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Of Popular Spaces: Northern Heterotopias, Morrissey and the Manchester Britpop Scene

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Of Popular Spaces: Northern Heterotopias, Morrissey and the Manchester Britpop Scene Of Popular Spaces: Northern Heterotopias, Morrissey and the Manchester Britpop Scene Ralph Pordzik Abstract: This essay traces the development of a northern sub-cultural scene in Great Britain since the late 1970s, proceeding on the assumption that it formed to punctuate the influence of the London-based music industry and that it sought to make an ideo- logical statement about regional forms of identity. The ‘Northern’ as represented in musical history will be regarded as a heterotopia of culturally interrelated sites, i.e. a space in which divergent attitudes interact across a wide range of different meaning- systems. The discussion focuses mainly on the lyrics of former Smiths front man Mor- rissey, one of the most widely reviewed sub-cultural icons in the history of Britpop. Some of his work as a writer will be analysed with special respect to the influence of Shelagh Delaney’s kitchen-sink drama A Taste of Honey (1958) and other literary pre-texts, showing how the writing epitomises the overlaying of individual messages with a broad variety of meaning-bearing patterns adapted from different realms of creative thought. Also, what comes in for inquiry in these media is the formative in- fluence of a distinct type of ‘northern female’ as represented in British TV soaps such as Coronation Street. In the course of the essay, the deconstruction of gendered iden- tities with respect to a particularly northern ‘way of life’ will thus be elucidated, along with the routines of local populations and the post-punk refashioning of the in- dustrial and factory image in poetry, film and music. Key names and concepts: Michel Foucault - Smiths - Morrissey - Shelagh Delaney - Oscar Wilde; Britpop - Coronation Street - Heterotopia - Subculture - Music Scene - Northern Iconography - Gender - Northern Female - Punk Movement - Thatcherism. 326 Ralph Pordzik 1. Going Down in (Northern) Musical History I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving England is mine and it owes me a living.1 In this essay, I am tracing the emergence and development of a north- ern sub-cultural scene in Great Britain since the late 1970s, proceeding on the assumption that it originally formed to challenge and punctuate the economic influence of the London-based music industry and that it sought to make a valid ideological statement about regional forms of northern identity. Since then different bands and musicians have formed a loose, informal network of like-minded artists in order to mark themselves off from the ‘dominant centre’ of British national culture, their main objective being that of challenging accepted forms of media representation and reformulating the position and future role of the North in contemporary England. To assess the significance of the North as a distinct region within the increasingly widening boundaries of a national musical cul- ture (see Viol 2000: 81) is to set oneself no easy task. In fact, it means to focus on the question of how different music genres, youth cultures and life-styles have impinged upon attitudes towards the North and its place within already existing notions of ‘Englishness’.2 Recent work in the area of British Cultural Studies has shown that the postulation of fixed and self-centred cultural or regional identities is not accept- able any longer; therefore, I shall use as a point of departure for fur- ther discussion French philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of het- erotopias as culturally and socially related spaces in which local sites mix with wider political patterns or modes of life and ideological posi- tions are placed or delineated in a way which makes them “irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (Foucault 1998: 239). The ‘Northern’ as represented in musical his- tory will be regarded as such a heterotopia of culturally interrelated sites, as an ideologically flexible and undesignated space in which the most widely divergent attitudes interact across a wide range of differ- 1 “Still Ill” (Smiths 1984b). 2 For notions of the term in the context of recent cultural and national debates see Lunn (1996), Bennett (1998), Hall (1996), Rawnsley (2000) and Russell (2004). .
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