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Two bars in control

By Tara Brabazon - posted Wednesday, 17 October 2007


“Angels” is a fine song, but it is a ballad used by ugly boys at discos to stick their tongue in the ear of some unwilling pubescent girl. For me, there was only one choice from the list, and the BBC complainants generally agreed.

Tom: While I am biased in that I thought Love Will Tear Us Apart should have won …

Laura: It [Angels] certainly isn’t anywhere near as good as Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division or Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush.

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Lee: Have Radio 2 listeners even heard of Joy Division? A band who, through two albums, have had a bigger impact on music, and continue to do so, over the last 25 years than Robbie Williams ever will.

The punters’ passionate certainty in their determinations was fascinating to watch. Enthusiasts of music - let alone life - require support and encouragement. Without this bubbling energy, we are left with Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs which, just like Fever Pitch, transformed blokey egomania into a slapped up bestseller.

We need music bloggers at the moment because there are far fewer great pop journalists than great pop songs. Greil Marcus is the Baron of Beat and the finest chronicler of the King. While Marcus is the Emperor of rock, Paul Morley is the Yoda of pop. His Words and Music spans from the second century BC to 2003. The image of a hot-panted Kylie Minogue driving through a post-industrial city singing “na na na - na na na na na - na na na - na na na na na” is the propulsive rhythm of his prose.

What has made Morley a stellar music writer is his obsession to convince the entire planet that Joy Division is the best group to ever crawl from the sonic ghetto and into the light of popular music. His mania is convincing. Morley was given a gift through birth, growing up in the right time and place, to be the chronicler of post-punk Manchester. His obsession with New Order and Joy Division has accompanied him throughout a writing career.

Not surprisingly, he believed “Love will tear us apart” to be the greatest song ever written, not just the best British track of the last quarter of a century. While his reasons are personal, there is also a musicological basis for his decision. The trajectory of dance in the last 20 years was foreshadowed in the shift between the eight and ninth bar.

In the space between these bars, something happens. The music transfers from a minor to a major key. On a dance floor, the repercussions of that movement is a feeling of euphoria, that anything is possible, we can dance all night and be young forever. There is also a shift from the guitar-based past of rock music towards the synthesised future of dance music. The change is significant, self-evident and pronounced.

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To ignore these two bars and displace Joy Division from the most significant pop of the last 30 years is to forget how dull rock music has been through much of its history. After disco’s demise, rock was a soundtrack for growing old. Dance music remains the endlessly transgressive, inventive and dynamic genre. Sampling translates and transforms aural and tactile memories into a bricolage of possibilities. Digitised divas warble with a re-energised beat and imported rhythms from Spain, Italy, France and Germany. Techno, offering a break with Motown’s past, fused with the intensely European sounds of Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and Tangerine Dream.

While Kraftwerk is frequently praised by critics (who have never heard their music), what makes this German powerhouse so important is that they prised open the gaps between the notes. They knew the musical value of silence and shock of unexpected noise. Their embrace of technology created new theories of meter, melody and mixing. These fusions continued through the 1980s with Cabaret Voltaire, Depeche Mode, Heaven 17 and Human League. Techno brought this merger of the corporeal and computer into clearer profile.

There is a trace of this rhythmic journey in the first nine bars of Joy Division’s “Love will tear us apart”. Certainly it is an evocative, powerful track, but its beginning is shocking in its innovation. While BBC 2 listeners did not vote it the best song of the last 25 years, I claim a smaller significance. “Love will tear us apart” encloses the two most important bars of music in the 20th century.

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About the Author

Tara Brabazon is the Professor of of Education and Head of the School of Teacher Education at Charles Sturt University.

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