Recommendations of the Editorial team
The 80s begin in cold. The utopias of the sixties and seventies are used up, the warmth of the social movements has evaporated, there are feelings of isolation and isolation. In western Germany, the “ice age” and the collapsing new buildings “Outside is hostile”, in Great Britain, punk announces from the end of the history and the arrival of the latest court: “There’s no future for you and me.”
But the blackest, hardest, most hopeless music of this time play Joy Division from Manchester. They let the time freeze. Your singer, Ian Curtis, paints crystal pictures of an introspection that does not become a home.
His texts deal with self -hatred, despair and shame, from the agonizing view of a world without possibilities. Against the political pessimism of the punks, Curtis – apparently traditionally – tells of the grief of the individual. However, this subjectivity also acts on the death of the subject.
Joy Division and the great seriousness
Ian Curtis never speaks the language of romance. His desperation lacks every sweetness, every operetta -like unprecedented, how the punk rockers of those years tend to carry him – but also the brightness of self -overestimation in which pop music generally relativizes their melancholy, to temporarily confuse. At Joy Division, nothing passes.
The pictures you paint in your music are forever – “Eternal”, the title of a song on her second album, “Closer” from 1980. The baritone in which Ian Curtis sings seems without light, without the tiniest spark of vitality.
“Closer”, like “Unknown Pleasures”, is produced, the band’s debut from the previous year, from Martin Hannett, a brilliant sound builder who has copied his techniques at the Dub Reggae. At King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, he learned the use of the Echo chamber and the endlessly delayed Hall. But nothing is lulled or carved here.
Hannett’s Echo is plastic and transcendental: from the fading of things, he builds huge rooms, cathedrals, in which the voices, the fates appear even smaller and more lonely. He mixes the guitar and bass far into the background until only the rhythmic scaffold remains and Curtis’ singing. Like a star from an endless distance, it penetrates through a rushing ether.
In May 1980, shortly before the band’s first US tour, Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen. “Closer” appears posthumously a month later and shows a Pietà on the cover: Maria before the died Jesus.
“This is the crisis i knew had to come/ destroying the balance i’d kept,” says the song “Passover”, Pessach. “Turning around to the next set of lives/ Wondering What Will Come Next.” There is the crisis, I knew she was coming/ she robs me the balance/ I turn to the next born/ what will happen, I don’t know.
The rhythm group of Joy Division will soon be available again. Under the name New Order, she gives the dance and future-oriented youth of the 1980s some of her most life-affirming hits.