Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?

GET UNKNOWN PLEASURES AND CLOSER NOW THEN DAMMIT!!!

Likewise the "Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio" in Transmission - a lyric so startlingly out of place here, seemingly flown in from a top 10 pop hit. Again the delivery is brutal.

Also "Where have they been? " (Decades)

Tom's point about LWTUA is well-made. Also Ceremony ("All she asks the strength to hold me/then again the same old story"). Actually these are brilliant lines, simply brilliant. Also the first line of the song is fantastic : "This is why events unnerve me".

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), September 16th, 2004.

OTM.

ANyway, Joy Division rocks! I still haven't picked up the box set, what's wrong with me, etc

http://www.easterncoastcostume.com/Pages/crowns/strawman.jpg

i sure hope they're a joke.

staple guns?

actually i suspect a *lot* of writers do something very like this, but morley is the only one i'm aware of who uses such nakedly useless stretches of deliberately(?) tiresome "literary" playfulness to mark the Three Chilling Dots (like [INSERT REALITY HERE] , and not using words which merely divert or move or distort to do so...])

(i didn't "get" this till i read ±nothing, whgere it's unavoidable)

so the tension is something like: clearly very able and literate writer who is also very extremely unusually perceptive abt ppl's motivations and feelings, deliberately choosing a style which contantly occludes and gets in the way of the blunt of expression of same....

-- mark s (mar...) (webmail), August 7th, 2003 1:58 PM. (mark s) (link)

"And so all of this bled fed wed and headed dead or alive into the drastic mind and body of Joy Division (who were outgrowing their mind and body and packing more time into the time they had than they had time for) and all of this, all these coincidences and transmissions and transitions and (r)apt moments and exotic settings and mild distortions, it all added up, and put them into this unique position where they were both the last ever great rock group (after The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, MC5, The Doors, Television, the Sex Pistols) and the first ever great rock band (before The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead) ... they were some twisted turning point some tunnel of light and dark and love and hate that you must journey through from one era to the next if you are to make any new sense... Joy Division summoned up in a rocket shell in their time and place all the great rock - surface and substance, pose and power - that there ever was and ever will be."

haha i like that sentence:

i. it has terrific rhythmic poise, and.
ii. is pitch-perfect in its invocation of mockable faux innocence, as a mask for actual genuinely (silly but knowingly silly) belief

-- mark s (mar...) (webmail), August 7th, 2003 2:41 PM. (mark s) (link)

the sentence in question has been very effective in getting us to disagree and explore more than the merely bald author-transparent journalistic report and/or critical claim being, er, claimed = it is doing the work it intended to do = it is a good sentence not a bad sentence (= the writer is not afraid to use "bad writing" — and thus the trashing of his own reputation as a stylist — as a device to produce lively, autonomous thinking on the part of the writer)*

(*i'm being a bit devil's advocate here in the sense that i think this device quite often fails w.morley, who uses it A LOT, risking catastrophe on a routine basis... i approve of this w/o always being convinced by it...)**

(**it's like football or something: a goal is better if it looked like it was a real mad thing to try but still goes in)***

(***i know fuck all abt sport)

-- mark s (mar...) (webmail), August 7th, 2003 4:01 PM. (mark s) (link)

i like mark s, but like a lot of his posts his reading is--how you say in UK?--too clever by half.

if it's not a parody, then it's truly pathetic.

I think it's a problem Curtis had in general. "24 Hours" starts out great and then he throws in that bastardized Shakespeare "A cloud hangs over me/Marks every move".

With "Dead Souls", I don't think "Imperialistic house of prayer/Conquistadors who took their share" is meaningless. It makes sense, I think, in that he's looking at human history ("Figures from the past stand tall") and seeing nothing but oppression and exploitation. It is rather overblown though - in this and other qualities, he sort of reminds me of Neil Peart as a lyricist sometimes (seem to somehow be fixated with 19th century concerns, overblown 'literary' language, moralistic sense, near-solipsistic macho-geeky perspective). Of course he's very different in others and sometimes wrote some brilliantly introspective lines.

I like "Shadowplay" and "Colony" lyrically.

this is really sweet.

If I find extra, I will steal them and auction them here.

It hasn't.

I love the writing in box set.

did you ignore this bit form that mark s post amt:

''actually i suspect a *lot* of writers do something very like this, but morley is the only one i'm aware of who uses such nakedly useless stretches of deliberately(?) tiresome "literary" playfulness to mark the Three Chilling Dots (like [INSERT REALITY HERE] , and not using words which merely divert or move or distort to do so...])''

To answer yr first q: why shouldn't it be in a box set?

Its so sincere by being insincere. I read the liner notes to the boxset many years ago - got a copy from my record library, taped some of it and gave it back - but I remember being baffled by it, but I didn't mind that. It was prob the first time I read morley.

Ha ha actually now that I think on it, I bought Closer because I read an interview with Thom Yorke saying that Radiohead based "Street Spirit" on a Joy Division template. When I got the album and it was so (to my ears) drudgy and leaden I felt very betrayed. The whole thing sounds a lot more beautiful and shimmering to my ears now though. That two chord guitar riff in "Heart & Soul"!

Re: the synthesisers on the Warsaw demos mentioned upthread - I had heard that they were added by some meddling studio engineer, that the band hated them and that it was part of why they didn't release the album on RCA. Whereas from reading 24 Hour Party People I get the sense that the band just let M.H. dictate to them soundwise.

That live gig is very poorly recorded and I wasn't surprised when another live set wz released separately.

I got far more out of Closer than unknown pleasures, which I always seemed to lose interest in after the first couple of songs. The guitars fade into the background a lot more throughout 'closer', as I recall, which kind of follows onto new order.