Joy Division
- Thread starter sadmanbarty
- Start date
Leo
Well-known member
@subvert47 I must have not paid attention to this thread, had no idea you were an old geezer like me, buying punk records when they came out. love your post on this thread, makes me pine for those days.
@subvert47 For sure, even Joy Division being at their shittest is obviously miles better than the Libertines, Fratellis, Killers etc at their best. I just find Side 2 of Closer the most underwhelming thing they ever did.
@Leo I agree, Atrocity Exhibition is fucking incredible. But then it kind of nosedives throughout the disc for me...
@Leo I agree, Atrocity Exhibition is fucking incredible. But then it kind of nosedives throughout the disc for me...
subvert47
I don't fight, I run away
Ah, the old days...
I had a massive post punk revisiting binge a couple of years ago after discovering this site...fytini.com – Just another WordPress site
fytini.com
...with a lot I knew, a lot I'd forgotten, and a lot I'd never heard of before ever.
sufi
lala
I conked out early, hectic week, this is a v great conversation and Martin's blog is forever
Leo
Well-known member
wow, nice, think I'll spend some time here, thx.
jenks
thread death
The other place to check out is musicophilia’s original sounds like 1981 project. Lots of great early post punk mixes - especially heady stuff for those who were there: https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/tag/1981/
Godfrey Ho made all these trashy action and horror films in the '80s, mostly about ninjas, and would just swipe music without licensing it. Guess there were a few post-punk records floating around Hong Kong at the time: there's some surreal bits in "Ninja In The Killing Field" where the ninjas are fighting to Joy Division and the Cocteau Twins. He also did a film called "Thunder of Gigantic Serpent" where a giant snake terrorises Hong Kong to Throbbing Gristle.
That's a shame. Yes had some truly awful parts (rick wakeman's keyboard solos) but Chris Squire's hooky basslines were dynamite, you have to look to like, early bleep and 92 ardkore to find something similar. Don't get me wrong, a lot of prog was in absolute bad taste, but that's what made it subversive, in a way. This titular lower middle class and working class autodidacticism was something that in a way punk 77 jettisoned for a spunking cock in a school textbook (insanely individualist and Thatcherite.) Yes were a working mans band. To tour huge arenas and then knock out the two lps of tales from topographic oceans (in all their pomp and ham-fistedness) whilst despising each others guts required a stakhanovite work ethic, a crazy amount of discipline and a willpower that can only be achieved on the shop floor, or on the farm and then relaxing off the job playing for Accrington Stanley. Punk on the other hand was a reactionary deviation from this absurdity, this practical joke of modern life to something more authentic, more rootsy, something more petit-bourgeois — every man for himself. Maclaren understood jack shit about situationism. The reintroduction of good (right thinking) taste, because so much punk models itself as being in bad taste it automatically makes it good to the self-loathing middle class critic. Prog, for all its faults, requires the suspension of disbelief. Part of what was great about 92 hardcore was that the producers learnt to get more sophisticated and get good taste in their productions (this is obviously derived from black music scenes like soul, funk, reggae and detroit techno etc) so what you're hearing is almost the inverse of the prog mythology, the mastering of technique. This is also why the most radical post-punk bands were those such as This Heat, Chrome, Factrix etc which rather successfully inverted the values of prog. Out with the symphonic pretensions, but no neanderthal rebellion for the sake of neanderthal rebellion, (The Clash were rebellion without creative destruction.) back to smart prole distance from the upper classes. Austere, but heartfelt.
This is why I kind of give people the side eye who renounce their association with ms. Bulkyhill. She was a soul girl and actually got it in 77-79 and one could argue that it was her management which encouraged her admiration for British aristocratic nonces. The reason being that most critics are not able to listen to music divorced from manufactured pitches timed to a deadline (the best essayist always mocks their bosses for this kind of farce.) and, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, only to offer a baseless stench that eminates from the putrid urinals of Magdalene College. However what these rhetoricians fail to understand is that rhetoric without learned cognition and militant zeal is merely huxtering quackery. If one merely hates those in authority, merely hates a value set of those in authority, then in fact they merely express a desire to reconstitute that authority, in spite of their ostensibly revolutionary rhetoric. On the other hand the most astute critics of which we count ourselves on this forum understand that hatred must rise like minerva's owl at dusk. We must learn to hate the dead (hate that their lives amounted to nothing, hate that they become bones and dust) to be able to imbibe their lessons, and must merely be quiescent and methodical with regards to the present. Onyerbike Tebbit, like the obedient Brit he is, only ever hated the present.
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Of course, Levene rehearsed to Yes, and was a roadie for them, which proves my contension that the best post-punk is prog with the unnecessary fat expunged. Joy Division sounds very much like David Cameron to me, these days. except for the ambition. Like an old toff at the council.
Smart man. Asia is where it is at.
subvert47
I don't fight, I run away
Sorry, that was rather dismissive, wasn't it. But I couldn't think of anything else to say
no offence taken, squire.
subvert47
I don't fight, I run away
But I've now just discovered this collection of Peel Sessions...
It's basically the Entertainment material without the sterile production. Splendid