Joy Division
Closer

Is it possible to draw a dividing line that can perfectly define a boundary within which any form of art, from the most complex to the most embryonic, from the highest to the lowest, can qualify as impersonal? And if it is not possible, when it interacts with some kind of real contingency, to what extent does it allow itself to be affected by the latter? These are questions I ask myself every time I write something: to what extent can what I write be influenced by my experiences, by the desire to do my best, and by the parallel apathy for continuous dissatisfaction, for my foolish prejudices, for the hatred that makes me feel small, for this cigarette that's about to go out. Each time it seems impossible to give a precise answer to each of these questions because no answer could assume general characteristics that could satisfy all the concrete cases that chance puts at our disposal and disadvantage. Thus, we have no choice but to analyze the particular rather than the universal. The particular case of my interest today is Joy Division's second studio work, released in 1980. Many will ask why. Because its beauty lies precisely in its becoming so inseparably intertwined with the life of Ian Curtis, the band's leader, and the band's own destiny that the sad autobiographical twist (Curtis would take his own life on May 18, 1980, by hanging himself) appears as the natural continuation of what the record conveys.

But "Closer" is not just a testament and, above all, it is not a melodramatic staging. It is a representation, an illustration of an inner world that can find no stability and reaches a point of implosion, aware that its ultimate end is self-destruction, as foreshadowed by the splendid cover depicting a tomb and figures in mourning attitudes (as many might know, the photo subject on the cover just described is the Appiani family funeral monument in Staglieno, near Genoa). "Closer" is an experience that every music lover should undertake, accompanied by Curtis's disenchanted and stern voice and those sounds on the verge of the spectral.

"Atrocity Exhibition" takes its name from the collection of short stories by the celebrated James Graham Ballard, a work from 1970 (translated in Italy as "La mostra delle atrocità," for those interested) which has at its basis a perverse taste for mental insanity, sexuality (if not pornography), macabre atmospheres. The track opens with Stephen Morris's drums that almost tribally adhere to Curtis's voice and his obsessive refrain "this is the way, step inside", an invitation to travel, to share his pain. Then you listen to "Isolation", you see Joy Division anticipate synth-pop and realize how much Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and Soft Cell owe to them, just to name a few. "Passover" arrives and once again that drum that seems to want to mimic the pulse of blood through veins, following an unsettling regularity and flowing beneath lyrics that aim to describe the chaos inside Curtis's head, that chaos which was combined with a disconsolate and desolate view of the world ("Colony"), certainly influenced by the pessimism to which his "great evil," epilepsy, had condemned him; which had led him to grow tired of his existence. But the best comes with "Heart and soul", another portrait of himself among fears, disappointments, manias, the most hypnotic track of the album, a manual of instructions for his malaise. We then move to "Twenty four hours" where the leader's droning tone matches perfectly with Sumner's monotonous guitar. A buildup of tension that finds release in the beautiful "The Eternal" with that piano distinctly imposing itself over distant sounds like echoes. The cathartic journey concludes with "Decades" where the band enshrouds itself in a nebulous, distant aura, almost as if it already wants to declare belonging to the past.

"Closer" shines with the charm of a twilight work, where a sense of end, dissolution, death reigns and its lyrics are the diary of a man who has already chosen to die because inside he cannot feel alive. It is a great poem of individual sentiment that at certain points will guard ambiguous, difficult, cryptic traits. Only one person could have explained them best, but as already mentioned, this person is unfortunately no longer here.

As Thumb would say, "A lasciarci per primi sono sempre i megli!"