![]() ![]() This isn’t to say that “sods” is an inherently silly word, but rather that it’s slangy and casual, a Britishism that affixes the lyrics to a particular place. The words for “Novelty,” an early Joy Division track, were written by Peter Hook, the band’s bassist, and it’s funny to hear a line like “You’ll just fall behind like all the other sods” sung by Curtis. Notable extracts from his lyrical vocabulary: “life,” “time,” “feeling,” “sensation,” “isolation,” “control,” “failure,” “stranger,” “blood sport,” “obtained.” The language tends toward loaded ideas, clinical terminology. The three other members had their instruments Curtis had words, and they were notoriously dense. What Curtis said is central to the Joy Division story. ![]() The austerity forces attention on what’s being said and the fact of it’s being said. In the lower registers, the young frontman sounds like a bad opera singer, and you can hear the effort it costs him to get the notes out. Personified, it would be a Freudian father figure or a mid-level bureaucrat. ![]() Should it have a color, it would be UPS brown. But Curtis’s voice is a blunt instrument. This sort of reflexive thinking is hard to come by when listening to, say, Whitney Houston, whose vocal gymnastics make “why” or “what for” seem beside the point. TO LISTEN to Ian Curtis sing is to wonder why we sing at all.
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