Control

It’s hard to narrow down all the great music of my lifetime to an even dozen, or twenty, or even 100, let alone a single act that would encapsulate an age, but Joy Division would come as close as any to being that band. I’ve been trying to get friends to start a Joy Division cover band for several years now, but I don’t think I need to do that anymore, because Anton Corbijn’s “Control” did that for me.

The first thing that a music pic should do is convey a love for that music, and that I think that is the strongest point of Corbijn’s film. Joy Division recordings are mixed in with the “Control” band’s renditions, and the band, led by singer Sam Riley in the Ian Curtis role, do a credible job of channeling the original’s musicianship and energy. At times, the soundtrack swells, like the sound engineer was a teenager turning the receiver up to “11”, and with classic cuts like “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” blasting out of the big theatre speakers coupled with Corbijn’s music video imagery, my hunger as a fan was fed.

Much of the film’s narrative was based on “Touching from a Distance”, a biography of Ian by his wife, Deborah Curtis. Corbijn, who knew Ian Curtis personally and was one of the band’s photographers, went to the closest source material he could find to fill out Ian’s biography, and to the degree that the movie is Deborah Curtis’s recounting of events, it is the tale told by a rather provincial English girl, in love with the poetic rock n’ roller next door but neither understanding nor accepting of the world in which he moved. In this telling, Ian’s tragedy is one of a life doomed by his love of two women (his wife Debbie and his mistress, an exotic Belgian siren named Annik) in tandem with his drug use, his epilepsy, and the callousness of the music world that wanted more from him than he was prepared to give.

It is a vision colored in large part by Deborah Curtis’ weepy eyed English Romanticism. Of course, Ian would kill himself because of his conflicted love for two women. I mean, didn’t Romeo and Juliet die for love? So why not a Wordsworth-quoting singer like her husband? It’s a valid view of the man, she was certainly a lot closer to the action than most, but I don’t think that it is a definitive portrait. With Joy Division still sounding as relevant as ever, with many of their songs beginning to approach the timeless quality of a Mozart or Miles Davis, I suspect it won’t be the last one, either.

Perhaps the freshest insight “Contact” gives us into the poetry of Ian Curtis is how he reflected the culture of industrial northern England, how Ian’s recital of a Wordsworth poem as a young teen, something he might have picked up in the local public school, dovetails with his own poetry, how his pleasures outside of his writing and his music are kind of quaint and very English, down to his favorite color being “Manchester Blue”, that of the local soccer team.

The film quoted the following excerpt from “Touching from a Distance”, taken from a poem that Ian wrote to Debbie on Valentine’s Day when he was just 16 years old: “All New York city’s broken hearts and secrets would be mine, I’d put you on a movie reel and that would be just fine.” Which is both emotionally intense and oddly innocent, and provides the context for a young man who 7 years later would sing: “Beyond all this good is the terror, the grip of a mercenary hand, when savagery turns all reason, there’s no turning back, no last stand. Heart and soul, one will burn.” It’s dark stuff, sure, but exciting in that its an original voice in the cultural wilderness, unmitigated by the demands of commerce or rock cliché.

The common line on Ian Curtis is that, a classic tale of a young rock god who died too young, he can encompass all of our myths about rock ‘n roll without any of the baggage. Like Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Holly, we never have to watch him grow old, to make a mediocre album, to sell out to a life as English gentry or Hollywood foppery. But I think this is selling the tragedy short.

When Kurt Cobain died, I, like thousands of others, went into a brief state of depression, not so much because of who he was or what he’d done, but because of what he could have been. Sure, “Bleach”, “Nevermind”, and “In Utero” were all great records, but it also seemed like Nirvana was on the cutting edge of something of more general importance, that millions of kids around the planet were getting turned on to the same song at the same time, and with this collective enthusiasm for something intense, for something that was honest and real, came the prospect that the world could change, that one day we would wake up and the sky would be purple, just because we willed it so. I know it sounds goofy, but that’s how it felt listening to them.

I never thought that I would say this, but with over a decade of perspective after Cobain’s death, I now think that the suicide of Ian Curtis was probably the greater loss. While Nirvana wrote a bunch of great music, a lot of it, at least to my ears, now sounds dated, a product of the environment around it at the time, a blending of hard rock chord patterns with “alternative rock” song structure and sentiment. However, Joy Division remains timeless, a musical font to which I keep returning, a pure melding of sonic electricity, of poetry, of song.

I could recite the musical advances of the band, such as Peter Hook’s use of a 6-string bass, the higher range allowing him to take over the melody line while Sumner’s guitar focused on creating a wall of sonic ambience that played off this melody. Or I could discuss my theory that punk rock broke down a wall so that is was once again cool for white teens to make white sounding music, focusing on the front beats, unlike all of the blues inspired rock of the 1960’s and 70’s, that “post punk” is an all-encompassing term used to categorize all the bands playing out this idea, and that no band did this with more intensity than Joy Division, that they did it first and they did it better. Or I could point to the dozen or two brilliant songs later penned by Sumner, Hook, and Morris after they went on to form New Order, posing the obvious question: Just how good would they have been with Ian still fronting the band? However you pose it, the loss of Curtis’ voice and what it could have meant for music, for the planet, for my life, is huge.

I think that in one sense that is what killed both Curtis and Cobain, or more exactly what drove each of them to take their own lives: that they both realized the genius of what they were doing and it scared the shit out of them, if for no other reason than they weren’t sure if they could keep it up, that each of them were in a creative state of grace, driven in no small part by their cockeyed psyches, minds that had tasted more deeply of existence than most of us mortals, and that this was a creative peak upon which they could not forever stand.

As Curtis sang in “Decades”: “Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders, Here are the young men, well where have they been? We knocked on the door of Hell’s darker chamber, Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in.”

It is this spirit, of a life given totally in an effort to see wider and feel more intensely and then to convey this feeling through music, that I celebrated while watching “Control”.

The Passion of a Waning Age

For the past couple of years, I have been writing these occasional comments on music and culture, subjects that matter to me, dissing a healthy array of rock gods along the way, from Henry Rollins to the Beatles, and I barely made a ripple amongst the small group of friends who read my blog, other than the occasional exhortation to keep up the good work. But let me cast a jaundiced eye on a professional baseball team, and the bats of Hell break loose. I got a couple of choice emails, one of which I responded to, and before I know it, I am being labelled a "fag" by a U.S. soldier currently serving in Iraq, and our once friendly debate is being compared to the Troubles by an Irish pub owner in Chicago.

Now that the storm has passed, what bothers me is not the reaction to the Cubs blog but the fact that none of my comments about culture or music could stir a similar furror. Maybe it’s a sign that we live in an age of distraction, where the trivial takes up more and more of our individual and collective energies. Or maybe my friends and readers don't get excited about the same stuff I do. Or maybe folks just really love their baseball.

Until I wrote about the White Sox and the Cubs, about the only truly down-and-dirty comment I got in reaction to this blog was from an old cohort, who told me to quit being a self-indulgent Baby Boomer, which were truly fighting words, as I wear my antipathy pinned to my sleeve against that most obvious of generations. I blame it for laying waste to any sense of intellectual complexity in our country, replacing it with an obsession for the visual, a mental cul-de-sac it backed into around the time most of its greatest minds were dropping acid and staring at blacklight posters in their dorm rooms, Pied Pipers leading an entire generation to misconstrue its vapid selfishness for an actual philosophy.

I will note that I was born in 1961, which in some circles may put me on the tail end of the Baby Boom, but us So Cal beach kids grew up hating all those fucking hippies, most of whom were invaders from other parts of the country. We witnessed first hand their vacant lives in their condos up the smoggy boulevard from the beach, wooing ladies in their Jacuzzis with their Cuervo Gold and their fine Columbian. Fuck them. I’m Gen X and proud, if you must label me in that kind of way. Beach punks never were and never will be Baby Boomers. We are an antidote to that disease, thank you very much.

A couple of weeks ago, Melissa and I went to see the National with a buddy from work. It was a great show. As I’ve stated on an earlier post, their songs have a lyricism reminiscent of the great rock poets, like Leonard Cohen minus the unweaned self indulgence, and while the National have borrowed heavily from the clear, harmonic guitars of the early 80’s, in particular pioneers like Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner, they twist these sounds into something new, with a dual guitar counterpoint, a Thin Lizzy of the New Wave, and then throw in some soaring melody lines on the violin for good measure.

I know that I’ve become a bit of a curmudgeon in my middle age and am particular about how the crowd around me reacts to a band. The alchemy between musician and audience is a somewhat random thing, a gift of the musical gods, and I don’t quite get the new rock crowds, making a big display of how hard they are rocking out one minute and then texting on their cell phones the next, or running off to get another beer, or shouting small talk amongst one another, seemingly oblivious to the music around them until it suits their needs, like a video game on pause, or perhaps a part of real life that they would just as soon Tivo over. Well, I’m sorry, I did not want to Tivo over one minute of that night at the Vic, and so it was odd hanging with those kinds of people.

One explanation is that small scale, underground rock has gone mainstream, attracting its fair share of guys with MBA’s slumming for the night and girls trying a different flavor than their normal singles bar vanilla. I actually find this a reassuring idea, in that the more exposure folks have to good music, the better.

However, I also think that music has become background fodder for a lifestyle, to be tried on and then stuck back in a dark closet when you’re done with it for the evening. Back when I was in college, even the guys who liked Bruce Springsteen REALLY liked Bruce Springsteen. If the Boss was going to play a four-hour show at the Sports Arena, these guys would be standing for the entire four hours cheering him on, and they would talk about little else for the next several days.

Music was a passion for most kids my age. I found the most interesting facet of Allan Bloom’s dyspeptic “The Closing of the American Mind” not all the hand wringing about the decline of Western letters but Bloom’s near-incredulous description of how much popular music meant to his circa 1980’s student, writing about this attitude with scrupulous detail, like he was constructing a travelogue on the rites of passage among a cargo cult in Papua New Guinea.

At some point in the past twenty years, music has gone back to its status as just one of many entertainment and cultural options, and Bloom, while I’m sure he would have plenty of other issues with them, would at least not be confused by the attitude of the current batch of college kids towards “popular music”, as I believed Bloom called it, because that musical obsession is now only shared by a relative handful of oddballs. The huge crowds at events like Lollapalooza and the annual Pitchfork Festival bear witness to the music’s popularity, but I don’t think the intensity my generation felt when first going to see the Clash or the Birthday Party is there.

A symbol for this regression is the revival of Kiss, a fact which I find hard to believe as, other than “Detroit Rock City”, there really aren’t any good Kiss songs to revive. Even when they were young, the band’s stage presence consisted mostly of Simmons’ tongue calisthenics and Paul Stanley’s chest hair. With mediocre songs and no moves, no wonder they resorted to face paint. Kiss is rock music for people who hate rock ‘n roll. But for some odd reason, a lot of 20-somethings take to them, in the same way they take to Boston, and Foreigner, and 80’s hair bands, and even Air Supply, anything with enough camp to stand out, to remind them of an innocent age when gawky white guys could do embarrassing things on stage and yet be wildly popular.

When the kids at Lollapalooza cheer Iggy Pop, when young women swarm on stage to French him and grab his crotch, it melts the cockles of my rock ‘n roll heart, as here possibly the greatest musical presence of the last 40 years is finally getting his due. But then I wonder, are the kids rushing the Stooges stage at Lollapalooza the same ones who sang to Quiet Riot songs at the bar last night, the same kids who paid $60 to see Gene Simmons do tongue pushups and roll his eyes like a stuffed animal? Does this new generation know the difference between Iggy’s real outrage and these other types of mock outrageousness, between a phenomenon and a puffed-up pussy? My guess is that some do and some do not, and in the end the best hope is that it is the smarter ones and the ones who care about music with the same passion that me and my friends had back in the day, it is these smarter, passionate members of the next generation who will be the ones writing the history of our waning age.

Here’s to them.