Anti-Climacus

"Most of all, I love Manchester. The crumbling warehouses, the railway arches, the cheap abundant drugs. That's what did it in the end. Not the money, not the music, not even the guns. That is my heroic flaw: my excess of civic pride."
-Tony Wilson, 24 Hour Party People

I've mentioned before my belief that indie music is the most conservative of genres. It's also the most (perhaps the only) localist genre.* Indie is the genre where place matters a lot. Though I am suspicious of localism in most contexts, I absolutely believe in it when it comes to music and literature. And there is no place that has started more bands that I love, across a longer period of time, than Manchester.** In that top tier of bands I like: Oasis and the Smiths. In the next: Joy Division and New Order and the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays. In the "won't turn them off if they're on" division, Inspiral Carpets and the Charlatans. In the "beautiful failure" division, the Fall. All this to say nothing of the Buzzcocks. Between 1978 and 1998 or so, there is not a band that broke out of Manchester I don't at least sort of like. Nor was this an intentional plan; I picked up all those bands at different points in my life and was unaware of the provenance of at least some of them (the Buzzcocks, the Fall, and even Joy Division, who I knew to be 'from Manchester' because the Smiths were originally designed to be a reaction to them, but I'm not sure the implication of this had made its way to my consciousness) when I did.

"Disorder" comes from the Les Bains Douches live cd. Joy Division were at their best in the studio when they were restrained and mysterious; live, they were at their best when they were loud and raucous. This is them at their best--I love how Ian Curtis loses control on the lines "I've got the spirit/ but lose the feeling" at the end. "Step On" is just another great Happy Mondays single, of which they managed to have about 12 (and Shaun Ryder had a pretty good second wind as the lead singer of Black Grape). Ryder is one of those puzzling cases: his lyrics are of dubious quality at best and he certainly can't sing, but it's hard to imagine, say, "Kinky Afro" being a good song without him.


*Hip-hop, sure, but the only equivalent to Manchester-and-not-say-Liverpool-or-Wigan-even-though-they're-closeish was the old "did rap originate in the South Bronx or Queensbridge?" debate, which petered out by the early 90s. Least conservative of all is, of course, Nashville country, which destroys all regional difference in its music to establish a bland and undifferentiated 'south' and/or 'America.' Mass production at its most dubious.

**(The only near competition is Athens, Georgia from '78 to '85 or so (B-52s, R.E.M., Pylon, Love Tractor); even my beloved late 80s-early 90s Seattle had a number of bands I would probably never have gone to see (e.g. Alice in Chains or Soundgarden, who I like now but recognize as too metal in their early days for me to have given them a chance).)