This World of Ours It Felt Brand New

Full disclosure: I was going to make a full disclosure. Then I remembered that art does not exist without the viewer/reader/listener/etc. And that individual interpretation need not make excuses for being intrinsically, unavoidably, personal. Why, for instance, am I moved to tears by the photography of Andre Kertesz, yet continually find every encounter of Andy Warhol's oeuvre insufferable? Who cares? It just is. Because of who I am. I don't have to justify my reactions/feelings/existence, any more than anybody else has to.

Disclosures aside, New Order's "Face Up" is the only thing I've been able to listen to for two months. All right, so I did spend an evening with Fiona Apple's "Never Is A Promise". And I did listen to Eazy-E on repeat on a six-hour drive. But this is the song to which I find myself continually turning. It is my comfort. It is my mac & cheese. It is my hot chocolate with marshmallows on a cold winter's day.

Somebody told me recently that they find the tone of this song to be one of anger. I don't feel that way. This is a song of sadness, of taking tumbles, of things not being that way. The way you thought they were. It's a reaction to that, but not really a venomous one, despite the best (or worst?) efforts of the narrator. When Bernard Sumner sings "Oh, how I cannot bear the thought of you", sure, he's angry. But he's also hurt, confused & bitter. And no one emotion outweighs any other. "I always knew you were cold" ends one verse; "At the start you had a heart" begins the next. This is a narrator giving into his instinctual emotions of pain, yet simultaneously finding himself unable to deny the beauty of what was, in spite of the hurt that is. I.e., "Don't let anybody tell you/What you should do/because it's not that way" into a repeat of the chorus. You can hear Sumner's voice tearing throughout the song (most particularly in the chorus) - the narrator doesn't know what to feel. He may not be able to bear the thought of you, but don't fool yourself for one second into believing that he's not going to think about you anyway. Perhaps a mere glance at the lyrics would lead one to believe that this song is angry - but a listen, a real listen, obliterates the easy interpretation of the song into a singular, definable emotion.

Guess what he's going to do to you? Sure, he sounds all pissed off, but you know what? He's got no idea what he's going to do.