It just lurches to the end, with Ian Curtis solemnly lighting the path without ever sounding like he has much say in it.You might have noticed that there’s a new(ish) binge-watch in town-Netflix’s moving young-adult drama 13 Reasons Why. This music doesn’t really begin or middle. At least Joy Division had death as a nucleus: The funereal album cover for Closer, the rough-edged synths, in the form of wobbly strings on “Decades” or shrill horns on “Isolation”, the legend of the dead singer already reaching US shores before Unknown Pleasures did. It’s hard to know what Wire were on about, for instance, or Pere Ubu. But oftentimes, post-punk sounded like it advanced beyond expression itself. Maybe they called this “post”-punk because it had advanced beyond exploding. It’s very hard to hear him and feel there’s a light at the end of this. The music intensifies around him and he just draws further inward. He sits with his pain and never raises his voice to it. It’s bad for catharsis Curtis never breaks out. That “control” is a blessing for their tunes, anchoring every atmospheric tic to a repeating morse code of two-note bass or a cavernous, simplistic snare pattern. I do not recommend putting on Joy Division to see if that’s the same activity it always was. Yet, it’s pretty tempting to wake up one day and pretend things are normal again to see if it’s true. It’s self-loathing, in a way, and completely morally correct. Somehow, the smartest and most compassionate of us have resigned ourselves to, yes, isolation. “This treatment takes too long.” Everything in 2020 is taking too long, and yet only the most stupid and selfish citizens are clamoring to end the wait. Like Ian Curtis, many of us cannot be with the ones we love. No two depressions are created alike, and now that coronavirus has turned us all into dwelling hobbits, everyone’s dealing with their own private hell: boredom, malaise, house arrest. What hasn’t really been done before is charting the effects of mass isolation on this band. Upside down, inside-out, backwards and forwards, the world knows its Ian Curtis. This has all been told, televised, documented, reissued, tribute album’d, and, in the case of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, rearranged for Broken Social Scene in 3/4 time. The “control” that Ian sought didn’t have to be his own. Deborah Curtis, the one who was set to divorce him before Ian plotted a greater loss, has become his historian. The tortured and despondent epileptic just needed to know where to fall. Watch Control or 24 Hour Party People and you’ll see a man who lets others create the gravity for him. You can process his acutely Jim Morrison-inflected quaver as a distancing device from his excruciating lyrics or his band’s world-class rhythm section as the very model of “control” he sought to ground his art, life, anything. Curtis left behind so little music that you can pack away his whole history in an afternoon: Debut Unknown Pleasures, swan song Closer, and intermittent singles gathered on the second-best compilation named Substance. I’m poly Ian’s story hurts.īut Joy Division’s career was short and remarkable enough to earn more than one film, so most any interested party knows all this. He couldn’t reconcile his marriage to Deborah Curtis with the infatuation that grew for Belgian journalist Annik Honoré. Another is “Pray to God, make it quick, watch him fall.” Oh, and his gravestone reads “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. “A legacy so far removed/ One day will be improved” was one couplet the married father who took his life at 23 sang. Either way, this anguish was as sincere as its expression was austere.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |