So This is Permanence: Joy Division Lyrics and Notebooks
- Jan 30, 2018
- 3 min read
★★★★★
My first “punk” girlfriend in high school was on the speech team. For one of her competitions she decided to recite lyrics as poetry and chose songs from a favorite album of ours at the time, The Lightning Seeds’ 1990 debut Cloudcuckooland. I liked that album, and still do, but I don’t recall poring over Ian Broudie’s lyrics the way I did of the bands who really spoke to me: The Clash, The Cure, Embrace, Fugazi, Lungfish, Midnight Oil, Minor Threat, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., Rites of Spring, The Smiths, Violent Femmes, and, of course, Joy Division.
Like so many teenagers, whether they have good reason or not (and, to be honest, I did not), I was moody and depressive. It wasn’t a full-time occupation, but I spent plenty of time sitting in my darkened bedroom listening to Disintegration or The Wall over and over again. And I wrote poetry—sad-sack, woe-is-me, life-is-shit poetry. Somewhere some high school flame has one or more of these fire starters sitting in a long-forgotten box in the attic or basement. May they never surface.
At university things didn’t get any better, at least not until some point during the back half of my sophomore year when I simply snapped out of the depressive fog I’d been living in. It’s doubtful anyone besides me had any idea, and since it wasn’t all-consuming it didn’t interfere with my social life, which primarily involved traveling to hardcore shows—in Indianapolis, Louisville, Dayton, Columbus, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati—with friends almost every weekend. My depressive moods weren’t an affectation, but they were self-imposed. And I still wrote poetry, though mainly for myself this time. I worked at it, eventually took an introductory creative writing class, and submitted to and got published by both of Indiana University’s undergraduate literary journals. I passed my portfolio review and was invited to enroll in the 300- and 400-level poetry-writing courses, both taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, including Yusef Komunyakaa. But the pressure was too much for me—I’d never intended to become a writer—and I dropped both classes before the first poem was workshopped. I never wrote poetry again.
So, I was a disaffected Midwest youth—vegan, straight edge, radically liberal—pouring my energy into music (I was eventually a drummer in two bands) and poetry. If not inevitable, it was only natural that I would gravitate towards Joy Division. Their music was a perfect combination of the two. With them, as with any of the aforementioned bands (or rock music in general), the music and the message were one. I didn’t sit in my dorm room decoding lyrics without the album playing simultaneously. They were lyrics, not poetry, and the words needed the music as much as the music needed the words.
All of which brings me to So This is Permanence. As a Joy Division release, it is exactly what one would expect: beautifully designed, bound in gray cloth and printed in white ink, an homage to their posthumous album Still. It’s a luscious look behind the curtain of a musician who took his craft as a writer, and his role as a singer, incredibly seriously. Though his words are presented without music, they never come across as poetry. That’s partly because, I think, it’s impossible to read the words without hearing the atmospheric austerity or driving motorik laid down by Barney, Hooky, and Stephen. But it’s also because, by having the scans from Ian Curtis’s notebooks, you can see—and feel—the urgency of his writing, and can imagine him pacing in his Macclesfield flat searching for the right word, or weaving disparate phrases together to fit a song taking shape during rehearsals. An appendix of fragments, early drafts, and lyrics for songs never composed, offers even more insight into Curtis’s process. A second appendix—a hodgepodge of fanzines, show bills, fan letters, and the covers of books from which Curtis drew inspiration—rounds out a book that is both lovely and lovingly assembled.
I’m no longer a teenager moping in darkened rooms. I’ve outgrown countless bands since those days. Joy Division will never be one of them, and So This is Permanence reminds us—often painfully so—of just how vulnerable and ageless Ian Curtis’s lyrics are, and just how vital and timeless the music is. It turns the obligatory question “What if?” into a savage punch to the gut. This book is an essential read for fans of Joy Division, but it’s also for anyone who ever wrote anything in an attempt to understand his place in the world. Our abilities may not be as great, but, in the attempt, we share something just as powerful.
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