It seems Joy Division is all the rage right now, what with the Ian Curtis biopic Control all set to wow music dorks everywhere and, as I noticed this morning while updating our Releases page, a new boxset of some kind coming out in September.
I didn’t know much about music history, especially things like post-punk, when I first heard Unknown Pleasures. It absolutely blew me away. It showed me that amazing things were hidden away in the past, musical treasures that ordinary MTV-watchers never heard about. And still now, nothing gives me goosebumps like “She’s Lost Control”. It is probably the single most haunting song ever recorded – all industrial echoes and empty pain. I didn’t know anything about Ian Curtis’ life and troubles when I first fell in love with it but even so, it felt like a kind of sadness that even Joy Division themselves couldn’t match on any of their other songs. Once you learn about the story of the song, the whole thing is unbearably tragic. Chris Ott, in his volume of the 33 1/3 series, Unknown Pleasures, writes:
["She's Lost Control"] was written about an epileptic woman who would often turn up at the Macclesfield Employment Exchange looking for work; when she stopped coming in, Curtis wrote the comparatively normal, descriptive lyrics about her, but as his own epilepsy took hold, the song grew to have awful implications, especially after he learned she’d died.
It’s true, the lyrics are basically simple and, on their own, don’t have nearly the same effect as when combined with that repetitive, slow bassline and those drums like a heartbeat, not to mention Ian Curtis’ deep drone that gives nothing away yet reveals everything. (Imagine it sung by someone with a more emotive singing style – it wouldn’t have half the power Ian Curtis gives it.) As heartbreaking as the song and its background are, it’s absolutely perfect.
Joy Division – She’s Lost Control
Filed under: Classics, Music Tagged: | Joy Division, Post-Punk
