12.5.24

No heat in Joy Division’s loins

1976-1980


Rigorous modernists, neuromantics, guys who wrote songs steeped in Conrad, Kafka, Burroughs, etc. etc. Second Deborah Curtis: depressives dressing for the Depression.

Joy Division were the sound of British culture’s speed comedown, a long slow screaming neural shutdown. Melancholia was Curtis’ art form. The key to Joy Division was the Ballardian spinal landscape, the connexus linking individual psychopathology with social anomie. The two meanings of breakdown, the two meanings of Depression. The music of Joy Division was about the death of optimism, of youth.

Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups, the anti-rock: divested of all illusions.