In the exhibition Suburbia. Living the American Dream the Architekturzentrum Wien, and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, explore that ubiquitous American institution as both the utopian component of the American Dream of the title, as standing proxy for America as a utopia, and as the dystopian component of the American Nightmare, as standing proxy for America as a dystopia, that is unspoken in the title, but very present: Dreams and Nightmares being as they are natural antipodes. And never far from one another.
Two simultaneous, diametrically juxtaposed, existences, realities, approached and reflected on in Suburbia from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of media, But not in context of music.
Which is clearly outrageous!!!
Thus Radio smow, once again, rides to the rescue.......
For all that the focus of Suburbia. Living the American Dream is and was, as the title neatly implies, American Suburbia, as an institution 'suburbia' is a universal phenomenon: wherever one meets sprawling urban spaces one meets isolated communities beyond them. Communities invariably as physically isolated from an urban space they rely on as they are socially, culturally, economically, conceptually, et al isolated from it.
Whereby not all 'suburbias' are as neatly turned out as the stereotypical American 'suburb' with its pristine lawns, white picket fences and smiling congenial neighbours, nor do all arise from the same desire to escape the pressures of the city, to stake your claim to your piece of the nation, to emulate those American settlers who travelled west from the eastern seaboard to tame the 'uninhabited' 'wild' west that, as Suburbia convincingly argues, is and was at the origins of the American 'suburb', and still defines a great deal of the development; however, despite such apparently fundamental differences, in all suburban conurbations one finds not only hopes and desires, but torments and afflictions. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Dreams and nightmares. Utopia and dystopia.
And regardless of the hows and whys of the genesis and reality of any given 'suburb', all 'suburbs' offer space for not only housing but for reflections on housing, on housing provision, on the social and political contexts of housing provision, on housing provision as both an active tool and a passive definer of segregation, integration, possibilities, struggles, et al; on how housing provision influences any given society. Both at the collective level and the individual level.
Allows for reflections on housing beyond the physical of the materials and on the urban space beyond the physical of the plan. And thereby helps underscore an important difference between construction and architecture.
An existence of 'suburbs' as material and immaterial spaces, as tangible and allegorical, that means 'suburbs' have long been spaces musicians have inhabited, sometimes with criticism, sometimes with anger, with resignation or with humour, occasionally (very occasionally, as in essentially never) with joy, and a mix that in its variety offers a fertile location for advancing and framing questions on and of housing and housing provision.......
Released in 1986 the Pet Shop Boys' Suburbia is inarguably one of the more meticulous dissections of life on the edge of the city.
A space that, as is very much implied if not directly articulated, for all that for some it is an ambition, for the Pet Shop Boys' protagonists it is a tedious, bleak wasteland, a featureless, disorientating space where "you can't hide", and that far from being a warming place of home is a "suburban hell" from which the only escape, certainly for someone "too old for toys" but not old enough to live independently in they place they choose, is "a felt pen", to "break the window" and wait till "a siren screams".
Whereby the don't want to, they protest; they "only wanted something else to do but hang around", they protest.
And you believe them.
But in Suburbia that option simply doesn't exist.
That "something else" is in the city, and how you goin' get there? 'Suburbs', almost by law, certainly by convention, being only poorly linked via public transport to the city. If linked at all. You're on your own in 'suburbia'.
Yet from this hopelessness of wasted time and energy arises, one presumes at a later date, with the advantage of hindsight and distance, certainly with the advantage of the extra vinyl of a 12" single and without the limitations of an album track listing, a qualified reflection on Suburbia (The Full Horror) and the demand "who are we to blame For the sins of the past? These slums of the future?"
Good question.
"What kind of dream was this"?
Another good question.
That was 1986, are we closer to answers today? Are we closer to solutions? Or are we still developing "slums of the future"? What dreams of housing are these that we are realising?
Whereby it's essential to note that the Pet Shop Boys' Suburbia is located in England. Not the America one is used to exploring 'suburbia' in context of. An important and instructive same same but different. And an important and instructive viewing of England.
All wrapped up in a song released in 1986 that, regardless of which year you're reading this in, could be released tomorrow and still sound fresh and dangerous and necessary.
We're not sure if there is a word for a song whose jolly tune belies the darkness of its lyrics, if there is, which we very much hope there is, and if there isn't society really needs one, it applies every bit as much to Pleasant Valley Sunday as it does to Delilah and Enola Gay.
A Sunday in Pleasant Valley where not only "the local rock group down the street, Is trying hard to learn their song", the "weekend squire" is out mowing his lawn, Mrs Gray's "roses are in bloom" but there is "charcoal burning everywhere" ready for the weekly barbecues.
Which is lovely. Pleasant.
Or would be, could be, arguably should be.
However, the narrator, whether by an undescribed superpower or through the frustrations of their teenage desires and impulses, has seen through the shine: the "weekend squire" a top drawer back-handed compliment that damns while feigning to applause standing in many regards as a near perfect synonym for the fakeness, shallowness, self-delusion of life "in status symbol land" with its "rows of houses that are all the same". The latter a fact one senses is unbearable for the protagonist. An unbearableness exacerbated by the fact the "no one seems to care"
How can they not care? What is wrong with them? You hear being screamed silently in the background.
Clearly, at least for The Monkees narrator, the "creature comfort goals" that numb the soul, "and make it hard for me to see" have seriously afflicted Mrs Green, Mr Gray, the "weekend squire" et al, have created a solid reality from a 2D facade.
"I need a change of scenery" the narrator laments.
A change of physical, mental and emotional scenery.
But is that possible?
An intelligent play with the fakeness, shallowness, self-delusion of 'suburbia' that, and just as importantly as the song itself, is by a band who started out as individuals cast to play a band in a TV show, cast to be fake band for purposes of commercial TV, before taking things into their own hands and becoming more successful as an actual band than they were meant to be or, arguably, as they were as a fake band . Briefly. Before it all fell apart. But regardless of how it ended a further interesting lens to view 'suburbia' through.
For all that 'suburbia' is popularly associated with planned housing estates populated by a comfortable middle class, that is but one definition, interpretation. As, essentially, a settlement physically and metaphysically removed from an urban centre, it needn't conform that popular definition, interpretation.
It can also be the self-built, informal settlements that arose on the edges of the Wienerwald to the west of Vienna in the early 20th century as a decentralised, autonomous response to the housing shortages of the period, both the shortage of actual houses and the shortage of healthy habitable houses among those that were there. Before becoming a formalised housing programme managed by the city authorities. An important and interesting moment in the (hi)story of housing provision. And in the development of Functionalist Modernist housing positions in the first third of the 20th century.
And it can also be the so-called shanty town, a definition, interpretation, of a 'suburb' that is more universal than the stereotypical American definition, interpretation, but because it doesn't have the cultural prominence of the 'suburb' of an America that is globally so culturally dominant, and because it is a 'suburb' generally to be found in the sorts of countries and regions most Europeans tend not to overly concern themselves with, unless there's a natural disaster there, far less visit and engage with, they tend to be invisible to the European gaze.
Desmond Dekker's Shanty Town is on the western edge of Kingston, Jamaica.
Or was.
Were.
Dekker's narrative taking as its genesis the clearance of the Industrial Terrace and Foreshore Road Shanty Towns by the Kingston authorities in July 1966.
Clearances on the one hand as a response to the organised crime and violence that, by all accounts, not just the authorities accounts, were rife within the settlements, if there were, unquestionably, also political motivations on the part of the authorities to clear the areas. And on the other clearances to enable both the enlargement of the city's Tivoli Gardens housing scheme and the construction of industrial facilities; thus aspects of both that fact that while land is finite the demands on and for its use are infinite, and also, specifically in terms of Tivoli Gardens, a component of those ongoing question of how one supplies safe, hygienic, affordable, responsive housing for any given community, and the degree to which the authorities include residents in those decisions or decide for them on their behalf. While also a question of how one controls organised urban crime and violence without punishing the innocent victims of the gangs. Or destroying the social communities that exist regardless of the physical realities of an area. A question as contemporary now as it was in 1966.
The Kingston authorities decided to clear the shanty towns. Without consultation.
A clearance operation that ended in a riot as, (one presumes primarily) those Rude Boys who were responsible for the violence and crime resisted the council workers; a riot in the course of which the local Rude Boys "Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail (A Shanty Town)"
'cause that's what Rude Boys do. They ain't no 007s. Or no gentlemen and lady gangsters of Ocean's 11.
And a riot, a lootin' and shootin' that, naturally, saw a lot of Rude Boys, detained and imprisoned. "Dem a wail"
Rude boys who once out of jail didn't change their ways, that questions to how, if, prison can be corrective; rather continued their violent criminal careers.
But "Police get taller" and Soldier get longer" and so "Rudeboy a weep and a wail". Again. And again. And again.
It would be 1967 before Dandy Livingstone would articulate Rudy a Message to You and his suggestion they change their ways.
And a song that not only allows for reflections on the correct spelling of Rude Boy/Rudeboy nor only of 'suburbia' beyond the popular image, nor only of 'suburbia' as an autonomous body beyond both the city and beyond those civic structures by which the city is managed and controlled, but that also allows for differentiated perspectives on 'suburbia' as a ghetto. Regardless of your wealth and social position.
No-one would argue Silvertown was The Men They Couldn't Hang's best album, it's far from being their worst, but its not their best.
Does however contain not only Lobotomy, Gets 'Em Home and Rosettes but also Company Town, a song that, as with so many of TMTCH's best moments, is as much a concise lesson in social and economic (hi)story as it is a tune.
A tune, a social and economic (hi)story lesson, about the Company Town, a very particular and specific variation on the 'suburb', a very specific form of 'suburbia' that arose in America in context of the industrialisation of the late 19th century before becoming a near global phenomenon wherever big businesses needed workers but infrastructure wasn't available at the required scale. Or wherever colonialism raised its ugly mercantile heads.
A Company Town in where, and as with in near all company towns, not only, and in contrast to the prevailing realities in the contemporaneous public and private sectors struggling to provide meaningful homes for workers, "there are houses being built", but "all the air is clean, all the pavements glеam", where "they've locked away the drunks", "they've eradicated crime" and even ensured that "the buses run on time". While for all those hard forced to survive on their wages alone, "The credit's good in all the company stores".
A utopia.
A space that is that which 'suburbia' wants to be, is often presented as, but so often falls short of.
Albeit, a reality only possible because "every street and building in the town" stands on company land.
It's not an independent community where all are free to do as they please. Far less a democratic space where all have a say. But a Company Town.
A town in which "Every park, every green, every hope and dream The company owns every piece of ground", ever piece of material ground and every piece of immaterial ground.
A space in which the worker is thoroughly dependent on the company, dependent on their job, have no alternative but to work for the company: the fact that "everyone obеys the company law" isn't out of agreement that the laws are correct, necessary, just, but for fear, no one had a choice but to acquiesce. If you lose your job you lose not only your home, your place in that peaceful town, but will have to find a way to repay the debt you've been quietly building up in the (invariably overpriced) congenial "company store"; and thus a space in which the company, effectively, also owns "everybody in the company town".
Not that the ownership of the employees, the denying the employees of their democratic rights, their ability to develop and grow according to their own will, was necessarily always the motivation for the company town; often it was either more social concerns of wellbeing or attempts on the part of the company owners to form society to a standard they understood as civil and social and desirable, to train the working classes to behave in certain manners; the result is however the same, a reality in which "those who own the earth are still tethering their serfs".
And for all a William Morris may have looked romantically on the serf/master relationship of the Middle Ages, may have downplayed the problems in that relationship, and may to a degree have been correct. That was then. A long, long time ago then.
A state of serfdom of the workers of industrialisation that while better than the ruthless exploitation faced by Jurgis Rudkus, his family and all the other migrant workers in the industrial meat industry of early 20th century Chicago as discussed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, it's not much better.
Thus a Company Town structure that poses important questions of not only the degree to which companies should be able to dictate how their employees live their lives, and of the power relationship in employment, how much independence, how much future, should an employee give up for the company, but also on how one achieves the utopian idyll of the Company Town without the dystopian control and power imbalances of the Company Town?
Is that possible?
The company town as a concept largely faded in the course of the 20th century, to which almost everyone would add, thankfully; however of late has started to make a comeback, including in the form of Elon Musk and Space X's increasing control over Boca Chica Village, Texas.
What could possibly go wrong?
If only there was a way to learn about the past and extrapolate that into the now and future.......
As Suburbia. Living the American Dream elucidates, until the 1960s American 'suburbia' was white. Non-whites simply weren't allowed to live there. A component of 'suburbia' as an active form of segregation.
Which meant that while 'suburbia' was establishing itself as a key component of the American psyche and the American self-image and the external image of America, non-whites were in the inner cities. Largely invisible to consumers of popular culture.
A state of affairs which is not only important and instructive in the (hi)story of America and in appreciating contemporary America, and in appreciating how external viewings of America became established and conventionalised, but that through the inherent invisibility of those denied access to 'suburbia', the invisibility of the inner city spaces in which everyone else lived, tends to reinforce a distinction between 'suburbia' and the inner city, tends to reinforce 'suburbia' and the inner city as distinct elements of housing policy and provision.
Yet as with many, most, things in life, it's not that simple and clean cut. Not least because both 'suburbia' and the inner city are more than purely physical locations. Both have tangible and intangible, practical and emotional realities.
Both are dreams, both are nightmares, both utopias, both dystopias, both desires to be there and desires to leave. Both components of the question of how do we provide meaningful responsive, safe, healthy housing for a society that empowers not only a collective growth but each individual to reach their full potential, to be that which they can be be, want to be, that which they are but need to develop.
The answer isn't the 'suburb'. The answer isn't the inner city. It probably lies, as so much does, between the two.
Therefore you can't consider 'suburbia' without reflecting on the inner city.
Simply can't.
And while we can all debate at length who has best captured the 'suburb' in a song, no-one has ever captured Inner City Life quite as gloriously as Goldie.......
The Radio smow al Suburbia playlist and all Radio smow playlists can be found on the smowonline Spotify page.
Suburbia. Living the American Dream has now ended in Vienna, and in Barcelona, but may pop-up somewhere else real soon. Keep an eye on local press for details.... [If you're not seeing a playlist here, there's an embedding problem... sorry... here is your path to the Radio smow al Suburbia playlist]
