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rfmcdonaldWithin the past week, I've realized that I've a habit of making posts about popular music that I really like: Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice", Linda Lamb's "Hot Room", Moulin Rouge's "Hindi Sad Diamonds", Laibach's "Tanz Mit Laibach", the Eurythmics' Savage album, Peter Gabriel and Deep Forest's "While the Earth Sleeps". Other songs interest me: Mylène Farmer's "C'est une belle journée" benefits from a combination of superb timing and good music, I'll always remember the shivers passing down my back when the first notes of Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan" came from the record player, The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" is a classic perfect angst song, and Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" just because. ("And if I only could,/I'd make a deal with God,/And I'd get him to swap our places.)
Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is another one of those songs. I'd first heard it--more precisely, seen part of the music video, filmed in an abandoned factory--in one installment of a multipart documentary on the evolution of popular music, perhaps this BBC-PBS coproduction. It struck me at the time, powerfully enough that I remembered to buy the 1995 reissued single quite cheaply at Back Alley Discs in Charlottetown five or six years ago.
Saturday, following our visit to the Thomson Collection, I went with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talktooloose to Sam the Record Man on Yonge. I felt in the mood to buy a CD, preferably a cheap one. After deciding not to pick up a title by David Bowie or P.J. Harvey, I settled on Joy Division. I decided to pick up Substance 1977-1980 instead of The Complete BBC Recordings, since, at 70 cents, Substance 1977-1980 is one-third cheaper per song than the other album. Last night, I put the CD in my player and advanced to track ten.
The song is simple enough, fitting Joy Division's post-punk aesthetic. Listening to the other tracks on Substance 1977-1980, almost all recorded before "Love Will Tear Us Apart," I could hear their sound's evolution, moving from a simpler punk outfit to a very intelligent rough-edged popular music group. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is a short song less than three and a half minutes in length. One jangly guitar starts the track, followed by a second, followed by chimes, followed by the drum, finally breaking into the melody and Ian Curtis' raw vocals, sounding almost electronically processed in their flatness and their distance.
When I first listened to the song in its entirety, it struck me as intensely passionnate in a rather innovative way. That innovativeness has lost its edge for me as the latest waves of pop-punk have emerged, imitating (consciously or otherwise) the Joy Division aural esthetic. I can still recall my first impressions when I concentrate, though: Curtis' despairing passion, despair at declining passion, against that energetic spare music. In 1980, at a time when passion had been cheaply bought by flaccid pop ballads or repeated endlessly in disco mantras, that song must have been a wonderful sharp shock.
Joy Division collapsed after Ian Curtis' suicide. It was reconstituted as New Order, a great group most famous for its hits "Blue Monday" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" and with its best work collected on the 1987 compilation Substance, but that group wasn't the same. It's just a pity that the musical outputs of Joy Division as it could have been and New Order as it was couldn't have shared the 1980s.
On a related note, after I listened to "Love Will Tear Us Apart" for the fifth time, I switched CDs, to a Tamla Motown compilation. Diana Ross and the Supremes' "Love Child" particularly caught my attention. Forty years on, it's a constant temptation to resist classifying "Love Child" as a golden oldie. When you think about it, though, forty years ago it still would have been remarkable that a group of African-American singers would have a #1 U.S. hit with a song describing (in the first person, no less) the sufferings of a child born out of wedlock. Back then, Diana Ross and the Supremes weren't the clichéd prototype of the early 21st century's girl groups, themselves made after repeated copyings--they were credible, their songs were still considered credible. I wonder what it would take to really recover that sense of credibility.
Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is another one of those songs. I'd first heard it--more precisely, seen part of the music video, filmed in an abandoned factory--in one installment of a multipart documentary on the evolution of popular music, perhaps this BBC-PBS coproduction. It struck me at the time, powerfully enough that I remembered to buy the 1995 reissued single quite cheaply at Back Alley Discs in Charlottetown five or six years ago.
Saturday, following our visit to the Thomson Collection, I went with
talktooloose to Sam the Record Man on Yonge. I felt in the mood to buy a CD, preferably a cheap one. After deciding not to pick up a title by David Bowie or P.J. Harvey, I settled on Joy Division. I decided to pick up Substance 1977-1980 instead of The Complete BBC Recordings, since, at 70 cents, Substance 1977-1980 is one-third cheaper per song than the other album. Last night, I put the CD in my player and advanced to track ten.Do you cry out in your sleep,
all my failings expose?
Gets a taste in my mouth
as desperation takes hold.
Why is it something so good
just can't function no more?
The song is simple enough, fitting Joy Division's post-punk aesthetic. Listening to the other tracks on Substance 1977-1980, almost all recorded before "Love Will Tear Us Apart," I could hear their sound's evolution, moving from a simpler punk outfit to a very intelligent rough-edged popular music group. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is a short song less than three and a half minutes in length. One jangly guitar starts the track, followed by a second, followed by chimes, followed by the drum, finally breaking into the melody and Ian Curtis' raw vocals, sounding almost electronically processed in their flatness and their distance.
When I first listened to the song in its entirety, it struck me as intensely passionnate in a rather innovative way. That innovativeness has lost its edge for me as the latest waves of pop-punk have emerged, imitating (consciously or otherwise) the Joy Division aural esthetic. I can still recall my first impressions when I concentrate, though: Curtis' despairing passion, despair at declining passion, against that energetic spare music. In 1980, at a time when passion had been cheaply bought by flaccid pop ballads or repeated endlessly in disco mantras, that song must have been a wonderful sharp shock.
Joy Division collapsed after Ian Curtis' suicide. It was reconstituted as New Order, a great group most famous for its hits "Blue Monday" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" and with its best work collected on the 1987 compilation Substance, but that group wasn't the same. It's just a pity that the musical outputs of Joy Division as it could have been and New Order as it was couldn't have shared the 1980s.
On a related note, after I listened to "Love Will Tear Us Apart" for the fifth time, I switched CDs, to a Tamla Motown compilation. Diana Ross and the Supremes' "Love Child" particularly caught my attention. Forty years on, it's a constant temptation to resist classifying "Love Child" as a golden oldie. When you think about it, though, forty years ago it still would have been remarkable that a group of African-American singers would have a #1 U.S. hit with a song describing (in the first person, no less) the sufferings of a child born out of wedlock. Back then, Diana Ross and the Supremes weren't the clichéd prototype of the early 21st century's girl groups, themselves made after repeated copyings--they were credible, their songs were still considered credible. I wonder what it would take to really recover that sense of credibility.
