Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (1979)

It's been a while since I've heard an unapologetic 80s rock album, the kind where the band or artist just says, "Fuck it! I like synthesizers and I hate key changes!" Unknown Pleasures is very ethereal and features long passages with very little sound. Not sure how this band thinks it deserves the name "Joy Division" based on this album, or how they think this album features any form of pleasure. It's very dark and spooky and features a lot of hollow rambling by the lead singer.

I've decided to believe that Unknown Pleasures, being released in 1979, is a preemptive lament about how awful music was about to become in the 1980s. Maybe Joy Division came from the future and was trying to warn us, so they made this really bleak and haunting album to turn us away. Maybe they thought if we associated new wave music with darkness and feeling like death it wouldn't catch on. But they missed something- the human propensity to view dark and moody music as beautiful regardless of how shallow it is. So their supposed warning accidentally set off a new genre that completely overtook pop music like a virus for a decade.

You know what else this album has made possible? It's made me appreciate The B52's, even just a little bit. I didn't realize it then, but The B52's when it arrived in 1976 was early new-wave, but in a way that sucked on purpose. Maybe that's what The B52's were trying to say with their album. Before I said it was like a joke no one was supposed to understand. Now I understand, or at least I want to. Maybe I'm giving The B52's too much credit and this joke only really makes sense in my twisted mind. But now I choose to hear The B52's as a similar warning to the rest of the music world. They were really saying, "Be careful, or else pop music will suck just like this."

As for Unknown Pleasures, the album's title must be some kind of meta-joke, because I wasn't pleased at all. 1 star.

Addendum: Not only does this album appear in the book 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, it also had the honor of appearing on the book's cover in 2010. I tend to like minimalist covers, including the one for Unknown Pleasures. Still I have no idea why this album is even on The List, let alone being good enough to be the upfront representative.