A Northern “Ode on Melancholy”?: The Music of Joy Division

Langhorst, Caroline

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_5

A Northern “Ode on Melancholy”?: The Music of Joy Division

Caroline Langhorst⁴

Chapter
First Online: 30 March 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ((PASTMULI))

Abstract

Even decades after its sudden demise, Joy Division indisputably remains one of the most seminal proponents of post-punk. This chapter aims to examine Joy Division in relation to both Romanticism and the Gothic. The former manifests itself on two different, yet interrelated levels: first in terms of the Romantic “mythos of the doomed young artist” against the backdrop of industrial Manchester, and then as it is understood through the lenses of Ian Curtis’s persona and Anton Corbijn’s biopic Control, both of which are shown to establish Joy Divison’s music as Gothic texts.

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Notes

1.
Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Fandom, Image and Authenticity. Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 47.
2.
John Orr , Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 180.
3.
Bickerdike, 43.
4.
Caitlin Shaw , “Known Pleasures: Nostalgia and Joy Division Mythology in 24 Hour Party People and Control,” in Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches, ed. Laura Mee and Johnny Walker (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 172.
5.
Atte Oksanen , “Hollow Spaces of Psyche: Gothic Trance-Formation from Joy Division to Diary of Dreams,” in Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day, ed. Isabella van Elferen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 126.
6.
Dean Lockwood, “Dead Souls: Post-Punk Music as Hauntological Trigger,” in Twenty-First-Century Gothic, ed. Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell, and Caroline Ruddell (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 103–107; Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 142.
7.
Michael Bibby, “Atrocity Exhibitions: Joy Division, Factory Records, and Goth,” in Goth: Undead Subculture, ed. Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 234 and 251.
8.
Lockwood , 100.
9.
Ibid., 107.
10.
See for example Seamus Perry , “Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3–11; or Peter Cochran’s introduction to his study “Romanticism” and Byron (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), ix–li.
11.
Ellen Brinks, Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 53.
12.
Oksanen , 126.
13.
See Chris Ott , Unknown Pleasures (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 2–5.
14.
Dave Haslam, Manchester England: The Story of the Pop Cult City (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), xx–xxiv.
15.
Ibid., xi.
16.
Ibid., xii–xiv.
17.
See Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre , Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 88–98.
18.
Haslam , xxvii.
19.
Shaw, 167.
20.
See James Hannaham, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music,” in Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, ed. Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 87.
21.
Bickerdike, 43.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid., 44.
24.
Ibid., 44–45.
25.
John Whale, Critical Issues: John Keats (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1.
26.
Bickerdike, 44.
27.
Shaw, 171.
28.
Ibid., 172.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Ibid., 173.
31.
Ghislaine McDayter, “Byron and Twentieth-Century Popular Culture,” in Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies, ed. Jane Stabler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 130–131; Bickerdike, 47.
32.
McDayter , 133.
33.
William Wordsworth, “My heart leaps up…”, in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), 62.
34.
Ibid., ln.4.
35.
Ibid., ln.7.
36.
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P.E. Charvet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 398.
37.
Shaw, 172.
38.
Orr , 181.
39.
Emma McEvoy, “Gothic and the Romantics,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), 19.
40.
Ibid., 19–21.
41.
Fred Botting, The Gothic (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), 136.
42.
McEvoy , 21.
43.
Ibid., 22.
44.
Van Elferen, 139.
45.
Ibid., 139–140.
46.
Ibid., 140.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Ibid., 141.
49.
Ibid.
50.
Lockwood , 104.
51.
Ibid., 103–104.
52.
Ibid. See 105–107 for Lockwood’s discussion of the differences between Derrida’s concept of hauntology and Deleuze’s approach to the subject.
53.
Ibid., 102.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Ibid., 103.
56.
Ibid.
57.
Bibby , 237.
58.
Ibid., 244.
59.
Ibid., 235.
60.
Ibid.
61.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 7.
62.
Bibby , 237.
63.
Oksanen , 125–126.
64.
See Roger Sabin , “‘I won’t let that dago by’: Rethinking Punk and Racism,” in Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin (London/New York: Routledge, 1999), 209.
65.
Sonya O. Rose , Which People’s War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1.
66.
Ibid.
67.
The song was initially featured on the soundtrack of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978) and reissued as a single in 1982.
68.
See David Huckvale, Visconti and the German Dream. Romanticism, Wagner and the Nazi Catastrophe in Film (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), 22.
69.
See Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 3rd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133.
70.
Ibid.
71.
Bibby , 237.
72.
McEvoy , 25.
73.
In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 613, l.2 and 614, l.32.
74.
Ibid., 613, ll.5–6; 614, ll.27–28.
75.
Whale , 5.
76.
Paul D. Sheats , “Keats and the Ode,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 96.
77.
Brinks , 53.
78.
Whale, 81.
79.
Brinks , 53.
80.
Whale, 102–103.
81.
Ibid., 91.
82.
Ibid., 105.
83.
Ibid.
84.
McEvoy , 27.

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Department of Film Studies/Media Dramaturgy, Institute of Film, Theater and Empirical Cultural Studies, University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany
Caroline Langhorst

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Mississippi College, Clinton, MS, USA
James Rovira

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Langhorst, C. (2018). A Northern “Ode on Melancholy”?: The Music of Joy Division. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_5
Published: 30 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72687-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72688-5
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