Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?

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Oh, we're talking about Radiohead now. F that.

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:22 (twenty-one years ago)

curtisss: there are more notes in the bass part than in the vocal during the hook

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:23 (twenty-one years ago)

Hooky!

― Bimble (bimble), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:40 (twenty-one years ago)

The confluence of voice, synth and bass on the chorus is EXACTLY what ameks that song genius!

― Dan Perry '08 (Dan Perry), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:41 (twenty-one years ago)

i agree. they are following the same general movement, but at paces different enough to keep things interesting. note how the bass drags behind the vocal. i believe the synth line drags even farther behind.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:47 (twenty-one years ago)

i'm actually trying to imagine in my head what the chorus would sound like if all the parts were *really* the same.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:48 (twenty-one years ago)

"love will tear us apart (sesame street hootenanny mix)"

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:49 (twenty-one years ago)

i should note again that they are playing different numbers of notes. the bass is i think playing more notes b/t intervals yes? and while the synth line is similar to the vocal line, it drags behind *and* has fewer rests--each chord follows the other w/little pause. the result is rhythmically and otherwise involving. i hope i am using the right terminology and am making sense.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:50 (twenty-one years ago)

i mean i guess the melody of this song is pretty uninteresting as a melody--it's not very mobile. but it doesn't have to me, because the textures of the song are so involving! i think of this as a defining quality of joy division.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:56 (twenty-one years ago)

i mean the vocal melody.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:56 (twenty-one years ago)

am-ek (v.): To spontaneously turn into a solid gold burrito that gives blowjobs.

― Dan Perry '08 (Dan Perry), Sunday, 19 September 2004 02:57 (twenty-one years ago)

radiohead did that song?
-- amateur!!!st (---...), September 19th, 2004.

yeah they also did the theme song for 'one day at a time' but the network thought it was too 'peppy'.

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Sunday, 19 September 2004 03:01 (twenty-one years ago)

dan did my description make any sense?

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 03:03 (twenty-one years ago)

Also, the bridge in the middle (which is repeated at the end) adds some rhythmic variability. There's only one chord being played during those sections, too, so it's sonically quite separate from the verses and chorus as well.

― MindInRewind (Barry Bruner), Sunday, 19 September 2004 03:17 (twenty-one years ago)

also IIRC that synth plays the chorus' vocal melody during the verses. so when the vocal melody "comes home" to the synth line as it were, it's very cathartic and satisfying.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:10 (twenty-one years ago)

how's your "love will tear us apart" now, curtisss?

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:10 (twenty-one years ago)

what a beautiful song

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:12 (twenty-one years ago)

i always had this sense from the record, that the vocalist and the other instrumentalists were playing the same song, but in different rooms, responding not to each other directly but to each other's distant reverberations.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:17 (twenty-one years ago)

the part where it changes keys toward the end is amazing (at 2:57 on the cd i have)

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:18 (twenty-one years ago)

i have never really had a clear idea what i.c. is singing about, btw. sounds kinda sad

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:21 (twenty-one years ago)

I think it kind of depends on the droning d-note on the bassline (I dunno if it's even there or if it's just kind of implicit in my mind when I hear it) that makes it feel anchored to the same chord. I saw them do it live and Sumner was playing major chords on a guitar, like D-B-G-A or something, and it fucked the whole thing up.

The synths that come in on the verses make it.

― Michael Philip Philip Philip Annoyman (Ferg), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:25 (twenty-one years ago)

"a cold blue laser light of power"??

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:31 (twenty-one years ago)

Yup. Something so focused, so completely locked in and harrowing...but not something sprawling and rampaging, Hannett's production keeps it from being so. Ever since I've first heard the song the color it calls up in my mind is blue, a cold blue.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:41 (twenty-one years ago)

uh them = New Order

― Michael Philip Philip Philip Annoyman (Ferg), Sunday, 19 September 2004 04:43 (twenty-one years ago)

ned, your comment and the turn this thread has taken in the last few hours got me thinking about the formalist criticism question again. now i don't mean to single you out cos i do it too (see robert wyatt thread) but the blue-laser thing the kind of description that i think is ultimately i kind of critical dead end (i mean, it can be evocative and useful to a point, but it's sort of lack walking up to the gates of the taj mahal and forgetting where you put the keys), and to which i would prefer some kind of attempt at breaking down the stylistic features of the song such that one's involvement in it can be explained somehow/to some extent.

i'm almost completely musicially illiterate, so i don't think my efforts to explain how "love will tear us apart" works contributed very much to anyone's understanding of the song. so i'm not sure i should posit my own posts as any kind of positive example. but i know that "love will tear us apart" has always struck me as a very involving song (such that i will often listen to it several times in a row). yet most criticism about it tends to adopt very very vague impressionistic, almost mystical language to explain its power and the charms of joy division in general. but i think that's dodging the real "problem." to quote tim on the "formalist criticism" thread, from one of my favorite posts ever made on ilm:

How does a given piece of music "cast a spell" over us? Too much non-formal music resorts to quasi-mythic terminology at that point, but the spell in question is really a piece of elaborate charlatanism, a confluence of sonic tactics which, in the mind or the body of the listener, appears to be something more than a series of discrete sounds. What is it that is allowing to a piece of music to do this to us (both at a "textual" and contextual level)?

to be fair i think your comment falls somewhere a little bit closer on the spectrum to stylistic description than tim's "quasi-mythic terminology." but it doesn't really help me *hear* "transmission." i find a lot of criticism like that. (including my own informal criticism.)

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 05:03 (twenty-one years ago)

another tim quote, even more to the point perhaps:

You can't separate the two things. The tightness of the groove in James Brown or whatever is a concrete phenomenon that can be measured and analyzed. The "spell" is not a metaphysical thing; it's made up of real components

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 05:04 (twenty-one years ago)

Is it a grayish blue? I have a vinyl copy of Substance, so I hear "Transmission" as being gray partly because Substance has a gray cover. (The green on the cover is like the green of LED lights.)

That said, there's something about JD's sound that lends itself to being heard as gray or grayish blue (as opposed to, say, purple or pink). I'm not sure why, offhand, one hears the guitar and bass sounds this way. Perhaps the "starkness" of the production makes the listener feel like he or she is in some large, urban space. There's also the robotic character of the music. Ian Curtis' voice is very robotic on that track. And robots, of course, are gray (or silver).

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 19 September 2004 05:19 (twenty-one years ago)

The Still album cover was gray, too, wasn't it?

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 19 September 2004 05:21 (twenty-one years ago)

yeah i associate them with gray, but a dark metallic gray

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 19 September 2004 05:29 (twenty-one years ago)

Do you associate them more with black when you listen to Unknown Pleasures, or white when you listen to Closer?

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 19 September 2004 05:48 (twenty-one years ago)

haha I wz thinking about the goth question above last night and I wz gonna say they are grey to me not black but Ian Curtis suicide made the music darker.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Sunday, 19 September 2004 08:44 (twenty-one years ago)

Am, I think you're pushing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction here. I was trying to describe a Dizzee Rascal song to Ned and came up with the phrase "it's the one with the sped-up Kanye beat grafted onto the navel of a supermodel" (ie, it's a deeply sexy, sensual-sounding soul loop that's been sped up so the vocals are chipmunked) and Ned knew instantly which track I was talking about. The evocative can have just as much power and meaning as breaking down the components and doing a theoretical analysis (and 7 times out of 10 it will be more powerful and meaningful because most people aren't interested in breaking down a piece of music to understand WHY certain sonic tricks and chord progressions produce certain emotional responses).

― Dan Perry '08 (Dan Perry), Sunday, 19 September 2004 11:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Obvious point alert, but I think there's room for both approaches in the space of the same review. I don't like reviews that operate exclusively in the realm of vague-but-pretty-sounding metaphors, but nor do I like exclusively technical ones - oddly both extremes are most annoying in dance music reviews, but maybe that's just because I feel "close" to the reviewer's tricks. I don't think its tautological to include, say, both Dan's description and his parenthetical justification for that description. In fact that's the *best* way in the long term because then you really get a feel for how Dan's mind works in constructing those metaphors. But if the metaphor is presented in isolation and is too remote from how the music actually sounds that can be difficult.

― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Sunday, 19 September 2004 12:24 (twenty-one years ago)

Hm, well, anything I could add at this point would be rambling perhaps. But it's not a grayish blue, I'll note. Tim's point is well observed and generally speaking I do try and balance off description with elaboration in my reviews though I don't think I do so consciously.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 19 September 2004 12:29 (twenty-one years ago)

NB. Ned I think you generally do too. Though I've read so many of your allmusic reviews plus everything here and on other fora that I could probably decode your metaphors without thinking (sort of like how I "hear" subtitled foreign films in English).

― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Sunday, 19 September 2004 12:32 (twenty-one years ago)

Heh heh heh. "He's talking about 'arcing overdrive' again, it MUST mean that he's referring to the use of an 808 pulse and an envelope filter..."

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 19 September 2004 12:33 (twenty-one years ago)

Generally speaking the two approaches go together anyway. I find it hard to construct anything but the most hackneyed, cliched metaphors about the sound of rock records that I like because I haven't invested as much time scrutinising their sonics as I have with electronic stuff.

― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Sunday, 19 September 2004 12:41 (twenty-one years ago)

Interestingly, I've remembered Ned's description of "Transmission" since he posted it three years ago - I think it even kind of added a dimension to how I hear the song or at least managed to neatly express something I hear about it. I found it to be a very evocative image. I don't think it's vague or mythic. It implies, as he said, focus and tightness, cool efficiency, unwavering forward momentum, clarity.

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Sunday, 19 September 2004 13:15 (twenty-one years ago)

Gosh, why thank ya Sundar. That's quite a compliment!

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 19 September 2004 13:16 (twenty-one years ago)

I think Ned's reviews are a pink ray of starlight as seen thru a prism made of opal and fairy dust. hard and soft at the same time like a gently roasted turtle.

― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 19 September 2004 13:20 (twenty-one years ago)

I think Scott Seward's hair is a flowing river of gold cascading down a mystical landscape of green grass, deer and black squelching demons from the underworld of HARD ROCK POWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!

http://www.totalmetal.ru/upload/reviews/pic226.jpg

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 19 September 2004 13:29 (twenty-one years ago)

And Ned, while I enjoyed your live Joy Division review on AMG, and was impressed by how it read like it was in A-flat major -loved the grave, formal phrasing - it ultimately suggested a rondo wearing a correct but unconvincing mourning veil of C minor.

― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 19 September 2004 14:02 (twenty-one years ago)

NOW you're just showing off.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 19 September 2004 14:06 (twenty-one years ago)

hee hee hee!

― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 19 September 2004 14:14 (twenty-one years ago)

I've been listening to Schubert all morning. OMG, How goth was he?! Die Winterreise is batcave central!

Check it:

Numbness

Vainly I search the snow
For the footprint she left
When arm in arm with me
She passed along the green meadow

I long to kiss the ground
Pierce both ice and snow
With my burning tears
Until I see the soil beneath

Where shall I find a blossom
Where find green grass?
The flowers are dead
And the turf has a wan look

Is there then no memory
That I may take from here?
When my sorrow is stilled
Who shall tell me of her?

My heart feels dead
Within it her image gazes coldly
When my heart thaws again
Her image too will flow away

― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 19 September 2004 14:21 (twenty-one years ago)

Stewart said **Here's a funny thing: I don't know what Dr. C's recollections are, but I don't recall JD actually having had that much of a "goth" following at the time when they were actually still going (not compared with e.g. Bauhaus or Siouxsie and The Banshees or even The Damned for that matter, anyway) - mainly the New Brutalist / "big black overcoat" brigade that also used to follow the other Factory bands and the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen, Killing Joke, PiL, etc.** etc.

I used to follow them around the country and there were various gangs, mainly from Manc/Burnley/Preston/Macclesfield areas + a few of us from the other side of the pennines like me. There were no goths whatsoever, but hang on...were there really goths in 1979/80?? Didn't that all coalesce 3 or 4 years later. All the folks I used to talk to that followed JD were either the long overcoat brigade, football hooligans/beer boys + the odd mad Belgian.

**"Love Will Tear Us Apart" is the one Joy Division song I don't "get" all the hype about because it's a good melody but there's NO HARMONY WHATSOEVER IN THE HOOK WTF WHY ARE THE BASSLINE, SYNTH, AND IAN CURTIS' VOICE ALL FOLLOWING THE SAME MELODY LINE **

Bollocks! Listen to the second synth line (playing 5ths I think)

― Dr. C (Dr. C), Sunday, 19 September 2004 14:43 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm mostly pissed because there's no steady bassline to imply a chord structure

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Sunday, 19 September 2004 16:08 (twenty-one years ago)

I mean yes there's a bassline but since it just follows the melody line it just sounds weak to me, you know?

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Sunday, 19 September 2004 16:08 (twenty-one years ago)

And you can tell me it's supposed to "supply tension" or "be different" or something but, as much as I love Joy Division, I don't think this song merits the hype it gets. Then again I don't like Closer either.

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Sunday, 19 September 2004 16:11 (twenty-one years ago)

I just know that one year from now I'm going to absolutely love this song and kick myself for ever saying this stuff

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Sunday, 19 September 2004 16:13 (twenty-one years ago)

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