In the Colony with Joy Division

Abstract

One of the noteworthy things that Joy Division’s music does is to powerfully resist any transformation into a more positive context. These are not feel-good songs. Their lyrics are relentlessly negative, and culminated in the suicide of the troubled singer, Ian Curtis, on May 18, 1980. The apocryphal slogan “Ian Curtis died for your sins” testifies to the religious significance his music and death possessed for some fans. Curtis hanged himself just before the release of Joy Division’s last album, Closer, and an impending tour of the United States. He was an epileptic, his epilepsy was intensifying, and his marriage was also falling apart. Curtis’s life is seen to imitate his art, where his desperate suicide enacts a disturbing sacrifice that fulfills the prophecy of his deeply pessimistic lyrics.

At the last table, where the camp doctor and the Master-Kalefactress were waiting, the fate of each girl was sealed. There the die was cast as to which of the two sections of the camp she would be sent—Labor Division, or Joy Division.

—Ka-tzetnik 135633, House of Dolls