Joy Division's Closer is a nihilistic pit of despair, a tunnel with no end in sight, a long lament for a kind of humanity you love to hate and feel a desperate longing for at the same time. The music is repetitive but atmospheric, the vocals devoid of affect, and the whole thing drips with dread. The first time I heard it I was positively repulsed, and dare I say it, bored. It took several listens and an absolute surrender to the music for me to realize something quite simple: Closer is meant to be experienced as a kind of surrender to its own logic, which, in its intricate moods and its subtle melodic shifts in turn symbolizing the mental shift from the uselessness of hope to the uselessness of longing, achieves a kind of last ditch optimism that does no one any good, except as evidence that maybe, the act of enunciating grief is probably enough, when nothing else works.
