Grim Britannia

[version]

i keep fantasising about squatting the shard.

Sounds uncomfortable.

 

[version]

Where's that London can die thread. Anything is possible

if New York can die so can London

do you ever worry about this? london has had a great run. but from afar i cant help worrying that its sputtering to a halt. im not sur its about to go as shit as new york but it suffers from a lot of th same problems id imagine. genuflecting to a mythos, stupid rents, wowsers, overezalous...

dissensus.com

 

[version]

Is Drill 'Grim Britannia'?

 

[luka]

Is Drill 'Grim Britannia'?

absolutely not. it's nothing if not glamourous

 

[version]

The videos look glamorous, but is it actually glamorous? The content certainly isn't.

 

[luka]

there's plenty of grim outside London but as Mr Eden points out the city has been kept clean and free of graffiti to increase its attractiveness to international business, banks, mostly.

 

[version]

It's still grim up north.

 

[luka]

The videos look glamorous, but is it actually glamorous? The content certainly isn't.

the lifestyle behind it is anything but. but it is transmuted into something glamourous by the music and the associated visuals. thats the magic of art.

 

[version]

Are Bad Boy Chiller Crew 'Grim Britannia'?

 

[luka]

Are Bad Boy Chiller Crew 'Grim Britannia'?

i agree with the initial thesis. that grim was grimmer than we can imagine and we havent seen its like again.

 

[luka]

it's washyourhands continually punching a mentally ill man in the face at a bus stop. it's bricks through windows of a Pakistani family home in Blackburn. it's football hooligans making everyone around them totally miserable. it's British soldiers in Belfast oppressing Shiels' relatives. it's Gary Glitter on TOTP. it's all a little before my time.

 

[version]

Sleaford Mods seem to tap into it a little. I get the impression the Red Riding films have it too, but I've never seen them.

 

[luka]

but with Sleaford Mods its a Face magazine simulation isn't it. it's a self aware fashion idol recreation for the cameras.

 

[version]

10 Rillington Place. The grimmest of the grim.

 

[luka]

there's more than enough grimness around in this country. there's terrible poverty, appalling violence, a resurgence in racism and so on and so forth but it's not '70s grimness. it's different.

 

[luka]

as the lads say, '70s London was still visibly scarred by bomb damage

 

[luka]

those vacant lots are now luxury apartments and offices. it took decades to fill in the gaps but the gaps have finally been filled in.

 

[luka]

just in time for coronavirus to turn it all into a ghost town of abandoned office blocks and boarded up shops and resturaunts

 

[craner]

You can never go back to the grimness of that time, I don't think; not even the early 80s which I can just about remember. It's because we have so much stuff to play with and so many images to look at now. I look at photos of my parents houses from the 70s and early 80s, and there is hardly anything in them.

 

[luka]

You can never go back to the grimness of that time, I don't think; not even the early 80s which I can just about remember. It's because we have so much stuff to play with and so many images to look at now. I look at photos of my parents houses from the 70s and early 80s, and there is hardly anything in them.

when my parents lived on the Isle of Dogs in the '70s there was one bus in and one bus out. It really was an island. I heavily relate free improv to this time. I think of it's aesthetics in the same way I think of my dad scouring the riverbanks for driftwood and other materials to build sheds on his allotments with. there's a real romance to it as well as the grimness.