#90, "Day Of The Lords," Joy Division (1979)

150 Favorite Songs: #90, "Day Of The Lords," Joy Division (1979)

If Ian Curtis had lived long enough to write 150 songs, there would be a part of me that would want this list to be nothing but Joy Division songs. Partly just to make a point, and partly because so many of those songs really are so important to me. 

So let's talk "Day Of The Lords," which is Joy Division at its Joy Division-iest. Of course it's the second song off of their debut album. Of course they didn't waste any time getting right to the point. It's a scary bassline, thumping drums, and aggressive guitars, and Ian Curtis' voice with those bold, declaratory lines that his voice was always so good at delivering: "This is the room / the start of it all / no portraits so fine / only sheets on the wall"—Curtis' lyrics were never meaningful, taken literally, but there are few songwriters better at evoking mood and atmosphere the way that he did. Had Curtis—who was 22 when he recorded "Day Of The Lords"—actually seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain? It's not relevant in the least. 

Which is so much of what I love about Joy Division, and what Joy Division taught me about the things a person can make, and what it is we really expect from art. We expect honesty and truth and wisdom, yeah, but those aren't the things that move me in "Day Of The Lords." What moves me in "Day Of The Lords" is the commitment to artifice. It's the wailing—especially in that final verse, my goodness, where he repeats the lyrics to the first one, this time an octave higher, in a shout that's positively fearful—about things that we know he has no experience with. But the band found a way to make things that he only ever really thought about feel very real, and very true. 

This is the important context when you talk about Joy Division and Ian Curtis, because while "Day Of The Lords" isn't really about anything specific (though apparently a commenter on RapGenius seems to think it's about World War II?), it's obviously about feeling tortured. And when you look back on Ian Curtis as a young man who felt tortured enough by life to kill himself at 23 years old, it makes a song like "Day Of The Lords" make sense. It helps explains why his art has endured far longer than he ever lived—his songs were full of this sort of youthful pain, but they weren't obsessed with trying to describe the reasons he felt it. Rather, he did his best to convey how I imagine those feelings felt in his body. 

Maybe it's tacky to try to write about the art of a person who killed himself and explain what you can understand about how his art relates to his death. But he made the art for a reason, and it’s still relevant, four and a half decades later, for a reason, too. That is the context that will always surround Joy Division and Ian Curtis, and I've spent a lot of my life considering it. Curtis' music was never self-indulgent about the way he felt. It's part of what made him such a special artist.