"To Create the Sound of a Council Estate Singing Its Heart Out"

"Beyond all the noise about chart battles, sibling rivalry and Cool Britannia, the Oasis narrative was such a powerful one because it pointed to how a valuable new form of 'oceanic feeling'–Sigmund Freud's term for an all-embracing mass consciousness–might emerge in Britain in the dying days of the 20th century. For all its broadness and frequent crudeness, the collective mood that Oasis inspired was at heart an inclusive one, based on the desire to advocate a more demotic, more democratic way of national being, rooted in the lived reality of working-class experience."

Alex Niven at The Guardian reacts to the Oasis reunion.

"Anti-Lincoln Obsession"

"The great stumbling-block issue for the Guardian and many other liberals was the right to self-determination. The paper believed that the south had the right to secede and to establish an independent state. It suspected that it would succeed. It thought, as Gladstone did, that this might hasten the end of slavery–and it may have been right, since no slave society, including Cuba and Brazil, survived into the 20th century. Above all, though, the paper wanted to be consistent. It had supported independence for the Slavs, the Hungarians, the Italians and the Egyptians–so why not for the Confederates, too?"

In a 2011 article, Martin Kettle reviews the positions taken in The Guardian during the U.S. Civil War.

What the World Was Waiting For

"Madchester made a rousing backdrop for those of us growing up in the north-west. That its heroes were not perfectly coiffed popstars or smouldering American rockers, but looked like every lad you had ever known, only enhanced the sense of proximity. I recall watching a report on the local news–vox pops with northern teenagers, an interview with the founder of Joe Bloggs jeans, a light-hearted exploration of the baggy scene–and feeling a new allegiance to my scruffy, overlooked part of Britain."

Laura Barton at The Guardian remembers the Stone Roses, thirty years after the release of their debut album.

"Channeling Kafka, Burroughs, Munch, the 20th Century"

"We're all post-punk. Punk happened, and then—at some point—we did. For bands in the era of Joy Division, it meant music that sounded like ideas. Tony Wilson, trickster-broadcaster and high theorist of the Manchester Geist, signed them to his new label, Factory. 'The degraded city was part of Joy Division’s life,' said Wilson. 'The idea of the city is a theme that runs through this whole thing, Manchester being the archetypal modern city.' Martin Hannett became their producer—dimensional slippage was his fixation, the little blips and space-smears and echoes of otherness with which he would open up the Joy Division sound."

James Parker at The Atlantic reviews Jon Savage's This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else.

There Is No Love in This World Anymore

"'I'm not interested in being able to play. A musician is like another brand of entertainer.
"'There are plenty of musicians that I enjoy watching that are entertainers. But I wouldn't want to be that, because the thing with an entertainer is that there is always that dishonesty, which is what punk tried to get rid of.
"'It was like, you're not pretending to be something you are not. You are just what you are. Punk is an art of action. It's about deciding to do something and then going out and doing it.'"

Kevin Rawlinson at The Guardian reports the death of Pete Shelley.

And Jason Heller at NPR writes an appreciation.

As does Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork.

"Songs, Melodies, Attitude, and a Kind of Irreverence"

"The Gallaghers' mother, Peggy, worked in a school and a biscuit factory. Their father, who left when Noel was a teenager, was alcoholic and abusive. Noel has said his father effectively beat the talent into him ('A good line, that one, isn't it? Yeah').
"'What'd you mean?' Mason asked.
"'It gave me the drive to make something of myself. I think I definitely withdrew into myself, into my own world, as a reaction to that. And the guitar, that thing, became my world, you know what I mean? I've never written a song about it, right? Which is fascinating.'
"'Why do you think that is?'
"'I don't know! Well, I've never been to see a therapist. Until today!'"

Anthony Mason on CBS Sunday Morning interviews Noel Gallagher.

The Fabric of Our Lives

"If there is an ancestral home for the Industrial Revolution, it's Manchester, England, where the first factories were built. Cotton propelled the factory's emergence, created after British inventors found a way to spin slave-grown cotton into yarn more swiftly. The man who invented the mechanized cotton mill at the center of these new factories was Samuel Greg, the prototypical genius-inventor of capitalist lore. By tying Greg’s success to slave-grown cotton and the ghastly conditions of factory workers, Beckert recasts him in a garish new light. Women and children comprised the vast majority of these first factory workers, all of them expected to work 14-hour days and huddled into barracks at night. If we celebrate Greg as a genius, Beckert implies, we must also accept that he was utterly dependent on the most coercive labor systems imaginable."


Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Sven Berkett's Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

No Love Lost

"Curtis's great lyrical achievement was to capture the underlying reality of a society in turmoil, and to make it both universal and personal. Distilled emotion is the essence of pop music and, just as Joy Division are perfectly poised between white light and dark despair, so Curtis's lyrics oscillate between hopelessness and the possibility, if not need, for human connection. At bottom is the fear of losing the ability to feel."


In a 2008 Guardian article, Jon Savage explores Ian Curtis's literary influences.

Devious, Truculent, and Unreliable

"For its first 150 pages, Autobiography comes close to being a triumph. 'Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big,' he writes, and off we go–into the Irish diaspora in the inner-city Manchester of the 1960s, where packs of boys playfully stone rats to death, and 'no one we know is on the electoral roll'. In some of the writing, you can almost taste his environment: 'Nannie bricks together the traditional Christmas for all to gather and disagree … Rita now works at Seventh Avenue in Piccadilly and buys expensive Planters cashew nuts. Mary works at a Granada showroom, but is ready to leave it all behind.' And when pop music enters the story, he excels. Before the Smiths, Morrissey fleetingly wrote reviews for the long-lost music weekly Record Mirror under the name Sheridan Whiteside, and his talent for music writing is obvious. By the late 60s, he is marvelling at hit singles by the Love Affair, the Foundations and the Small Faces; in 1972, as with so many thousands, he marvels at David Bowie miming to Starman on an ITV pop show called Lift Off With Ayshea. 'It seemed to me that it was only in British pop music that almost anything could happen,' he writes, which is spot on."

John Harris in The Guardian reviews Morrissey's Autobiography.