Seven Red

Two of the most perfectly crafted rock/pop songs of the 1980′s, one now a staple on NPR Market Place, the other virtually forgotten outside a rather odd collection of hardcore fans. But still. I was in my favorite bar in Queens over the holidays, and I told my brother that New Order’s “Ceremony” was one of my picks for most brilliant rock songs ever recorded. He made the usual face people make when you say something preposterous. But still. Of course, it was initially written when New Order was still Joy Division and Ian Curtis hadn’t yet fashioned himself a noose, but the New Order version – their first single release – is far better. I read somewhere that Bernard Sumner was still taking voice lessons at the time, learning how to breath while singing, a point that I didn’t know whether to take as mischievously ironic given the former lead singer’s fate. But you can hear the halting ineptitude of it, which is really what makes it perfect. The Ceremony video appearing here, too, some amateur hour film student job, chosen because only slightly better than the other option, the heartwarmingly despicable Kirsten Dunst vehicle Marie Antoinette, the 80′s party girl soundtrack of which was ostensibly meant to signify something: I’ll take cheap film school sentimentality of the (post)industrial structure crashing into the organic over that any day. The second is a favorite of mine that I’m almost embarrassed by, and I think the black screen YouTube is just about right. It’s a radio song, 1987 or thereabouts, written by Stephen Duffy, perhaps the most exquisite craftsmen of the 80′s English rock/pop song, just torn up by class ennui and joyful about it. I thought about it recently after seeing a flyer for a “poetry night commemorating the inauguration of Barack Obama.” Despite my open support of Obama since I announced to my students in October of 2004 that he would be President “one day” (we read his convention speech in honors comp two days after he delivered it – I wonder if they remember…), the flyer made me recoil a bit, left a bad taste, and all that. Certainly, I’m not “opposed” (as if one could be!) of the admixture of poetry and politics, but I do raise an eyebrow at poetry “celebrating” any fixture of the State – Obama or not. By all means, I wish him well in his job – and the notion of McCain/Palin was just too grisly to contemplate. And breakthroughs in something like a collective consciousness are of course wonderful. Yes. But poetry celebrating the elevation to Power? It’s unseemly. And so I was brought back to the lines Duffy used to capture the Event of working class England in shambles, destroyed by the Tory ascension, sure, but far more by a kind of global enthusiasm. It need not go the same way, but this is how many people that I feel far more comfortable with usually experience these “dramatic” social changes:

We’ll face this new England
Like we always have
In a fury of denial
We’ll go out dancing on the tiles
Help me down, but don’t take me back…

That’s perfect to me. Unproductive life, as the sociologist Michel Maffesoli might call it. But here we are now with Reaganism and Thatcherism in smithereens, their underlying economic philosophies exposed as fraud and sham (never once and for all, of course: it can always get worse). But the global enthusiasm lingers, even if mixed with dread. (And we know there was dread then, too. Perhaps the best scene in 24-Hour Party People has Ian Curtis dead-panning the lyrics of Transmission to a bunch of boinking skinheads, as the news of capitalist crisis – unemployment, war, oil shortage – gets spliced into the act; the Joy Division/New Order solution to the Thatcherite darkness was, moreover, much the same as Duffy’s: “we would have a fine time living in the night…so dance dance dance dance dance to the radio.” This response is not without cultural consequences: the dim outlines of a coming techno can be heard in Stephen Morris’ frenetic high hat, even then, the trip from Warsaw to Blue Monday as bound up in the history of neoliberalism as in the technology of the drum machine). So the global enthusiasm lingers, in any case: We’ll face this new America, like we always have, in a fury of denial, we’ll go out dancing on the tiles…

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