Age of Consent

I’m going to be honest and say that I was never especially a fan of the band New Order. I’ve always felt a bit ashamed of that fact because I knew several extremely cool and musically knowledgeable and otherwise attractive people in every sense of the term, physically attractive but also having that indefinable sense of being people that you just wanted to be around because they exude a kind of cool self-confidence, maybe even a kind of arrogance but that arrogance is always tempered by a kindness, a generosity of spirit you could say, that makes the cool confidence all the more alluring and when people like that speak the name of a band, when they say, have you heard such and such song by New Order, the way that they say the words ‘new’ and ‘order’ is both a provocation, a challenge (have you heard the song? Do you know the band?) and a form of desire (I really want to listen to New Order now).

New Order was made all the more alluring and desirable as a band to listen to and own albums by and perhaps t-shirts and posters, all the stuff, all the New Order stuff, you wanted all the New Order stuff partly because of the fact that the members of New Order (except for Gillian Gilbert) had been the members of Joy Division and Joy Division has about as much aura as any band of the last fifty years could ever be said to have had. I personally find Joy Division terrifying but I don’t really know what I mean by that. The gothic image on the cover of the album Closer always frightened me when I was younger though I suppose it is true that it also intrigued me in the same way that a postcard image of the Ophelia painting by John Everett Millais that was magnet-hung on the side of the refrigerator during my childhood days always upset and intrigued me. Was she dead I always wondered, but I think never actually asked my parents, who had obviously put the postcard there. Surely my mother. But I never asked her. I didn’t want to know, I now realize. I just wanted to wonder about it even though the thought scared me. Why was this woman floating in that strange way with all the flowers and weeds and why was she so beautiful?

You have to be extremely disturbed, just genuinely fucked-up in some deep way to name a band Joy Division. The name comes from a novel, House of Dolls, by holocaust survivor Yehiel De-Nur. The Joy Division in question is a unit of women forced into sexual slavery for German soldiers. It’s hard to think of a more horrifying thing you could name your band. But it sounds so cool. Joy Division. And then when you find out what it means the coolness takes on an almost unbearable edge, a power. Abyssal.

I was recently listening to the song Age of Consent by New Order and I was struck for maybe the first time by just how wonderful is the opening bassline. I mean, I’ve definitely noticed that bassline before. You have to notice it if you’ve ever listened to the song. It is the only thing one really hears for the first few seconds and it sets up everything else. It’s a bassline that sort of dips down into itself and then comes out again and turns around. For that reason you wouldn’t call it funky. It dips down too much into itself to be properly funky as a bassline. But it does groove. And maybe it even bounces. Yeah, it does. But the groove never loses its feeling of self doubt and hesitation because of that dipping.

Why is it so hard to care about other people? Or that’s not even really the question as I mean to ask it. More like, how can you actually express that you truly love someone else, that you need them so much that you almost want to become them? To merge. But that’s horrible. So you hate the person a little bit for making you want to merge with them. And then everything feels completely futile. And yet…

Age of Consent is basically a break-up song as I understand it. And it’s a break-up song that wants to establish and that wants to express a terrible sense of being wounded and then deny that you could express such a thing or that either party in the relationship needs to express anything at all. I’m not the kind, you see, that needs to tell you just what I want to do. And also I’m not the kind, just to be very clear, that needs to tell you just what you want me to.

The guitar parts that sort of weave around the dipping and grooving bassline are especially lovely, I’ve realized in recently realizing that maybe I’ve loved this song quite a bit, maybe too much, all this time. It’s a sort of plucking and almost lazy guitar version of the bass melody and then later a synthesizer picks up some version of the melody at a highish register and that sound carries it along just almost completely perfectly too. And then it goes away. Not too much. Just the right amount of synthesizer to carry the song up and up and then let it settle down again just right.

I’ve read that the drums in the song are a version of the drum sound that exists in the Joy Division song Love Will Tear Us Apart. That’s to say, Stephen Morris, the drummer of both bands, used a version of the drumming for the first Joy Division song in the drumming for the second New Order song. And Love Will Tear Us Apart is one of the most heartbreaking love songs that was ever written, probably. Because it is about the fact that the very thing that draws us inexorably together is also that very same thing that is unbearable and destroys us. And that we must accept this, and create a sound for it, and listen to that sound and feel an aching recognition that this is true.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. The Fate of The Animals, and The Grand Valley He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.