Ian Curtis’s suicide made post-Joy Division musicians feel their survival was inauthentic

Evidence

I was 21”, Smith told Uncut in 2000, “but I felt really old. I actually felt older than I do now. I had absolutely no hope for the future. I felt life was pointless. I had no faith in anything. I just didn’t see there was much point in continuing with life. In the next two years, I genuinely felt that I wasn’t going to be alive for much longer. I tried particularly hard to make sure I wasn’t.” From its very first moments, Faith locks onto this hollow-eyed bleakness, and stays there. Affectively, the album is as improbably unwavering as Unknown Pleasures and Closer, and the Joy Division (anxiety of) influence hung over Faith like an acrid pall, the black source of its paradoxically entropic energy, what made it possible but also what would relegate it to the status of a revenant. “The whole thing was reinforced by the fact that Ian Curtis had killed himself,” Smith recalled in the Uncut interview, speaking for the post-Joy Division generation (which would of course include New Order) that would deem itself inauthentic simply by dint of the fact that it had carried on living. “I knew that the Cure were considered fake in comparison, and it suddenly dawned on me that to make this album convincing I would have to kill myself. If I wanted people to accept what we were doing, I was going to have to take the ultimate step.” — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1060

Categorization

• QUESTION: The idea that living on past a fallen peer reads as inauthentic — that survivorhood itself is a mark of fraud — is a rich psychological/artistic mechanism worth chasing into other post-scene contexts.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that continued existence after a peer’s suicide constitutes artistic inauthenticity, so that producing convincing art seems to require actual self-destruction, is a genuinely dense insight about how scenes police sincerity through death.
• XREF: connects to: Curtis’s suicide made the whole post-Joy Division generation deem itself inauthentic for surviving. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1060; New Order preserved Joy Division’s magic by refusing to understand it — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 120; Faith’s debt to Joy Division both enabled it and doomed it to derivative status. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1060

Broader Connections

• Curtis’s suicide made the whole post-Joy Division generation deem itself inauthentic for surviving. #corroborates (0.98) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1060
• New Order preserved Joy Division’s magic by refusing to understand it #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 120
• Faith’s debt to Joy Division both enabled it and doomed it to derivative status. #expands (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1060