Rock and roll’s escapist ethos could not take root in Britain’s cramped industrial landscapes

Evidence

Smith’s r and r citations functioned differently, precisely as a means of reinforcing his Englishness and his own ambivalent attitude towards it. The rockabilly references are almost like “What If?” exercises. What if rock and roll had emerged from the industrial heartlands of England rather than the Mississippi Delta? The rockabilly on “Container Drivers” or “Fiery Jack” is slowed by meat pies and gravy, its dreams of escape fatally poisoned by pints of bitter and cups of greasy spoon tea. It is rock and roll as Working Men’s Club cabaret, performed by a failed Gene Vincent imitator in Prestwich. The “What if?” speculations fail. Rock and roll needed the endless open highways; it could never have begun in Britain’s snarled up ring roads and claustrophobic conurbations. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1141

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is it true that a music’s genre conditions are spatial-geographic, or does this understate how other industrial musics (punk, rave) thrived in the same British geography through different escapes?
• SEED: An essay comparing what forms of musical escape different geographies enable — open-road American mythos vs. British indoor/collective rave euphoria vs. Jamaican sound-system mobility.