Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?

"Good, good..."

blood test, dude.

x-post

The "Futurist" tag appeared in September 1980, as follows:

From George Gimarc's Post-Punk Diary for Monday September 15 1980:

STEVO the DJ at Billy's club and general provider of the soundtrack to the new scene brewing in the electronic underground, has his top 20 current records
list published in Sounds under the heading "Futurist Playlist". Top tracks are Joy Division "Isolation", Gary Numan and "I Die You Die", Bowie's "Ashes to
Ashes", Bauhaus with "Terror Couple Kill Colonel" and Gina X and "Do It Yourself". At #6 is Fad Gadget and "Fireside Favourite", B-Movie with "Soldier
Stood Still", Gary Numan's "Aircrash Bureau" and "Telekon", and a demo from Blancmange of "I've Seen The Word". Other groups present are Modern
English, Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, Human League, YMO, Iggy Pop and Last Dance. Several months from now Stevo will confess to the NME that "...the
tag Futurist is a bunch of crap. I took a chart of the most popular electronic music I was playing as a DJ into Sounds and said to them 'put it in but don't call it
'Eurorock' or anything like that'. I grab hold of the paper a week later and it says 'Futurist'. I hate all this stopid tagging."

Despite Stevo's disclaimer, "Futurist" was seen by some as a useful tag for an emerging movement, and there were actually "Futurist" nights
at some nightclubs. The movement was seen by some as an avant-garde version of/reaction to the "pop" New Romantic scene, with the most
important bands being John Foxx-era Ultravox and Gary Numan. However, the movement seems to have suffered from the lack of a coherent
identity and never became a subculture as such.

The tag, however, became popular for a while- in an interview in Sounds in January 1981, Blancmange denied being Futurist ("I'm not a
Futurist. I hate that word. What we do is more like experimental new music") whilst Depeche Mode laid claim to the term in an attempt to evade a
worse one ("OK, we're Futurists. We've always been Futurists. For me, Futurusts were an extension of punk rock. We never had anything to do with New
Romantics. They all looked the same. Bunch of flaming sissies! But call us what you like. Ultra pop. Fiturist, Disco. Anything so long as it's not New
Romantic").

ha ha ha ha! I assume this was meant in jest, and if so, good one.

Latebloomer, while I sympathise with your point of view in other respects, I believe goth would have existed without JAMC - in fact, it did.

Thanks to Scott Seward for pointing out that when JD were going there WAS no goth scene to speak of. If there was, JD might have dressed differently. MIGHT have. Instead they dressed pretty normally and forced you to concentrate on their music. Another reason why they're ace. I pulled out U.P. last night, spurred by the person here who kept saying he thought the bass line from Disorder was out of tune (on another thread somewhere). He (she?) regretted and retracted it later, but wow. Hooky out of tune is like...he can't be out of tune because more often than not he calls the tune everyone else seems to play around. If he were out of tune the whole thing would fall apart.

I warn you guys, though I tend to get hysterical at goth-related jokes, so try to keep it at a minimum. I'm rather horrified at the way Franz Ferdinand singer has copied Stephen Morris' striped shirt above.

But Radiohead can often be brooding no? They certainly have made some pretty depressing music. When I think of happy music, RH is not the first to come to mind.

Just came across the lyrics for George Harrison's "Only a Northern Song" and realized they were strangely appropriate for this thread:

If you're listening to this song
You may think the chords are going wrong
But they're not
He just wrote it like that

When you're listening late at night
You may feel the bands are not quite right
But they are
They just play it like that

It doesn't really matter what chords I play
What words I say
Or time of day it is
As it's only a Northern Song

It doesn't really matter what clothes I wear
Or how I fare
Or if my hair is brown
When it's only a Northern Song

If you think the harmony
Is a little dark and out of key
You're correct
There's nobody there

And I told you there's no one there

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

The synths that come in on the verses make it.

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.)

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

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).