I love New Order. Perhaps it’s because I grew up with them – they’re my dad’s favourite band. I’ve got these fond memories of hearing those glimmering synths, those droning basslines. Theirs might’ve been one of the first pieces of music I ever heard.
And yet, despite knowing them all my life, it’s only today that, while editing my paper at UBC, looking out from the Koerner Library out onto the campus, I heard their song ‘Sub-culture,’ off their album Low-Life. I was just enchanted by it, and I closed my eyes and felt transported into some other world.
I saw the space shuttle blasting off in a fiery inferno, soaring through the atmosphere, daring the sky to hold it back, countering all that mass of air and the gravity that tethers us to the ground, that incredible monument to human engineering pushing, defiantly, stubbornly, idealistically, naively, hopefully pushing against the hand of God.
I saw the two World Trade Center towers, those beautiful steel monuments towering into the air, shining against the New York City skyline, a beacon in Long Island Sound, reaching, etching its name into the sky and shouting ‘I’m here, we’re here,’ its spires pushing audaciously upwards, fighting to stand, if only for one night more, amidst the sublime company of the stars.
I saw masses of people, and I heard Eliot tell me he ‘had not thought death had undone so many’ and yet I saw power in them, innumerable stories, innumerable potentialities, and I felt that transcendental awe, that hope that refuses to die, die, die as much as the world shoots it, stabs it, murders it.
I saw an age where we built things with pride and looked to them because we could create beyond belief, beyond our wildest imaginations, beyond whatever limits set before us.
And I was overcome then by a deep sadness. That somewhere along the way, I lost something.
But then the pads quieted for a moment, replaced by that steady drum beat, and Hooky’s bassline, and then those sweeping modular synths came back…
New Order’s synthesisers have this total sound. They’re enveloping, all-encompassing, they wrap themselves around you. It’s not a hug, not an embrace. It’s a nuclear bomb. It fries your skin from the inside out, surrounds you in the immensity of its apocalyptic plume, and one can’t help but admire the spectacle, can’t help but be struck by the sheer awe of what we were able and willing to do to rob ourselves of life wholeheartedly, viscerally, totally. To think that we are capable of such destruction, and simultaneously, capable of such life, should we choose it, should we hope that we use our ability to create above and beyond ourselves, to create on a precipice of wonder that I feel every single day in the large and the small, in totality and specificity, in freedom and brotherhood — it’s all too much: too beautiful, too fast, too violent, too strange.
And yet, I choose this life in its radical defiance, its revolutionary promise: the seditious beauty and terror of the impossibility of being alive.
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