Real Life Rock Top Ten – July/August 2012

(1) Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah (Verso). From 2006 through 2009, Ford produced the issues of the fanzine collected here: hundreds of pages of text, maps, bland drawings of vague faces, and cumulatively riveting photos of architectural detritus—roads, graffiti, housing blocks, filthy courtyards, storefronts, overgrown building sites, almost all of them utterly depopulated—chronicling a long walk through the back alleys and abandoned patches of a London remade through Thatcherist and New Labour gentrification and the evictions and new constructions of the looming 2012 Olympics. Read straight through, Ford’s work is the most convincing follow-through there is on the project of poetic urban-renewal inaugurated by the situationists Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, and Michèle Bernstein. In the early ’50s, they and a few other young layabouts began an exploration of Paris as a city that ran according to its own backward-forward-spinning clock, where a drift down the streets might so scramble time that 1848 would exert a stronger spiritual gravity than 1954. In places Ford echoes Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her slideshow of sex and death in bohemian New York in the 1980s, and the cityscape in Andrea Arnold’s 2006 film Red Road, where in a decaying Glasgow foxes dart around the base of apartment buildings that are corroding from the inside, almost as strongly. On any given page, Thomas De Quincey, from his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, might be holding Ford’s hand: “I could almost have believed, at times that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.”

Number by number, Savage Messiah is a delirious, doomstruck celebration of squats, riots, vandalism, isolation, alcohol, and sex with strangers, all on the terrain of a half-historical, half-imaginary city that the people who Ford follows, herself at the center, can in moments believe they built themselves, and can tear down as they choose. The past is a shadow, an angel, a demon: most of what Ford recounts seems to be taking place in the ’70s or the ’80s or the ’90s, with the first decade of the twenty-first century a kind of slag-heap of time—of boredom, enervation, despair, and hate—that people are trying to burrow out from under. “1973, 1974, 1981, 1990, 2013,” she chants on one page. “Always a return. A Mirror touch. A different way out.” “Queen’s Crescent is the nexus of knife crime, a flashing matrix of Sheffield steel,” Ford writes in Savage Messiah #6, “…suspended somewhere between 1968 and 1981, and I sense my darling there,...