Joy Division Suck

Joy Division Are The Worst Band On The Planet

I’m tired of receiving abuse from Joy Division fans who instantly assume that I must listen to shit like the X-Factor or any other brand of banal pop music just because I don’t like Joy Division.

Joy Division fans just listen to the band to appear different. These people typically have no personalities whatsoever, so to compensate they try to come across as dark and edgy by listening to seminal New Wave bands with no talent.

The truth of the matter is that Joy Division were nothing. I’ve listened to everything in their back catalogue and it all amounts to nothing. Ian Curtis couldn’t sing. Barney couldn’t play guitar. Hooky was average even for a punk-era bassist. I won’t make any remarks about the one with the chin as he was perhaps the only talented member of the group and to praise him would take the wind out of my argument.

With all that said – if you’re a Joy Division fan that means that I instantly have a better taste in music than you.

Now, it’s time to take some notes, grasshopper. I am about to teach you about music that ROCKS!

For some proper Northern Music with heart and soul I suggest checking out this band.

This band are 100,000,000 times better than Joy Division.  In 40 years time we will have thankfully forgotten Agony Division but will still be humming the beautiful middle 8 of That’s Not My Name.

If you disagree then you know nothing about music.

Joy Division were a perfect example of how virtuosity will never beat ideas, that literacy can enter the pantheon of popular music without being insulting to ones intelligence, that it is possible to do sonic explorations within the framework of focused pop music.

Virtuosity? Why should virtuosity matter a jot in music? Sonic explorations? Jesus H Christ man! It’s music NOT art. I think you’re seriously Fripping out here!

I’ve always believed that all rock lyrics are basically bad poetry, there are precious few artists over the years that have written something profound that stands up to close scrutiny, Ian Curtis is one of them.  He’s not a storyteller in the precise sense of the word but his lyrics were the perfect compliment to Martin Hannett’s sparse spacey production work.  Its brilliant music, its like ambient music but bleak, it resonates because it taps into that thing that everybody has, the innate sense of alienation, the notion that human beings are self contained self obsessed vessels, peering out of our shells is something that EVERYBODY understands and this music is a stellar reflection of said notion.

Martin Hannett’s production was spacey, yes. As spacey as me producing a recording of myself taking a shit in the toilet. Is that art? No. Ian Curtis was as self obsessed as it gets. All he was interested in was shagging around, dancing like an idiot and contributing lyrics to music that has not stood the test of time.

These are lads that came from the ruins of an industrial town and for better or worse, with all the qualifications God gave a giraffe, have made a lasting stamp on popular culture.  Its easy and its simple to label these things as self indulgent and such but music by its very nature is an act of self indulgence, its is not a necessary function of life, it is all about self indulgence.

OK so just because the band came from a shithole we should take pity on them? It doesn’t work that way. I’ve seen giraffe’s that looked more capable of writing better songs than Ian Curtis.

Ian Curtis had a wonderful baritone voice, very Jim Morrison influenced, his juxtaposition between standing still and singing and that slow building epileptic dance has a wonderful climactic thing to it, sort of like Nirvanas instrument destroying shtick and the Doors great instrumental passage with Morrison improvised poetry laid over them that would build and build and build, there’s almost an element of drama in there.

His voice was rubbish as was Jim Morrison’s. Joy Division should not be considered in the same sentence as Nirvana. Nirvana are the true heirs to rock n roll. Compared to Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis was nothing.

Most importantly though, for a punk band coming off a pretty stock EP to make that first album is an INCREDIBLE leap, its music but its sort of…going somewhere, on the precipice, that point where music is in a stage of gestation, somewhere between punk and dance and madchester and art rock, its indefinable, they call it things like post punk or art punk or college rock but that’s just lazy journalistic inability to put a name to this wonderful organic music, stuff like PiL’s first three albums which, when dissected you can find or trace genre influences but as a product in and of itself it is totally unique and totally indefinable.  That’s basically where popular music is as interesting as it gets, when its between formats.  Now you can say that all of that is due to Martin Hannett’s production but again, that’s a shortcut to really having to understand what you’re presented with.

They didn’t want the album to sound like that. Barney and Hooky were pissed off at how it sounded like a goblin taking a shit in a damp cave and rightly so.

Its just great art, its enduring, its timeless, it isn’t fettered by being of a certain time and place and yet it has and continues to inform our understanding of that time and place in history, you can’t honestly listen to it and say ‘that’s so 70s’ or ‘that’s so 60s’ or ‘that’s so 80s’ or whatever.

Its raw without being scrappy, its polished without being diluted, its experimental without being rambling…you could cite it i suppose for being pretentious but then again, music, by nature is a pretentious thing, the arts are pretentious, performance is pretentious, if you consider the word and the meaning of the word and its critical application in the field of art criticism is swiftly apparent that the term is redundant in the field of art, if you don’t like all that which is pretentious, do your 9 to 5, have your dinner and go to sleep, avoid music/cinema/art etc as a rule because let me tell you ahead of time, the concepts that they’re based on are pretentious at their very heart…poetry most of all.

Are you Paul Morley by any chance? Anyway thanks whoever you were. If you are a Joy Division fan and want your say on the band, submit your argument in the box on the right hand side of the page.

Well, the fact that the band has managed to irritate you enough to set up a website so negative, full of bile, and desperation to shock says volumes. Don’t you think this site is a complete waste of your time? At the very least, Joy Division were creative and not, as in the case of this website, destructive. And where is the evidence that Curtis was a Nazi? There is none. Have you no respect for his family, friends, etc.? I guess not.
Have a more positive life.

I will admit that I am a sad bastard. I was a Joy Division fan for 6 years after all. Now THAT speaks volumes.

I do not wish any harm on his family or friends. I think they’ve had to put up with a lot of shit over the years but that shouldn’t be used as an excuse to stifle people who hate the band for legitimate reasons like myself.

OK so I was checking my web stats earlier on and found that some people had actually visited this blog. Curious, I decided to investigate and found the following amusing post on a website called Tumblr by someone called doe eyes.

Some utter fucking knob who does not appear to posses any testicles has created a page entitled “Joy Division suck.”

What a dick wank. I don’t mind if you dislike them, I can understand why, but to make a fucking blog about them?

What an utter twat.

The funny thing is, his logic is utter bullshit.

permission to kill this person?

What’s wrong with creating a blog about something you hate? People do it all the time with talented bands like U2 and Coldplay yet if someone has the gall to attack Joy Division, it’s as if someone’s shit in their soup.

Tell me this, if my logic is utter bullshit, then why has it hit such a raw nerve? If I was talking out of my arse then you’d have just moved on. But no. You know deep inside that you just listen to Joy Division to appear cool.

Children like ‘doe eyes’ listen to Joy Division for exactly the same reason that people her age take up smoking. It’s all about vanity and not about substance.

No-one could listen to Joy Division’s funeral dirge for any other reason as it HAS NO SUBSTANCE. It’s mindless, charmless, soulless bollocks, topped off with third-rate sixth-form lyrics written by a preening wan bum-boy with no discernible talent.

Permission to kill me for having a different opinion, eh? This demonstrates perfectly that all Joy Division fans are fascists who would have loved it if Warsaw had continued on with their clumsy Nazi-sympathizing spiel.

Charles Manson was and still is a die-hard Joy Division fan.

You should all hang your heads in shame. Seriously.

The above title is absolutely true.

I’ve never met a Joy Division fan I could hold a proper conversation with.  They are worse than Christian Evangelicans for crying out loud! They quote ‘Closer’ lyrics  as if scripture or something. If you try to say hello to them they’ll respond with “Go away, I’m in a crisis. I knew it had to come. It’s destroyed the balance I’d tried to keep.”

If you even dare question Joy Divison’s position in rock folklore in front of a fan, they’ll try to physically attack you. ‘Try’ is the key word here. Since most fans are ridiculously pale and underweight they’ll likely collapse into an epileptic fit before getting a blow in.

These same people are typically music snobs who refuse to listen to anything written after 1990. They go into nightclubs and just stand in the corner trying to emulate some of Ian Curtis’s trademark gormless poses. If a Joy Division record comes on, then the fan will try to seize the dancefloor with the “chicken dance”.

Out of principle whenever I see someone try this, I’ll kick the legs from them. They are inconsiderate bastards. They’ll happily smash into you, making you spill your drink and have the nerve to blame it on you for being a boring generic nobody.

At the end of the night they’ll go home alone and cry to “How Soon Is Now” by The Smiths on repeat.

Joy Division fans never laugh and I can fully understand why. They’ve nothing to laugh about.  If I have to listen to the band for more than 5 minutes I literally want to die.

The best example of a Joy Division fan is Paul “I should be shot for founding Art of Noise” Morley. Honest to fucking God, does this guy ever fuck up about Ian Curtis? More importantly have the police questioned him about the whereabouts of Ian Curtis’s old headstone? It’s obvious he’s taken it.  But yeah, Paul Morley is dire pretentious bore who probably cuts himself with the ring pulls of Special Brew cans.

I’ve also heard that he uses mayo as a lubricant and once had a pocket wank in Debbie Curtis’s coal bunker whilst howling like a dog.

Regardless of what Joy Division fans think, Ian Curtis could not sing. He could not croon like Sinatra.  His voice sounded like shit. He sounds worse like my uncle when he’s drunk and in dire need of a shit for God’s sake!

Take the early Warsaw tracks like “Interzone” where he howled like a dog through most of the intro. This was perhaps his best moment as a singer. He just continually got worse. I’ve since heard the Joy Division cut of “In A Lonely Place” and it’s diabolical. I can understand why Peter Hook tore the tape to shreds.

“Closer” would be a bad album without any vocals but Curtis just brings it down to a whole new level. “Decades” in particular is unlistenable. My flatmate actually threatened to kill me once whilst I was playing it they were that dismayed by his voice. What the hell was he thinking with the whole “Where have they been” thing? I’ll tell you where they’ve been, as far away from you as fucking possible, Ian mate!

Live, Ian was even worse. I’ve heard that before performing he’d down 8 cans of Carlsberg Special Brew. This makes perfect sense and is why he sounded like an ape raping a motorbike when singing live.

If Ian was still alive today he’d be totally unable to sing. Most Joy Division fans think that the band would have evolved into this powerhouse of modern rock. They wouldn’t have. They’d have attempted a ska album in 1983 called “Sausage Rolls and Blow Jobs” and Ian Curtis would have been rightly arrested for crimes against music.