A Joy Divided: On the Importance of Rock Music in My Life and Yours

1: THE FIRST PART ABOUT JOY DIVISION

This is not an essay about Joy Division, though I would like to begin it by talking about Joy Division.

I am not an authority on the history or techniques of the British rock band Joy Division. All of my knowledge of Joy Division The Band comes from Wikipedia. If you want to know about anything in detail, go there. Better yet, buy a book. Watch some documentaries. I haven’t done either, but I have listened to every song they’ve written a dozen times at the absolute minimum.

A friend of mine has a tattoo of the album cover of “Unknown Pleasures” on his left bicep. It’s an image you’ve probably seen, whether you knew or not. It’s a series of spiky white lines on a black background. It looks like a computer’s representation of a mountain range on another planet. It looks like a photo of a line made with a pencil taken under an electron scanning microscope. In fact, it is an image of radio waves recorded from the pulsar CP 1919.

My friend got the tattoo after a close friend of his killed himself. “Unknown Pleasures” had been his friend’s favorite album. I don’t know how often he listened to Joy Division before he got the tattoo. I don’t know if he listens to them now. I’m not sure I could still, if I was him.

The lead singer of Joy Division, Ian Curtis, hung himself in his kitchen in May, 1980. Even before I had knowingly listened to a single track by Joy Division, part of my brain registered the band’s name as ironic. I associated their act with gloom. I avoided listening to their music.

I want to take a moment to look back at a chain of events: A star emits a pulse of radio waves. An astronomer records them. The recording is published in an encyclopedia. A young man sees the picture in the encyclopedia. The young man asks an artist to make this picture into an album cover for his band. The young man hangs himself. Another young man listens to the album. He listens to it many times. He dies by his own hand. The star continues to pulse at regular intervals.

Do not mistake my reexamination of this chain of events for attributing the cause of one to the other. Specifically, of attributing listening to Joy Division to ending one’s life. I intend to do the exact opposite.

2: THE KIND OF POETRY I LIKE

Joy Division is not my favorite band. I am not sure I have a favorite band. I have a favorite album: “Source Tags and Codes” by …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. After writing that sentence, I got up, got my headphones, and began listening the album again. I have listened to it for at least once a month since I turned nineteen. I turned nineteen six years ago.

For me, it is a perfect album. I could understand someone―you, for example―not thinking it is a perfect album. Most of the people I’ve shared it with have come to that conclusion. When I first listened to it, I came to that conclusion.

On first listen, it’s too big. Too much noise, too many noises. Everything washes together. On first listen, it feels like listening to the color you make when you’re first given watercolor paints, and you mix all the colors together to make the best color in the world. Once you’ve listened to it a dozen times, it feels like you’re listening to the individual brush strokes of an incredible oil-painting.

However, the first time you listen, you’re glutted with rich guitar. You’re disoriented as songs fade into street noise, party chatter, old records, and then come exploding back to life. You can’t tell if Conrad Keely’s voice is melodic, grating, or too emo-inflected for your tastes. Eventually, you accept all of these things, you understand them, and you learn to live in the warm womb of sound the album grows around you.

“Source Tags and Codes” is a perfect album for the following reasons:

1. Every song is distinct. This is the hardest aspect to appreciate on first listen, as it’s hard to even tell when a song ends and another begins. Yet once you’ve become truly acquainted with its arrangement, you realize that every piece of “Source Tags and Codes” offers something different―without reinventing the band’s sound, without forcing them into uncomfortable corners. Each song has a different structure, uses subtly different sounds and tones, and delivers a distinctive, gut-grabbing hook. Sometimes it’s a repeated phrase, or an opening smattering of piano notes, or the way a crescendo crests and falls on its own reverb.
2. The lyrics are the kind of poetry I like. This is unusual. Normally, lyrics are at the bottom of my concerns for rock music. At best, the vocalization works as an additional instrument. Sometimes, they can tell a story and give the fuzz and drumbeat some context. I’m indifferent to that practice―often, it makes a song less appealing on repeat listens. I grow bored of the predictable little story while ignoring the part that’s actual music. At their worst, rock lyrics are dumb and distracting. Trail of Dead do more than strike the right balance. They do something completely their own. Their lyrics don’t play off any existing rock tropes. They aren’t willfully obtuse, yet they don’t describe anything concrete or clear. They’re meant to be sung. They’re beautiful without trying to be beautiful, poetic without acknowledging poetry. They don’t feel dated or ahead of their time, they are timeless. They never take a misstep. Like the rest of the album, they cohere to a rigorous, indefinable internal logic. Let’s take a look at some of my favorites, as I try to find out why they’re some of my favorites: “You picked me up and we went for a drive / Into the stained-glass cavern of the night. / You turned to say, your eyes fixed on the road, / ‘Take me from this place I know, / This ruined landscape that I once called home.’” I like the banality of the setup: going for a drive with a friend or lover, nowhere in particular, just indulging in that suburban pastime or time-sink we try to mistake for freedom. Then, a phrase so perfect that it’s attached itself to the inside of my head since I first heard it: “Stained-glass cavern of the night.” The final couplet captures exurban ennui and King-James-Biblical levels of grandeur in perfect, equal measure. It is a sentence that says both and neither, an illusion that changes shape as you focus on it. These words, allusive on the page, take on even more power as part of a river of verse and sound.
3. Great cover art. For about three months, I thought the cover was an attractive abstract, fiery orange background with the band logo on top. Then, lying in bed, half-drunk and trying to sleep, I saw her. Like the music itself, out of an overwhelming and formless fugue, comes something beautiful and familiar: a woman’s face.
4. I first heard it when I was nineteen. While I do think “Source Tags and Codes” is an Objectively Perfect Album, I can only admit that yes: I am biased. We are all biased. Any art we consume is immediately contaminated by our point of view. By our childhood, by the books we’ve read, by what we had for breakfast: all conspire to drown our objectivity in the bathtub. It can’t be helped. I heard this album when I was in the process of becoming a (somewhat) complete person. I heard it at a time of heightened sensitivity to new things, new experiences. I can only look back on everything I touched and everything that touched me then through triple rose-coated lenses. Still, I listened to a great deal of music then, and have listened to a great deal more since. There’s only one album I’ve heard at least once a month for the past five years.

Unfortunately, no other album by Trail of Dead reaches the knees of “Source Tags and Codes”. But for me, it is the only album. I will say that “Lost Songs”, “Madonna”, and “The Secret of Elena’s Tomb” are all worth a listen, though.

3: IN WHICH I SAY GOODBYE TO ONE OF MY CHILDHOODS

In March of this year, I got the chance to see Trail of Dead perform “Source Tags and Codes” live in its entirety. This is what happened.

I arrived in the city in the mid-afternoon. I’d arranged to meet Collin at Grand Central, then check into the Airbnb I’d booked in the East Village. We went downtown. Rain started throwing itself at the sidewalks. We went into an organic, independent, fair-trade coffee shop. I got an Americano, he got a latte. When I tried to pay for my beverage upfront, the world’s most chill barista responded, “Nah man, we don’t worry about that money stuff here.” We sat down. We watched the rain. We talked. I got an email on my phone; it was from my Airbnb host. She’d left the keys at an artisanal cupcake bakery across the street. We went to the bakery. I got the keys and a cupcake. The cupcake was dry, but the keys got us through the door. The apartment was a spotlessly clean hallway with a kitchen placed midway through, and a bed at the far end. It was full of neatly organized racks, trays, and baking materials. I began to hypothesize that my host was a baker who used this space as her test kitchen, sleeping in the adjacent bedroom as she waited for a giant lemon tarts to set, renting it out the rest of the time. It would suit my needs just fine.

After more talking, we left to get dinner. We went into the first Mexican restaurant we could find. We drank margaritas and ate a big black volcanic-stone bowl of guacamole. Some Jameson sales representatives came in and gave us whiskey and ginger ales in exchange for our pictures. I was feeling good.

I said farewell to my friend and rushed off to the Bowery Ballroom. My tickets said doors open at eight, so I was there at eight. When I arrived, I immediately learned a great deal about the time one arrives for a rock show.

I sat down at the bar and ordered a double Jameson on the rocks (that sales rep stuff works). I was told I needed to get a wristband from the bouncer. I did. I got my whiskey. It was less a double and more a pint. I was able to sip it all evening. At nine the doors opened. I was able to get a seat at a table on the very tip of the balcony. The theater began to fill with men who looked exactly like me. Glasses, jeans, collared shirts, muted colors. There were a few dedicated followers of punk and Goth fashion and a few of the most beautiful women, but mostly guys who looked like me. I offered the seats at my table to a pregnant woman and her fiance. They were in their early thirties. They lived in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was a computer programmer, she was a kindergarten teacher. She was the Trail of Dead fan. They were adorable.

The show opened with a set by Midnight Masses. Their lead guitarist was one of the guitarists in Trail of Dead. They were okay.

Next was La Femme. At first, they seemed out of place. La Femme are a band of five to six people, depending on the song. They are from Paris. Their lineup consists of: two singers, two-to-three keyboardists, a guitarist, a drummer, a thereminist, and someone who hits a strange block-like instrument I couldn’t identify. The musicians on stage swap and share responsibilities: sometimes the guitarist plays theremin, sometimes one of the singers plays keyboard, et cetera. From their initial setup on stage, it looked like they could not have the rock. How could they? One guitarist? Three keyboards? Impossible, I and the audience assumed.

We were mistaken. They played a hot set of sixties-French-pop-inflected psychedelic surf rock. Their album, “Psycho Tropical Berlin”, feels like the soundtrack to a lost experimental science-fiction noir. I fell a bit in love with one of their lead singers. When not singing, she spent her time on stage dancing like a Parisian Uma Thurman at a darker, louder Jackrabbit Slim’s.

Then, Trail of Dead came on. They launched right into the opening of “It Was There That I Saw You”. They played “Source Tags and Codes” in its entirety with barely a break. Then they played every other excellent song from every other album. Then they left.

It was a strange experience, hearing the songs I’d cherished and memorized thrown back at me with a new ferocity and in new interpretations after decades of practice and acquired skill. It was strange to see older, fattening career musicians revising the work of their younger, wannabe independent rockstar selves. The concert was, in its way, a gift to me and the handful of weirdos like me who have drowned the inside of their heads with this music. I now have two copies of “Source Tags and Codes”. One static, flawless version I can consult at any time, in any place. One made only of the sound in the air at a rock venue. The second is a messier, imperfect memory of an original. But it is truer, more organic. It is forever attached to real people and real moments that have passed away like the rest.

As I said goodbye to my table companions, I wondered if―after absorbing all that noise in vitro―the child being carried by the woman across from me would grow up to be the savior I’d been hoping for.

As I left the Bowery Ballroom, machine gun rain peppered every surface. I walked back along those strange streets umbrellaless, thinking about the time in my life that was coming to an end; I was bidding farewell to one childhood, and saying hello to another.

4: NESTLED BETWEEN WALLS

I have been playing guitar for one year in total. I started playing guitar because, in all the music I like, someone plays a guitar. This was not always the case.

I went through a phase of only liking electronic music. I told myself that I “didn’t like the sound of guitars.” I listened to a lot of different types of music, but few where the guitar-playing was something I noticed.

Then, I finally listened to Radiohead, instead or hearing them on the radio. The first time I heard “Karma Police”, I was glued to my screen. When I heard, “No Surprises”, I cried. I thought they would be my favorite band forever. I was seventeen.

Instead, Radiohead were the perfect bridge for my growing tastes to march along, straddling electronic music, alternative rock, and whatever the name for the assortment of sounds I look for in my music is called (I just call it “rock”).

I first heard Trail of Dead through Pandora, the online radio / streaming service. I liked one of their songs, not from “Source Tags and Codes.” I didn’t seek out more. Only later, as I circled round the drain of weirder, harder rock music, did I bump into “Source Tags and Codes” on a list of the greatest albums of all time. I listened to it, was intrigued, didn’t fall in love. However, crucially, something made me download it, so that I could listen to it later. The rest isn’t history (yet).

The first time I genuinely tried to mess around with a guitar, I had just finished university. Someone had left a shiny black acoustic in our living room. I had what felt like infinite amounts of free time, so I tried to learn a thing or two. The first thing I learned was how to tune it. The second, how to play G Major. Then, the guitar’s owner reclaimed his instrument. Still interested in learning, I borrowed Collin’s hand-me-down nylon stringed classical guitar. I used this for two weeks before buying my own acoustic at a charity shop

Some people will tell you that to learn electric guitar, you need to start on an acoustic. I disagree with this sentiment: you should learn on what you want to play. However, I can understand it. Learning on an acoustic and, even better, a classical, teaches the mechanical skill of playing guitar in a stark and concrete way.

I never knew about―but became fascinated by―the way that playing guitar (and any instrument) was such a physical activity. Before you learn rhythm or tab or meter, you have to learn how to hold the guitar. Then you have to learn how to hold a plectrum (or pluck with your fingers). Then you have to begin training your fingers to push down on the strings along the neck. Then you have to learn where you should be putting your fingers. Then you have to learn how to move your fingers. Then you have to learn how to play notes with your right hand while simultaneously contorting your left hand into a number of uncomfortable postures. You have to do this until your left hand is strong enough to consistently make chord shapes. Then you can start learning the first thing about playing a song on your guitar.

The best part about learning on a non-electric instrument is the appreciation one gains for sound. Not that you couldn’t learn the same on an electric, but at least for me, using an acoustic instrument made several obvious, science-class facts real.

Sound is vibration moving through the air. Different vibrations make different sounds. These vibrations are governed by absolute mathematical laws that are uniform throughout our physical world. A guitar string of a certain length, thickness, and taughtness will always make the same sound. An acoustic guitar is simply a holder and amplifier for the vibrations of these strings. By holding them down against a fret board, we shorten them and can make new notes. We now sit on the precipice of the bottomless depths of musical theory, so let’s step away from the edge before I say anything more incorrect than I already have.

I began playing the guitar knowing I would not be great, and expecting not to be great. This was one of the many reasons I hadn’t picked up an instrument earlier. As a child, I had the unhealthy mindset that I shouldn’t do something unless I could be great at it. To me, this meant that I either had to have prodigious undiscovered natural talent, or start from a very young age. I knew I wasn’t musically inclined―I didn’t listen to tons of music, I wasn’t drawn to any instrument, I didn’t have perfect pitch―and since violin prodigies started at the age of four, and I was already ten, that was off the table. It genuinely did not occur to me until I was nineteen that I could learn and play music not because I wanted to be the best in the world, but because it was a relaxing, enjoyable hobby.

So I bought my first instrument with the mindset of making guitar playing a routine and enjoyable side course throughout the meal of my life. I might be very bad for a great while, but I would enjoy it, and after five years or so, maybe I’d be quite good?

When I left university, I left my acoustic. I received my first electric guitar and amplifier on my twenty-third birthday. I went to a shop with my dad in Bridgeport and purchased it from a middle-aged jazz guitar aficionado. At first he thought I was a jerk for coming in and asking for a starter guitar. He told me to go to Guitar Center. I was, for once in my life, undeterred. My dad asked him about a special collection of guitars a friend had told him were kept in the shop. The aficionado lit up. He showed us around. I asked him questions. Eventually, he pulled a beautiful Les Paul copy out from behind his desk. It had a warm, rich, natural wood finish, with mother-of-pearl inlays along the fretboard. It was the guitar I imagined I would own. He told us it had been made for him, but he had to get rid of it. His wife said he had too many guitars, and this was one of the ones he was giving up. He had been saving it for a charity case, he hoped someone would buy it with their last dollar. I was not that someone. He gave me a good deal anyway. I bought a big Fender digital amp, too. I resumed playing that night.

I try to play an hour per day, six days a week. I do scales and exercises, I try to learn songs, I mess around. I only have one goal in my guitar playing: one day, I want to be good enough to play music with at least one other person, in front of at least one other person.

In my attempt, I’ve learned something: there is a great joy in making music. It is a different joy than creating something more lasting―like writing, for example. The music you make only lasts as long as it rings in the ears of anyone who can hear it. It is an impermanent expression. It is a joy divided―divided between the thrill of creating, and the sweetness of losing. It is a pure joy. We can record music, we can make something beautiful and lasting, but it is live music that really lives. For me, for rock, joy exists nestled between rising, falling, disappearing walls of sound.

5: THE SECOND PART ABOUT JOY DIVISION

“There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen.”

Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain”

Joy Division is a band that sound markedly different live and recorded. This is due to the pioneering techniques of producer Martin Hannett. His experiments, both in recording and in post-production, lend Joy Division an expansive, unearthly sound. Wikipedia tells me that he went as far as to record different pieces of drum kit independently. As you can imagine, the band would have been physically unable to replicate the sound of their albums in a live performance. Listen to a song like “Atmosphere”. It perplexes, its sound defies logic. Joy Division’s studio albums feel as cold and airless as a collapsed Siberian mine shaft.

Forgetting their tragic circumstances, on first appraisal the band’s records are not exactly jolly. I would argue that, in being recorded, some things were lost, others gained. It is an extreme example of a question that arises when you interrogate your appreciation of any recording artist: what did they give me, and what is it missing? Was some vital energy lost in the process of being compressed into an MP3, for example? Or in the circumstances of the recording studio itself, where there are do-overs and mixes and all manner of wizardries to be done between changing impermanent sound into something that lasts?

I think, after listening to a great deal of Joy Division, I know what’s changed. I think it’s part of the reason listening to the band can feel so claustrophobic and heavy (not often in a bad way).

The recording of Joy Division highlight their genius and liveliness by restraining their essential quality. Somewhere, the joy of making was inverted. This does not mean their music is not enjoyable, that it is not beautiful and interesting, just that it is different from their live shows and what it could have been. The recording has made it so cold and hard and dark, it takes time to peer through the frozen surface to see the teeming pond beneath.

I read a quote from a recent interview with one of Ian Curtis’s former bandmates. He says that they were in denial about his depression, that they should have been able to see it in the lyrics and sound of their music. I don’t know if they necessarily should have.

This is because, what I think makes Joy Division great, what is subdued but undeniable in their studio albums and gushes from their live recordings, is an absolute thirst for life, for living, for striving and creating with every breath. Making music, making sound, is a refutation of nothingness. It is creating something from nothing. There is a wild, terrible, beautiful, childlike, animal joy in making it. Listen to the live recording of “Transmission” from the Collector’s Edition of Unknown Pleasures. Tell me that every second doesn’t drip with vitality, with the need to keep creating to keep living.

Someone, somewhere, makes something from nothing. They make it for the pure joy of making it. Somehow, they shrink it down, package it, make it something repeatable and shareable. We find this, this thing. We carry it with us. Tattoo it on our skin. We let it change our thoughts. We let it grow inside us. We get a piece of that joy. We are reminded that, though we’ll fade out, like a guitar string left singing into silence, we can divide our joy and share it and leave it behind.

That’s why I’ll keep practicing. I’ll keep making somethings from nothing, until nothing is left.