I hated the 80's when they were going on. And so did everybody else, as far as I remember. Every time someone mention the 80's in any kind of serious context, it was never flattering. Conservatives hated the cheapening popular culture, the complete mindlessness of sexn'drugsn'rockn'roll without even the pretense of Romantic ambition to justify it. Liberals hated the laissez-faire economics and cold-warring of the Reagan Administration. Hippies hated getting old. Punks hated being ignored. When New Years Day 1990 came around, everyone was ecstatic that the old bad days were over.
Heh.
I especially hated the music of the 80's. I didn't like metal, heavy or glam, I didn't like New Wave, I didn't like rap. Everything was either limp-wristed, sybaritic, or psychotic. Where could a kid find a nice simple Rock sound, unadorned and unashamed?
We've gotten plenty of that in the ensuing years, more, perhaps then ever we really wanted or needed. But I eventually came to peace with the music of my youth, by the simple method of discovering and appreciating its antecedents. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, boys and girls; New Wave will invariably fall on deaf ears until you've heard and absorbed the Old Wave. So it is, by following grunge back to punk and following rock from the 50's through the 60's and 70's, I stumbled upon Joy Division, and heard the soundtrack to my youth that I'd missed.
"Heart and Soul" begins with a throbbing bass line, is joined by drums that seem to pop and crack open when hit, like machine guns at the bottom of a well, and then meets up with chilled guitars and Ian Curtis' trademark voice-from-beyond-the-grave. The result is 5 minutes and 51 seconds of speeding, pumping melancholy.
So why pick this one from the wealth of Joy Division's catalogue? It ain't like they have a shortage of good tunes. Mostly because this song is a rumination on one of the subject matter of one of the most popular cliches in pop music: the heart, source of love, and the soul, which gets noticed whenever it's being tortured. There are a plethora of songs by a variety of artists with exactly this title, But this is the only one that seems to stand up to the weight of the material. Most of them toss away the heart and the soul like freeway tolls: "I fell in love with you, Heart and Soul," "My Heart and Soul are yours," "Take my Heart and Soul, Please!" Here's Joy Division's take:
Heart and Soul
What will burn?
Which is real, the blood valve whose stoppage means death and decomposition or the ethereal ghost in the organic machine? Is there an answer? If not, why not? And can we even begin to find our way out of asking such questions as these?
For Joy Division, and for most of the New Wave, there wasn't, which made it all the easier to dismiss the questions as a pose, but one helix of the music industry business cycle. And by the time we got to the aforementioned Kajagoogoo, such criticism may even have been just. But it wasn't always so. And if I can admit that, then just about anyone can.
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