joy division

...listening to joy division in the here and now most if not all of their contemporaries and the myriad of copyists and journeymen seem to pale into a vast expanse of nothingness, it's like they actually didn't exist, they were just distorted echoes of earlier division noise, a psychic babble that broke down peoples will to think for themselves, hipsters and trendoids went along with the sisters/nephs/cult/(your selection here) in the goth pantheon and who knows what was happening with the post punk funk shenanigans from every 'with it' nightclub denizen out after dark...joy division sound and textures spread throughout the world via blitz club dandies, one note synth ditherers, goth purveyors from the provinces and just to mention the effect this beautiful doom noise had on the black metal brigade is to acknowledge the tentacles of mancunian angst is forever mutating and diluting and it's this dilution that brings it all back home, all back to the weird years in northern england when the whole area was closing down financially and spiritually, back home to four young lads with time on their hands, time to get some grooves going to alleviate the thought that tomorrow may in all probability be the same as yesterday with not too much happening in rock now that punk had been usurped by the record companies and the bands working to codified programs of weak rama-lama thrashing...the bleak surrounding visions of the countryside and the cities crumbling from within are all fed into the division sound with nary a thought of it happening, they just seemed to do it because it was right, their music was them and all that they encountered on a daily basis, with ians lyrics coming from deep within the darkside of his persistent daylight nightmare world...outside of the studio ambiance and production niceties joy division show how much of a full on attack squad they were, vibrating with sheer unspoken curiosity, a great summing up of the clatter from such forward thinkers such as the velvets/bowie/kraftwerk/glitter/ultravox/saints and the hotrodpistolclash explosion of '76 all channeled through a folkloric attitude of natural reinvention and rejuvenation of cultural (un)desire...true that joy division inhabit a league very much of their own command they were accompanied by earlier players on the rocking fields of noise with such underworld luminaries as doctors of madness/cabaret voltaire and for a split second subway sect but these cats all fell away from frontline duty for varying reasons...these division cats are progressive in a regressive environment and curtis is the lounge crooner from the nightclub at the end of town, the place where everyone is cool because everyone knows its futile to exert negative energy in an imaginary place, this nightclub is the nightclub of the mind, a collective individualisation of teenage brain rage digging the last sounds from the end times...thirty years down the line these boots ably show joy division as emissaries from another country, a desolate land of failed capitalism now forgotten by all (apart from the proles who still live there on crack filled time warped estates) except for populist 'cultural' historians who populate the lovie media with case loads of 'worthy' time wasting clutter...so one and all step inside the heart and soul of the interzone...

2 comments:

  1. wow....like VU, the overflow of JD boots and such starts getting blurry, but i love lost treasure, which is new to me...thank you ever so much....
    bit of a long shot, but do you happen to have access to white house "psychopathia sexualis?" thanks for bein you

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  2. that's a great essay. thanks for putting something original up amidst all the cut-n-paste dreck.

    steve in toronto

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