So This is Permanence by Ian Curtis

Author:Ian Curtis [Curtis Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2015-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

These lyrics – both draft and complete – were written to be sung with loud music that was at once brutal and unwavering, futuristic and increasingly sophisticated. They show a distinctive writing talent, cut short, that could well have flourished into middle age and beyond. Bernard Sumner thinks that if Ian ‘hadn’t committed suicide, he would probably have written a really good book’. Instead, there is a legacy of over forty songs that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century, together with notes and other prose fragments that give extra clues on how those songs were written.

Above all, the lyrics are the work of a young man of twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three. They capture the heightened emotions of a particular post-teenage state: the desire to be different and the searching for oddity and extremity, the violent mood swings between feeling omnipotent and hopeless, the dreadful sense that you’re never quite good enough, that you’re letting everyone down, and the immersion in books as an inspiration and a method, if you feel weird or different, of staving off isolation – ‘other people have felt like this, I’m not alone’.

Curtis felt himself emerging into a hostile world outside his control: ‘We’re living by your rules/ That’s all we know’. A powerful strand that weaves through the songs is the idea of ‘forgotten youth’ in a degraded, hostile society: in the late seventies, young people were at the sharp end of the neo-liberal economic and social experiment. As he wrote: ‘corruption – music biz, government business – everything. Dual standards hypocrisy restrictions those with no choice – social or intellectual position holds no bright prospects for future. Trapped in corners – solitary’.

Ian Curtis’s great lyrical achievement was to capture the underlying reality of a society in turmoil, and to make it both universal and personal. He felt the human cost of the economic and social restructuring that was occurring in the late seventies – and that still casts its malign shadow today. Distilled emotion is the essence of pop music and, just as Joy Division are perfectly poised between white light and dark despair, so Curtis’s lyrics oscillate between hopelessness and the possibility of, if not absolute need for, human connection.

jon savage, April 2014

‘Reality is only a term, based on values and well worn principles, whereas the dream goes on forever.’

ian curtis, handwritten note, circa 1979

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.