By The Landlord
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city ..." – Charles Dickens, Bleak House
“Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind. It really is a trip inside the collective psyche of a compacted group of people.” – David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries
“By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.” ― Socrates
“The advantage of a big city, move on a few meters and you find solitude again.” ― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.” ― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
“Cities are humans' shoddy attempts at making ecosystems.” – Elliot Connor, Human Nature: How to be a Better Animal
“New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.” – Joan Didion
“No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.” – Cyril Connolly
“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.” ― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
“A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.” – Patrick Geddes
“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.” – Christopher Morley
There goes the neighbourhood.
I saw it on the morning train.
It whizzes by as I sit still,
Busies itself, it’s changed again.
What happened to that river view?
That sweaty, rickety music venue?
That little shop with shoes and hats?
It’s all replaced by luxury flats.
And there goes that neighbourhood.
I’d live there too, if I could.
Beyond my means, I’m afraid –
To cope with all the changes made.
So where does this theme belong?
To capture living space in song?
Details huge, yet very small
And all about the urban sprawl.
Architects may plan and plot
About what’s needed, and is not,
But from concrete, mall to steeple,
The biggest building blocks are people.
Urban means where humans live
And all about what that might give –
Vibrant life? Prefab to skylab?
Or lonely boredom, town-plan drab.
Ideal or nightmare? Urban sprawl
Urban’s often not spectacular,
More often corner shop vernacular,
So songs that capture hum-drum times
Will fit in this week’s lyric rhymes.
It often starts off with a trickle –
River, track, thatch, then brick will
Build anticipation,
A copy-paste to conurbation.
Yes here goes the neighbourhood
They overdid the chop of firewood,
Battles, swords and shields.
I remember when it was all fields.
Yes there goes the neighbourhood.
Now grubbing with pans, Dakota’s Deadwood.
Muddy streets, bar-whorehouse plumbing,
Gold in hills? More men are coming.
Deadwood. Drama, like many towns, built on the quest for gold with booze and sex on the side.
There goes the neighbourhood –
Yummy-mummy pram-push parenthood
Where once hood gangs, stood gin-casinos
Al Capone to babyccinos.
There goes the neighbourhood
It’s all about a livelihood,
Cut-throat streets and Hell’s Kitchen
Now boutique shops and curtain twitching.
Urban can mean spread and spillage
Cities contain many a village,
Bungalow to hall, skyscrapers tall,
This theme might throw up big or small.
Urban maps our modern life
Despite its constant stress and strife,
Despite the noise and hustle-bustle
We seem to seek out crowds and hassle,
Some folks never leave, just manage
With their local shit-shop garage,
But urban life has many forms,
Nothing is standard, there’s no norms.
Shanghai to Mumbai, Beijing, Osaka,
Dhaka, Chongqing, Lima, Jakarta,
Manila, Kolkata, Delhi, São Paulo,
Lagos to New York, Rio to Cairo.
Mexico City, Moscow, Kinshasa,
Tianjin, Guangzhou, LA to Nagoya,
Bogata, Istanbul, Paris to Lahore,
London to Tehran, Chennai, or Bangalore.
Hong Kong
Wherever your setting, where people may flow,
The biggest urban sprawl is in modern Toyko,
But despite all the noise and madness micro-macro,
There’s harmony to show in the city’s metro,
Where music plays a part from station to station,
A product of the ethos of this tidy, busy nation.
Composer Minoru Mukaiya’s musical commune
Has given every stop a gentle little tune:
You might touch on a megacity
Choked-up smoke, to the gorgeously pretty,
High-spec utopia, metropolis?
To scrubland relic – now shit, brick, and piss.
Architect’s ego made its phallic landmark?
Now dealer’s den, or dogging carpark.
Big town planning with pricey ekistics?
Becoming the place for a shady fix.
Urban’s ugly as well as the beautiful,
Let’s capture both, earful and eyeful,
Taxi Driver’s Herrmann to sci-fi’s Philip Dick,
Visions future-past, the sleazy to the slick.
Bladerunner
So there goes the neighbourhood
Someone’s childhood to adulthood.
There goes the neighbourhood
Now blossoming with cherrywood.
There goes the neighbourhood
Who are they now in my hood?
There goes the neighbourhood.
It’s changing and misunderstood.
Urban’s normal, urban’s strange,
Whoever comes, there’s always change,
Whatever form, right or wrong
It’s time to capture all in song.
Deadline? Monday at 11pm in UK
DiscoMonster’s here to capture this big play!
So place your songs in comments - that’s the goal,
Building our own city on playlist rock’n’roll.
Classic Brutalism in West London
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