Unlike certain other bands that would become favorites of mine, I cannot say I remember exactly when or where I first heard Joy Division. It was very probably via a mixtape from my friend Rich, who’d already championed (arguably) similarly gloomy bands like Theatre of Hate to me (although, compared to Joy Division, Theater of Hate sound positively peppy). I believe I succumbed to the austere allure of Joy Division’s debut LP, Unknown Pleasures in about 1983. Ian Curtis had already been dead for three years.
Listening to that first LP was an immediately immersive and affecting experience. For a start, it genuinely sounded like nothing else. It lacked the feral abandon of the punk rock that had obviously inspired it, but retained the genre’s minimal, spartan aesthetic — applied with a clipped, bone-dry precision. Within the album’s 10 original tracks, there are no warm splashes of color beyond bleached, blinding white, frigid grey and ponderously funereal black. There is no camp, no arch wryness or anything cheeky. Topically, Ian Curtis’ lyrics burrow into the realms of despair, degradation, hopelessness, self-loathing and existential dread. In both sound and sentiment, Unknown Pleasures offers a narrow menu that — while entirely singular and elegiac — offers little solace or relief. While frequently draped in overused descriptors like “bleak,” “claustrophobic,” “haunted,” “elegiac,” “grim,” and “sepulchral,” the best adjective to describe Joy Division’s iconic first album has always been the straightforward one — it’s depressing.
Joy Division certainly weren’t alone, in damp Cold War-era England, in mining this particular vein, but few accomplished it with such an aura of authenticity. There was precious little doubt that Ian Curtis wrestled with a lot of issues. While some of their foppish contemporaries could credibly be accused of hamming up the heartache, no one could ever call Joy Division posers. The music on Unknown Pleasures never sounded calculated or contrived. The emotional dislocation woven into that music was genuine, which is entirely what made it so distinctive, leant further permanent poignance by Ian Curtis’ tragic, early exit from this mortal coil in 1980. He wasn’t bluffing.
Unlike the band that the remnants of the original foursome would shortly become, Joy Division didn’t make party music. Sure, you could certainly dance to a lot of it, but no one was going to slot Unknown Pleasures alongside records by Kool & the Gang, Chic and Donna Summer for rump-shaking spins at their next block party. Tempo-wise, it was either nervous twitch, adrenalized sprint or deliberate plod. It is weighty, but without an ounce of fat — pure, opaque and unwaveringly dark.
Despite the status it would enjoy in later decades, Unknown Pleasures doesn’t even have any of Joy Division’s “big singles” on it, the poppiest moments probably being the frenetic opener “Disorder,” the driving snarl of “Interzone" and “She’s Lost Control,” a sobering rumination on a friend’s descent into the indignity and powerlessness of epilepsy. “Rock Lobster” it ain’t.
Too heady, monochromatic, jagged and — again — inescapably depressing for most, despite what certain retrophiles might try to sell you these days, Unknown Pleasures was not exactly a staple around college hi-fis throughout the `80s. At Denison University, any dorm room that contained a copy of the record was probably occupied by a shy and/or disaffected adolescent with a healthy amount of contempt for the perpetually Grateful Dead-scored shenanigans of the frat scene.
But there was (and remains) one special element to Unknown Pleasures that has belied and almost betrayed its cold, unrelentingly desolate core. While fittingly sheathed in a pitch black sleeve, the front cover of Joy Division’s debut came stamped with a striking, enigmatic image that graphic designer Peter Saville plucked from an esoteric book about astronomy. Depicting the fluctuating frequencies of a pulsar signal, the design portrays a succession of crooked, angular lines that strangely mirror the stark, disciplined pulse of the music contained on the record. I cannot speak to the veracity of the legend, but it might have been a luckily prescient design choice, as it has been said that Saville selected the image for the cover without ever actually first hearing the record.
So beyond obviously being an blowhardy, silver-scalped Gen-X’r waxing laboriously about the music of his youth that he quite obviously feels is incalculably superior to the weedy piffle that kids listen to nowadays, why exactly am I bothering to drudge all this up about a now-universally-acknowledged post-punk milestone?
Well, it’s invariably very late in the day to be harping on about this, I am still struck by how Unknown Pleasures has become strangely adopted by mainstream popular culture. For a start, according to Peter Hook’s excellent memoirs, Joy Division never sold “merch.” I certainly remember dutifully buying an Unknown Pleasures shirt around 1984 at Butterfly’s on West 8th Street (now hardware store), but the band initially eschewed all variants of conventional marketing. New Order followed suit up until about 1985’s Low-Life, wherein they did the unthinkable of put their faces on the sleeve. From that point on, I guess, it was off to the races, and one could suddenly buy official Joy Division/New Order gear in much the same manner as Iron Maiden or Kiss.
But, at some point, the cryptic iconography of Joy Division became more than just a sharp t-shirt for precious music geeks in the know and followed the Ramones, Motorhead and CBGB logos into simply the surface-patina of “cool,” whether those sporting said designs knew about the underlying meanings or not. Some folks, like, say, myself, still think this is strenuously unfortunate.
This has obviously been the case for quite a while, here in 2022, but I was slammed in the face by it again, today, while out clothes-shopping with my daughter. Evidently perilously low on certain crucial items, Charlotte asked if we could pop into American Eagle (a clothiers I would normally be loathe to enter based on its name alone) to see if they had a particular cut of blue-jean she preferred. I accompanied my daughter into the place and spent an interminable eternity wandering around while Char emphatically scrutinized their denim selection. While Char sequestered herself in the changing room, I caught sight of something that sort of ruined my afternoon. Surrounded by miles of pre-distressed outerwear, numbing pastels and midriff-exposing crop tops for every climate, there were the jagged pulsar strands from the cover of Unknown Pleasures, incongruously grafted onto a sun-bleached yellow t-shirt to pair with a denim-on-denim ensemble.
Now, obviously, appropriation of the images associated with Joy Division's seminal work for the purposes of a t-shirt ultimately does nothing to diminish the significance of the album in question. Whether the clientele of American Eagle knows it or not, the music of Unknown Pleasures remains as impactful, stirring and important (yeah, I said it) in 2022 as it did in 1979. It has lost none of its power.
I realize it’s a trivial thing, but … is this what Ian would’ve wanted?
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