Hi, its me, the bloke whose “argument” you replied to, just wanted to add a few things…

1) I didn’t say virtuosity matters a “jot” in music, thats the point, what i said was virtuosity cannot beat ideas, never has.  And whats wrong with the term sonic exploration?

Sonic exploration = pretentious. I’m guessing you like My Bloody Valentine too?

2) OK, a vague insult to Martin Hannetts production work there, no real addressing the point i raised, fair enough.  Is that art?  Yes, yes it is, you explain to me how its not and properly, i’m not talking about insults and clever little digs, talk about the music, the product, don’t just sit there inventing new ways to write “its shit, i don’t like it”.  Your points about Curtis being self obsessed are sort of arbitrary and, despite being in response to a point i’ve made it has no relevance to it.  If it hadn’t've stood the test of time mate we wouldn’t be here talking about it now, would we?

We’re here talking about it in the same way that we still talk about Cancer these days.

3) There’s a difference between pity and giving credit where its due.  And well done for ignoring the part about self indulgence and its relation to the nature of music and instead opting for more vague digs.

I can’t help it, I tend to scan over the sentences as I’ve lost my attention span after suffering brain damage as the result of a Toffos overdose whilst I was still a Joy Division fan. Joy Division are due absolutely no credit.

4) Kurt Cobain saw fit to cite Unknown Pleasures in his best albums ever so i think you’ll find they are worthy of mention alongside them…I also marvel at your criticism of Ian Curtis for commiting suicide and making music you deem as depressing when the exact same observations are levelled at Kurt…more frequently than Ian.

Kurt Cobain killed himself because he was married to Courtney Love. Are you telling me you wouldn’t blow your own head off if you were married to that bint?

5) Unknown Pleasures is their album, they made it.  Lots of artists are critical of their own work, it don’t make it any less theirs.

??

6) Well done for ignoring the last paragraph.  Every point i’ve made has been of direct relevance to the point at hand whereas all you’ve done is make digs, i thought you were interested in a serious discussion, apparently not.

I didn’t ignore it on purpose. It just read like a Paul Morley piece. I’ve read most of Morley’s writings on Joy Division and you get tired of that sorta flowery wank after about the 15th dreadful analogy in a paragraph.

Also, how is music not art?

In the same way as a foot is not a cock.

Anyway thank you for responding young man. You are at least well mannered unlike the young rapscallions who keep calling me a ‘f**ing cunt’.

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.

‘Closer’ is a film about Joy Division that is directed by Anton Corbijn.

The film starts with Ian Curtis walking around in Manchester, scoring prescription drugs off pensioners, wanking into bins and chasing chubbies around his home town. After dating and dumping every fat girl in Maccers – Ian falls for Debbie who is intrigued by the fact that Ian can write (which would have been outstanding at the time as Manchester had a literacy rate of 3%).

Ian eventually becomes tired of being a no-one, so he fires out a sprog and robs a bank to fund the formation of Stiff Kittens/Warsaw/Joy Division.

At Joy Division’s first gig in the Rafters club in Manchester, Ian makes a Hitler salute to some fat girls at the front row, before whipping out his knob and nads, lodging a finger up his hole and climaxing into one of his Primark socks.

Throughout 1978 – every journalist hates Joy Division as they can’t play their instruments and there are rumors on the scene that either the bassist or guitarist molests raccoons as a job on the side.

In 1979 Manchester seemingly has a collective mental breakdown allowing Joy Division to become the best band in the city. However their success was not to last. At the height of their fame – Ian begins to experience troubling visions of owls onstage. During these hallucinations he is implored by God (who sounds eerily like Tony Wilson) to “swat exactly 450 of the freaky-beaked bastards” otherwise he’ll be forced to live in a shed with Hooky and his bean-farts for the rest of the year.

Sometime between 1979 and 1980 Ian begins to have an affair with a Belgian Boiler called Rick Honore. Ian was approached by Rick after a gig in Antwerp, bragging that he ‘had the biggest cock in Ghent’  and that ‘he longed for ‘the beef of a ‘ready salted’ type of boy’. Curtis and Honore then fall madly in love but Ian has commitments back home…

After listening to David Bowie and chowing down 50 Magic Mushroom pills one Saturday night, Ian felt he could rack up his guilt no longer and racked himself good and proper.

We are then treated to an extended moving epilogue read by Peter Hook who explains that Ian killed himself to escape nightly recurring wank-fantasies featuring him and Terry Nutkins frolicking around Deansgate with nothing but songs of love and stonking hard-ons to pass the time with.

Aside from the stunningly emotive epilogue this film is really a missed opportunity and therefore only gets 2 nooses out of 10.

/10

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.

The song is littered with confounding fart noises from Sumner’s guitar and occasional interjections from Curtis about how he doesn’t know ‘which way to turn’ – a reference to both his general fedupness at the time and his desire to have Hooky sit on his sack of magic.

Throughout Joy Division’s existence he was subject to a media gagging order by Ian Curtis who felt that if the guitarist mouthed off about his love for Kebabs, Carlsberg and glue during interviews he’d ruin the air of mystique surrounding the band.

Sumner later waived the gagging order after Curtis’s death, forming New Order a dance band who specialized in writing songs about Kebabs, Carlsberg and glue.

He is now rumoured to be involved in a perpetual war with Peter Hook who purportedly mails him slabs of his own shit in the post.

The song in its entirety consists of Ian Curtis screaming ‘Feel it closing in’ and ‘Day in day out’ for 2:49. What exactly is ‘closing in’ is up for debate. I personally believe that he is referring to his own arsehole, bemoaning the fact that he hadn’t had a good shit since the Tony Tabac days.

If only Ian was intelligent enough to realize that living off a diet of chips and old wallpaper was not good form, then we wouldn’t have been so depressed and knocked himself off.

The pressing question here is – why the hell does Ian Curtis have to sound so constipated in this song?  If he’s trying to sound ‘moody’ then he fails miserably. He sounds like he needs a shit urgently, that’s all.

The cheesy guitar break ruins the whole song. Honest to God. It’s like something you’d hear in a 70’s porno. I can hear testicles bouncing off foreheads every time I listen to it.

The video to it is comedy gold. We’re introduced for the first time to Ian’s Robot dance that his fans love so much. What Joy Division fans don’t realize is that Ian does not dance like a robot. He looks like a lost old man on a treadmill in the midst of a dementia-induced panic attack.

The song itself starts with Ian Curtis moaning about how he always has people walking away from him in silence. Is he surprised? I mean the guy was hardly the heart and soul of the party, was he?

The backing music is like something off the soundtrack to a Christmas B-Movie where Santa turns out to be a lesbian and the kids get nothing for Christmas. It’s just plain bland and cheesy.

It continues on in a similar vein until we reach the climax of the song with the lyric “People like you find it easy”

Oh boo-hoo. Yes I find life perfectly easy. I woke up this morning with a godawful hungover and laid a turd of which the stench nearly made my family pass out.

I had to explain why it smelt so bad to my whole family. I could have been a whiny little bitch and wrote a moany meandering piece of nonsense like Atmosphere but I’m a better man than that. I have balls.