Why I like what I like

 

Tonight I am going to see Control, the new biopic about Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis. Most of the people whose blogs I read have long since seen this movie, and I ‘ve read many of their reviews and impressions of the film; Simon Reynold’s review of the film in The New York Times is one of the better I’ll ever read, and his criticisms seem logical. In short, according to Reynold’s, The film dwell too much on Ian Curtis and not on the band, and makes the mistake of assuming that it was Ian Curtis, the towering but depressed genius, who was solely responsible for the sombre tone of Joy Division’s music, rather than the city of Manchester itself, and the time in which the music was made and performed (could Joy Division have existed in 1969, rather then 1979? I doubt it. It was unique to its time and place, like Godspeed You Black Emperor was during the late 1999’s).

I’m still excited to see the film, of course. I’ve been listening to Joy Division’s first album Unknown Pleasures all day, trying in some misguided way to…what? Soak up the ambiance? I suppose so. It made me think of why I like the album so much, which quickly led to me thinking about why I like anything at all. Not in a nihilistic way, but in an ontological fashion: why have I come to find Unknown Pleasures, as a whole, so potent, so creative, and able to keep my interest day after day, month after month, for several years now, while my patience for progressive rock, for instance, has faded away to nothing, except for some early Genesis and Van Der Graaf Generator?

I think it has much to do with feelings about aesthetics. I haven’t read a great deal of critical thought about the aesthetics of art, of any sort; a little Aristotle here, a smidgen of someone like Northrop Frye for a class years ago. I’ve read a great deal of Marxist criticism on literature, from Marx himself to Lukacs and Jamieson, but the same problem resurfaces. I studied English literature at University (not grammar, though that would have been nice to learn in high school!) but almost everything that the academic study of literature emphasizes has nothing to do with value judgments or aesthetic taste. I learned, nonetheless, useful skills, like parsing information, critically thinking about a book’s subject and themes, and most importantly, recognizing the biases of class, gender and everything else that work their way noiselessly and darkling into all creative works. Great, so I can analyze to death a novel, but what I like about it remains a little more indefinite, a little too slippery, like an eel on river side sod.

I’m quite certain nothing I can say about aesthetics has not been made before, better informed and more eloquently put. The nature of a blog puts it between personal journal and public editorial, so I always hesitate to talk about myself, especially when the average blogger, myself included, really isn’t that interesting! Nonetheless, why not put a good case forward for aesthetics vis-a-vi Joy Division?

I’ve come to the conclusion that unity is the single overriding element of any album, artwork or novel, or short story, or poem. Again, I’m certain many of you out there have already reached that conclusion, and it does seem self-evident, but hold with me. I tell people I like the song ‘London Calling’ but not the album, which, alongside Sandinista, is a mess. Individual songs on London Calling are great: the eponymous opener, ‘Guns of Brixton’ and ‘Spanish Bombs’ being some of my favourites. But the album as a whole? I never listen to it. Sandinista is even worse, as far as I’m concerned. The album has no unity, no greater overreaching sense of wholeness, of an artist or group consciously guiding the music in some direction. Undoubtedly, there is a single overreaching theme to Sandinista, one that is fairly obvious, but it is not enough to unite the album; the musical styles and the songs, in structure, lyrics, instrumentation, are all over the place. I once heard a friend of mine, a young whelp still, exclaim that she never needs to listen to anyone else but Pink Floyd, because they placed all sorts of different styles of music; you find the same sentiments about The Clash. Yes, I would respond, but they don’t play any of them really well: If I want free jazz, I’ll listen to Ornette Coleman, if I want reggae, then I’ll listen to reggae. I don’t have a problem with the melding of genres, not at all, and I’m fine with the kind of experimentation that leads to bands like !!! producing dub, for instance, and I eventually got use to the Gorillaz near-ruinous flirtation with rap, that though fine rap on its own, just didn’t go (that supreme spiritual rightness) with their music; what I don’t want are albums where every genre is thrown together like confetti puzzle pieces and expected to make a fully fleshed picture.

Unknown Pleasures, on the other hand, has a wide enough range of musical difference, different chord for different tracks, while still remaining with a unified parameter set by their instruments, Bernard Sumner’s guitars, Peter Hook’s bass, or Stephen Morris’ drums, Ian Curtis’ dreary, phantasmagoric lyrics, the hollowness of the production, the mood evoked. There is a world of difference between ‘Shadowplay’ and ‘I Remember Nothing’ and yet those songs feel right, they are united by a sound, by the instruments, the voice, in a way that the difference in subject or sound, between fast pace and pensiveness, and by thematic and atmospheric elements, the lyrics, the sound, that make it very clear that it is Joy Division and no one else we are listening too.

I suppose what I’m describing is voice, in the sense my English profs used to drill in: voice is that distinctive combination of syntax, theme and structure that allows us to recognize a poet, or any other artist, really, almost instantaneously.  It makes the artist unique, after all.  There is  no mistaking Joy Division for any one  else (though Section 25 veered a little  close sometimes).   Likewise, M. John Harrison, one of my favourite authors, is difficult to miss: his voice is unique, the combination of his characters, sensibilities, poetic language (about space battles and decaying mutants and strange cities) that is unlike any other author I have ever read.  It is also, by extension, what makes him good, and what makes many of the best writers stand out from the crowd; the vast majority of writers in fantasy and science fiction do not distinguish themselves in any way but through the minutiae they switch around in their scenarios; the language, the imagery, the themes remain constant, static, atrophying.

 Back to music.  Such musings may be trite, but they are surprisingly durable; perhaps I have retroactively made myself believe this fact, but every album, every book, every movie, even the few television shows I watch, have largely been works I consider to have a strong unity.  Gang of Four’s Entertainment?  Sure: incredible guitar, lyrics inspired by Marxist deconstruction of personal relationships and intimate social spaces, energy and drive, carried across song after song, united by theme, sound and a clear sense of what the band wants to say and have heard.  Van Der Graaf Generator’s H to He Who is The Only One?  Sure: Peter Hammill’s soaring vocals, the bitterness and isolation of loneliness carried across every line, every song, every word, brilliant sax work, a balance of song length to content (unlike Genesis, who I find very uneven in that regard).  I could go on: Arcade Fire’s funeral, The Knife’s Silent Shout.

This is not to say that a band can never change or move on, or that an artist should paint the same thing over and over again.  I would abhor that, but again, careening wildly between styles, genres and techniques, while experimentally satisfying, and even ultimately successful, does not always make for the best.  I consider, for instance, Closer by Joy Division and Songs of the Free by Gang of Four to be fairly successful continuations of what they started on their first albums, clearly going in new directions (a buzz word I realize) while retaining the sound and emotions that made them good in the first place.  I’m likewise glad that the Arcade Fire and The Knife both chose to push themselves and try newer, darker sounds, because their first work, whether the eponymous Arcade Fire EP or Deep Cuts were, in the former, rather uninteresting, shallow and far from unique or potent, while the latter, the same lack of unity presided, a scattered approach that I abhor.

Even in the visual arts it is unity of form and purpose I look for.  Max Ernst, for instance, though over seventy years his portfolio at a glance seems exactly what I described above as abhorent, is not.  There are definite phases or periods, more often described in light of say, Picasso, that occupy years and represent dozens or hundreds, in Ernst’s case, of paintings, collages and sculptures that represent a clear sense of style and theme, even if produced under the creative impulses of Surrealism, and its various spontaneous artistic techniques: Ernst moves from collage into his more famous ‘classical Surrealistl pieces (such as The Elephant Celebes) to decalcomania (such as Europe After the Rain) to geometric abstractions later on, but never entirely abandoning the sensibilities that had first produced his art.  Perhaps Ernst is not the best example, after all: the techniques of surrealism are in many ways opposed to that of ‘concentrated’  arts: but it hard not to look at works by Andre Masson or Urica Zurn and not see the same preoccupations thematically and stylistic turns appearing again and again, even as the artists experiment and push the boundaries of their art.

 

Obviously, visual arts and musical albums are slightly different in their presentation, and the demands of unity, and what precisely I mean by that, and can be meant by that, are difficult to judge and open to adjustment.  If I return briefly to music, my aesthetics of unity are violated by the culture developing of the iPod and the iTunes, the often trumpeted end of the album, in the the sense that an artist like, say, Deerhunter, produce works that are released one song and a time.  I don;t actually have the panic of many that this spells the end of albums, but it does mean trouble for the production of albums as works of unified art, tied by theme, sound and a driving idea, and the return of albums produced solely as repositories of songs, unconnected to each save by the name of the band and the instruments used.  This was, to an extent, the shape of albums before the rise of pop music like the Beatles, and it continues to be the shape of much mainstream Pop music to this day.  I suppose the fear is that albums will disintegrate, like books are doing now, even amongst the artistic types like myself most dedicated to the production of something unified, whole.  I can’t say that will happen, but I don’t fear: there is, after all, much more to worry about then if the music my children will listen to will come in a neat, little package.

 

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