LONDON CALLING THE CLASH LONDON CALLING 1979 London

LONDON CALLING

THE CLASH, “LONDON CALLING” (1979) • • • London calling to the faraway towns Now war is declared and battle come down London calling to the underworld Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls London calling, now don't look to us Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust London calling, see we ain't got no swing 'Cept for the reign of that truncheon thing The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin Engines stop running but I have no fear 'Cause London is burning and I live by the river London calling to the imitation zone Forget it brother, you can go at it alone London calling to the zombies of death Quit holding out and draw another breath London calling and I don't wanna shout But while we were talking I saw you nodding out London calling, see we ain't got no high Except for that one with the yellowy eyes Now get this, London calling, yes, I was there, too And you know what they said? Well, some of it was true London calling at the top of the dial And after all this, won't you give me a smile? I never felt so much alike

THE MODERN CITY Late 19 th century = fading away of the last remnants of romanticism (first “normalized” by the bourgeois culture of realism and then disintegrated by the radical perspective of naturalism) Modernism = transnational cultural movement dominating the first three decades of the century → “the meaning of the city becomes more dense, until we see the city through layers of historical meaning, or until it blurs into the opaque vision” (Richard Lehan) City = text, full of meanings referring to each other and to other texts, and to the totality of historical times → epistemological confusion → loss of the sense of reality

UNREAL CITY T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. l Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

MODERNITY AND CONTEMPORANEITY Modernity = American and French Revolutions (1776, 1789) Contemporaneity = second industrial revolution (electricity, 1870 s), revolution in communications (material – trains, automobiles and airplanes – and immaterial – radio, cinema and sudio recordings; early 20° century), Russian Revolution (1917) Modernism = cultural movement reacting to the trasformation of the modern into the contemporary

THREE VISIONS OF THE “NEW” CITY 1. Denunciation of the “corruption” of the “harmonious” relationshiop with nature brought about by urbanization (Oswald Spengler, Lewis Mumford) 2. Study of how cities “work” → cities = entities half-way between the organic and the mechanical (Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess) 3. Analysis of individual and collective behaviour patterns – the city as a “state of mind” → birth of urban sociology (Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel)

MASS SOCIETY Contradiction between a heavily individualistic bourgois ideology (Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904 -05) and a social and economic system based on massification and depersonalization

MASSIFICTION VS. DIFFERENTIATION Mass society → tendency towards “homogenization” vs. expansion of cities → spread of heterogeneity (migrations) Specialized craftsmen substituted by unspecialized workmen, who on the other hand resist to the merging into the undifferentiated melting pot of “Britishness”, maintaining their own different cultural identities

ALTERITY AND HOSTILITY From the village-city to the metropolis → dissemination of representatives of “other” cultures, distinctly different from the dominant culture → alterity = danger Migrant = disease, a “contaminating” body to be expelled from the “sane” body of the city

THE SPACE OF THE CITY Jurij M. Lotman – Boris Uspenskij, Typology of Culture: inner space (IN) vs. outer space (ES / OUT) IN-space = space of the already known, of culture, order, law, maybe constrain OUT-space = space of the unknown, of nature, chaos, mystery, maybe freedom City = IN-space vs. non-city (desert, forest, ocean) = OUT-space, but also inner subdivision of spaces inside the city → the city as a jigsaw puzzle of different sub-spaces, each an IN-space for its inhabitants and an OUT-space for the others