History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs Read Online Free PDF Page B

and The Sound and the Fury. The last, in particular, remains the exemplary American novel, perhaps the greatest work of fiction produced in the United States in the twentieth century. And it is no accident that its title comes from the bleakest passage in Shakespeare, or that its action begins inside the mind of an idiot. The point is insisted upon bluntly, almost too obviously: life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Here is the ultimate negation, the Hard No pressed as far as it will go. Yet “nothing” is not quite Faulkner’s last word, only the next to the last. In the end, the negativist is no nihilist, for he affirms the void. Having endured a vision of the meaninglessness of existence, he retreats neither into self-pity nor into a realm of beautiful lies. He chooses, rather, to render the absurdity which he perceives, to know it and make it known. To know and to render, however, means to give it form; and to give form is to provide the possibility of delight—a delight which does not deny horror but lives at its intolerable heart.
    Or, I read Faulkner —or Sartre, Nietzsche, Hesse, Ballard, Dostoyevsky, as Curtis did. He said that life was terrible. I wanted to get up and tell people life was terrible, too. That was the idea of the band. They had named themselves Joy Division after brothels in Nazi concentration camps filled with prisoners. “The oppressed, not the oppressors,” Hook insisted. “Quite punk,” everyone said: “Great name.”Their first record, a four-song EP called An Ideal for Living, featured a drawing of a boy who looked all too much like a member of Hitler Youth banging a drum. Their songs, taking them through Fiedler’s labyrinth of self-betrayal and weakness of nerve and coming out the other side, told them how much richer the idea was than such a picture, and how much more dangerous. As Tony Wilson would say of Joy Division when their real songs began to arrive, “Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you. Someone was going to want to say, I’m fucked.”
    Anton Corbijn could have called his film after Joy Division’s song “Atmosphere”—shooting in black and white, without dragging his camera over such punk antiurbanism clichés as blocks of rotting council housing or dead-end streets, he pictured Manchester as a place that in giving birth to the Industrial Revolution gave birth as well to an immiserating poverty so ingrained, so close to nature, that it foreclosed all possibilities of vanity or style. As the band members meet in apartments, as Curtis, working for a government employment office to find jobs for disabled people, talks to people who will never have a job, even the rooms seem to have clouds in them. “I found it very difficult to listen to,” Sumnersaid of the first Joy Division album, Unknown Pleasures, released in June 1979, except for “She’s Lost Control” all of the most memorable songs carrying titles of a single word: “Disorder,” “Shadowplay,” “Wilderness,” “Interzone.” It wasn’t that it didn’t make sense to Sumner, that he wondered where it all came from. That he could explain where it all came from so specifically, to the point of reduction—
It was because the whole neighborhood that I’d grown up in was completely decimated in the mid-sixties . . . When people say about the darkness in Joy Division’s music, by the age of twenty-two I’d had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realized then I could never go back to that happiness. So there’s this void. For me Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood. It was absolutely irretrievable.
    —suggested that there were far more threatening