Pick four songs from any band and you can tell a lot about their sound. This summer, I’m featuring #RockBlocks, four picks from bands across various genres. They might be wildly different from each other, but what binds them together is the fact that they’re all a part of my life soundtrack.
When I first started listening to Long Island’s WDRE, the band Joy Division was revered, adored and celebrated. They didn’t get the amount of airplay that other artists like The Smiths, The Cure or Depeche Mode achieved. But they certainly got more respect. They were, in many ways, viewed as the elder statesmen. They made a huge impact and helped shape the sound of many bands in their shortlived years. But this band wouldn’t have commanded the attention it deserved if it weren’t for “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. For critics and fans alike, this was the gateway song that introduced us to the rest of the Joy Division canon.
If you want to know the difference between punk and post punk, all you have to do is listen to “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. I think this one song helped define a new genre. Gone was the anger. Gone were the over-simplistic chord progressions. Gone was the rebellion. In came a flood of feelings — sadness, regret and misery — along with an instrumentation that was more atmospheric than sonic. The genius of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” isn’t that it’s simply a remarkable new sound. It also showed us a new way to express ourselves that no one else was doing with music.
“And we're changing our ways, taking different roads. Love, love will tear us apart again.”