Deciphering the Mystery of Joy Division
A new book explores how the group turned itself into a portal for some of the most alien and beautiful information ever to be broadcast through the medium of a rock-and-roll band.
The approach to Joy Division is forbidding. This band comes sealed in a myth of monumental severity, outside rock and roll to some degree, its achievement arrested at the point of maximum force by the suicide, in 1980, of singer Ian Curtis. Reading the fragmentary testimonies in , Jon Savage’s oral history of Joy Division, I was put in mind of “Cold Dark Matter,” the 1991 installation by the British artist Cornelia Parker. With the British army, Parker arranged for a garden shed to be blown up. Having meticulously recorded the explosion, she then collected and assembled the debris in a facsimile of the shed at the moment of
