s left in which his lover has departed. It’s a melancholy poem, elegantly crafted:
Well, now I notice the streetlamp’s hum
The ghosts of graffiti, they couldn’t quite erase
The blank-faced stares on the subway as people go home
The parks lay empty like my unmade bed
The streets are silent like my lifeless telephone
And this is where I live, but I’ve never felt less at homeSo, I’m not unsympathetic
I see why you left
There’s no one to know
There’s nothing to do
The city’s been dead
Since you’ve been goneSometimes I stand on my roof at night
The City, The Dismemberment Plan
And watch as something seems to happen somewhere else
I feel like the breeze could pick me up and carry me away
Out and over the iridescent grid
Up and away from the bar fights and neon lights
And out and away from everything that makes me what I am
My son recently moved back to the suburbs from the Central Business District of Melbourne. The city, in other words. He’s more relaxed now. But sometimes misses it. Here are some songs, mostly about the downside of city life. But the city is also where things happen. Including where these songs were written and recorded, largely.
