Things get personal, very personal, as the Senior Staff embark upon the third Great Debate. Each is acting as a representative of their favourite album of all time, and no punches are pulled as Alex and Bruce champion the virtues of two undisputed classics. The Cure’s Disintegration. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Two albums enter. One leaves. One…gets its corners dinged. Don’t forget to rate and subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, or download directly or stream from Spotify or the widget down below.
I dunno about this one… “Is THIS classic album better than THAT classic album?!” doesn’t seem to inspire much of a great debate. They’re both, y’know, classics. If you heard Joy Division first, and that changed your taste in music and lifestyle, it will be more important to you, I guess. As for me, I was literally listening to the harshest bullshit metal had to offer, Deicide, Morbid Angel, Death, when the opening of Plainsong was like a revelation that totally changed my taste in music and my approach to life and everything in 9th grade – LOL! It’s pretty much the most important album ever to me!
“Is Blutenangel bad?” is a great Great Debate. (Yes, they are terrible). “Would anyone talk about Depeche Mode if they stopped right before Black Celebration?” is an interesting Great Debate. “Is this highly regarded Joy Division album better than this highly regarded Cure album?” just feels… semantic. And for the record, “Disintegration” wins.
Isn’t this kind of like asking “which would win, a bear or a shark?”
Unknown Pleasures was a product of 1979. It was the sound of a young band just hitting their stride, four wildly divergent talents and personalities gelling into a coherent unit. If the punk movement kicked down a door, Unknown Pleasures was a confident first step into the unexplored rooms that lay beyond. It is a truly seminal record and influential beyond measure.
Disintegration was a product of 1989. It was the sound of a seasoned band drawing upon a decade of musical exploration, much of which was instigated by Robert Smith, who had by this point assembled a team of solid veterans, and while he may have held the reins loosely, he was still the band’s dominant personality. It was ultimately a product of Robert Smith’s struggle to deal with the commercial success and major label pressure he suddenly had to deal with, which was just not a problem Joy Division would ever have during their brief lifetime. And ironically, it became a smash hit, alerting many young top-40 radio listeners to the greener pastures that lay beyond the charts.
Unknown Pleasures vs. Three Imaginary Boys might be interesting. Or maybe Disintegration vs. Technique. But I just don’t see how you can pit Unknown Pleasures against Disintegration.
Even though I agree with Mike above: Disintegration wins.
I mean keep in mind that this is less about finding some universal truth and more about giving Bruce and I something to argue about. Like the previous two Great Debates it’s a topic that could be easily summed up as a matter of personal taste. But that’s not as fun for us.
Tough debate. I want to say Disintegration is ~better~, but Unknown Pleasures is ~more important~
Unknown Pleasures, like was said, literally created a genre, it revolutionized music production in many ways and while the tumblr-gif craze is real, it’s still an album that is referenced and cribbed from both in and out of the dark music world. Disintegration is very different – I think the songwriting is better, as it took the darkness of goth/post-punk/ etc and added psychedelia and pop without being slavish to either of those interests, but it’s not revolutionary outside of that metric.
Also, I’d probably argue Disintegration is a much better gateway album to the genre than Pleasures – if we’re considering canonical importance as a factor in an album’s quality, maybe that should be a consideration as well?
On a separate point: Canonical importance is really kind of a weird metric, isn’t it? – it kinda automatically casts music that is great or interesting into a lower bracket because it failed to attract an audience.