First Round Matchup: ERASURE at JOY DIVISION

(16) Erasure, "Fingers & Thumbs (Cold Summer's Day)"

At first blush, Erasure is a not a band known for their sadness, and certain members of the selection committee expressed skepticism at their inclusion in the bracket. Still, in terms of quality wins, we might look at early single, “Oh L’Amour,” as counterpoint (sample lyric: “Oh L’Amour / Broke my heart and now I’m aching for you”), and actually, the more you start to listen to the songs, very many of them are rooted in sadness. Like how their big single (“A Little Respect”) is about its lack, and in that song it’s almost like the speaker is trying to talk himself into asserting himself. So this song comes at the end of their middle period, I’d say, which is about as long as I’ve seriously tracked them. It’s from their 1994 self-titled album, easily the most “serious”-seeming in their oeuvre. It’s a really good album, though! I forgot how much I like listening to Erasure. Of all the synth bands that once soundtracked my life, they’re the one that’s disappeared most obviously from my adult life, and only when I was trying to explain them to my friend Dolly it occurred to me how much I know about Erasure. I had lunch once with the poet Reginald Shepherd in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at a Waffle House there. He was not happy that the various foods on the plate were touching one another. I asked him: have you ever been to a Waffle House? He was living in Alabama at the time. He had not. Well, I said, that's kind of the jam here (and in adult life, I wanted to say). How we got from that onto Erasure's b-sides (I've always been partial to "Supernature," for instance) I'm not sure, but Shepherd impressed me: I haven't met anyone with as equally encyclopedic knowledge of Erasure as he had. Anyhow, it was a lovely meal even if his foodstuffs were touching, and we parted ways, and would see each other over the next few years a few times in passing.

Anyhow, in this song I very much like the mix of sadness and anthem that makes up the chorus, how “Gone / And blown it all / How can you say / It doesn’t matter much to me” isn’t exactly a consolation, but it is a kind of stiffening of resolve, a celebration of this particular sadness. I like the instrumental break of sorts as a bridge, how the lights go dark for a while, and then how it surges back. And I realize that Erasure will get rolled over by Joy Division, which is probably the right result.

Reginald Shepherd died maybe five years after we talked Erasure at the Waffle House. I can't think of the man without the band and without the restaurant. Of course I hadn't ever got around to telling him how much I liked his work or enjoyed that conversation and being part of his life, if only in passing. So I'll quote a couple lines of his poem "A Brief Manual for Swimmers" for y'all here: "History has written its ritual runes and we / have scrawled some moments of / conversation into damp sand." And I'm sending this long distance dedication out to you, Reginald:

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(1) Joy Division, "Atmosphere"

We can't imagine a sad songs bracket without Joy Division in it, and of the Joy Division discography we probably could have picked five or six songs that would go deep in this tournament. The most obvious and best-known would have been "Love Will Tear Us Apart," a brilliant song, but I've always found this sadder, the pinnacle really of this sort of sadness: the desire for communication—for kinship—for friendship—for love—for understanding—and the failure of all attempts to reach it, largely because of personal failure, and the despair that comes with that understanding and the subsequent giving up. There's no irony here, and very little distance, it seems like. Though the song certainly feels like a requiem for Ian Curtis (and the video goes all-in on that reading), it's almost too beautiful for that, and stranger, really. It's easy, after all, to mythologize the dead. As Peter Hook points out in his recent memoir, Ian Curtis was a guy who farted and drank and behaved badly, not just this isolated and haunted poetic genius that we've made him into. Yet it's inevitable that we make myth of the songs we love and those who made them, especially if they're dead, even moreso if they're dead of suicide, at least if those songs and bands and musicians are any good at all.

Anyhow, I find the video beautiful in part because it's all-in too, and thus it's easy enough to make fun of (the jawas and the symbology? wtf? & it does look sort of like the kind of project I would have made in college if I wasn't then so allergic to even seeming vaguely sentimental) if that's how you want to roll. Well, you don't need to read me reading it: better to do cue it up yourself. For me, "Atmosphere" is one of those songs that you're either all in for or what are you doing with your life? (Actually maybe you're doing something awesome and successful, in which case that's super rad. As for me, I'm going to close my eyes so as to skip the video and enjoy the darkness and the memory of the isolation.)

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Which is Sadder? Vote by 9am 3/13

Fingers & Thumbs (Cold Summer's Day)

Atmosphere

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