Clean blogging under difficult circumstances: in search of Owen Hatherley on music

In Owen Hatherley's Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances, the 2021 Verso compendium of his writing, he says that "music is the art form most important to me that I write about least". Hmm, why not write about it more, then? No, I guess this is because Hatherley has made a name for himself writing trenchant books on architecture, books I've read and thoroughly enjoyed even if, in truth, quite a lot of the architectural reference points are lost on me. Walter Gropius, who he, as Private Eye might say. But I reckon books like A Guide To The New Ruins of Great Britain and A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain still work for the architecturally illiterate (though architecturally curious), especially if - like me - you have a basic sympathy with modernist architecture and the socialist, egalitarian or even utopian impulses behind some of it. Yeah man, give me more concrete, steel and glass and to hell with your Victorian houses. So, in an alternative universe Hatherley might have been a sort of "high-value" music writer - a Wire staffer, a new Simon Reynolds or Jon Savage, or another music-adjacent cultural-political maven like Mark Fisher, Hatherley's big inspiration (there's a long Fisher appreciation in Clean Living). 

Anyway, having just read the book I've gathered together a few of the music bits and pieces from Clean Living, sliced and diced them in my own inimitable (unfair?) style, and er, here they are:

*The book's 2007 essay on Black Box Recorder's England Made Me album is, in my opinion, pretty wide of the mark. BBR's stuff is, I guess, an acquired taste. To me it's OK in a post-Flying Lizards, "postmodern pop" kind of way, but hardly worldbeating and actually rather tiresome on repeated listens. With Luke Haines' music, I've always thought the Auteurs' mannered-indie sound was preferable, especially if it didn't veer too far into Suede territory. Hatherley seems to think something like BBR's cold-as-ice cover of Althea & Donna's mighty Uptown Top Ranking is noteworthy ("what to make of it", he says), yet to me it's just reheated Flying Lizards plus basic trip hop. One person on YouTube says it's "destroyed jah music", which I kind of like. Yeah, they have, intentionally, but was it worth it?   

*In another ill-advised (imo) foray into the realms of pop music eulogy, Clean Living has a three-page tribute to the Pet Shop Boys. Evidently, the PSB "combine condensed critiques of capitalism with bitter love songs". God, Owen, I think you need to sit down on this one (a little joke there, recalling Hatherley's old blog, sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy). Nope, I've never rated the PSB's lukewarm sub-New Order stuff, possibly because of over-exposure to the deeply-irritating West End Girls during my mid-80s record shop assistant days. And yes, I suppose I'm just diving into subjective opinion-mongering here (they're no good because I say so), and ... well, so be it. Anyway, Hatherley's appreciation seems to rest very largely on a fairly literal reading of the PSB's lyrics and their cool pose ("their synthetic ironies") which I think is over-indulgent and overlooks the basic reality of the band. A few pointed lyrics aside, aren't they just a straightforward pop juggernaut, albeit a pop juggernaut which likes to dabble in a little mild politicking and theorising? And musically, aren't they a sort of blanded-out The Beloved? 

*After those two (low-key) dissings, I can now - uncharacteristically?! - switch to a more positive mode when it comes to Clean Living's piece on Kraftwerk (originally a 2020 London Review of Books blog). In this, a response to Florian Schneider's death, Hatherley rather nicely leans into some of his architecture know-how to point out how Schneider was the son of "one of the leading West German architects of the 1960s", that Kraftwerk very consciously referenced some of the grand-scale architectural movements of the 1920s and 30s, and that they were "retro-futurist from the start". Yeah, I'll go with that. And he also seems to get things right by quoting Kodwo Eshun's observation that "Kraftwerk are to techno what Muddy Waters is to the Rolling Stones - the authentic, the origin, the real". Yep, the ultra-white, super-stiff (in fact immobile) machine men of Kraftwerk rocked the party in the Bronx and in downtown Chicago. Amazing, but nevertheless true.    

Other stuff? Well, music-wise that's more or less it in Clean Living. There's a quick reference to The Fall's Hex Enduction Hour as a "bizarre and endlessly complex" work of "modernist art" (agreed, and it's quite superlatively good to boot), while likewise post-punk, glam and jungle are all categorised as forms of "modernism". And as such, says Hatherley, they undermine any literary theory-type view that modernist art was elitist "obfuscation" (though perhaps it was as literature?). Yes, there's a run-through of Mark Fisher's analysis (over-analysis?) of Gwen Guthrie's Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But The Rent (another irritating pop tune from my record shop days), and a fleeting mention of Orchestral Maneouvres In The Dark's song Stanlow, but - as Hatherley has already confessed in his introduction - Clean Living doesn't go very big on music. Which, despite my quibbles with what is included on music, is still a bit of a shame. That's because, ever since I first stumbled on his Sit Down Man blog in the 2000s, I've enormously enjoyed Hatherley's writing. It could even be, at some level, one of the reasons (fwiw) I started Niluccio on noise in 2010 - that, and a horribly misguided idea that my thoughts on music were worth writing about (ahem). Actually, Clean Living's introduction has various pretty interesting things to say about the fine art of blogging, including the rather worrying claim that it has now "mostly disappeared" (no, say it isn't true!). Hatherley also remarks on how his early blogging had been a means of expiating "all kinds of resentments", which definitely sounds about right to me. What else would allow you to vent this way? Pet Shop Boys? Rubbish! Etc. Hatherley says that his early blogging - along with contemporaries like Mark Fisher at k-punk, Simon Reynolds at blissblog, and others like Woebot and Freaky Trigger - was also an attempt to try to "recreate some of the pop-modernist culture of a relentlessly dumbed-down music press". No doubt it was; with mine, it was very likely mere vanity plus a need to write out some lists. Anyway, though I don't always agree with his scattered remarks on music - while (shamefully) I haven't read his monograph on Pulp (they were never, massively, my kind of band) - I'd still happily read anything Hatherley has to say on the topic. And if he sticks to architecture, that's also fine with me. In fact, come to think of it, there's one topic that's crying out for the Hatherley treatment: the use of meanwhile spaces for cultural production, not least the hosting of music events. Come on, Owen, where's the Verso book on this?