New Order’s ethical album comes of age.
It’s the most striking pop album title ever. When New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies appeared in 1983, it announced a sea-change in culture and politics. This was pop music that held its audience to a new standard — insisting that everyone recognize the world’s ethical disorder. That radical gesture from the British band shames the complacent partisanship of Millennial pop.
From Lizzo’s defensive self-indulgence, to Taylor Swift’s gender bias, to Beyoncé’s tribalism and the Bidenomics of Garth Brooks, contemporary pop eschews ethics in favor of social-justice narcissism. So Power, Corruption & Lies remains a challenge.
Power, Corruption & Lies preserves the awakening of young people thinking for themselves. New Order emerged from the catafalque of Manchester’s great, gloomy punk band Joy Division (its name teased Nazi dehumanization inspired by the hipster decadence of America’s the Velvet Underground). After Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide, the gifted remaining members (guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris) moved forward — no longer naïve cynics but developing a new moral ethos.
Punk turned post-punk — against Margaret Thatcher’s establishment yet also skeptical about British socialist fashion that could not save a malcontent’s life. A reborn dance band, New Order celebrated life and conscientiousness — a far cry from the virtue-signaling that Millennial pop stars celebrate as “change.”
On “Age of Consent,” the album’s opening track, New Order’s new fourth member, keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, brought (feminine?) grace to the boys’ previous glum explorations. Synth chords lightened the group’s depression, consenting to dance — endurance through melody. Eighties American rap would do the same, adding R & B beats to social consciousness, but New Order wasn’t merely topical; it transcended punk anger through philosophical post-punk musing and largely instrumental, existential rhythms. (Essential Logic’s “Beat Rhythm News” and the Au Pairs’ “Ideal Home Noise” presented other examples of that ethos.)
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One legend about that formidable album title says that Hook spotted the phrase on the back cover of a Penguin paperback that read, “George Orwell tells the story of a revolution among animals of a farm, and how idealism was betrayed by power, corruption, and lies.” A second claims that it came from graffiti that German artist Gerhard Richter spray-painted on the Kunsthalle gallery exterior during a 1981 exhibition. Both tales point to the band’s avant-garde, intellectual interests. And the album cover reproduces the 1885 painting A Basket of Roses, by Henri Fantin-Latour, chosen by Factory Records designer Peter Saville to confirm the artsy nature of post-punk aesthetics.
But Power, Corruption & Lies also indicates the rebellious attitude that post-punk artists had toward the music industry. (The name New Order equates with Elvis Costello’s “I want to bite the hand that feeds me,” from “Radio, Radio.”) For most youths, cynicism is smartness. However, today’s indoctrinated youth express their smartness through specious bromides regarding gender, race, and climate movements.
New Order’s gentle tunes proved they weren’t ideologues, just twentysomethings who wanted to dance. Calling out power, corruption, and lies is as politically explicit as they get. The title’s generic criticism is criticism enough.
Then, Side Two bursts with sheer beauty —“Your Silent Face” is an enigmatic, mostly instrumental love song because that’s the band’s wheelhouse. It’s inexpressibly lovely as only good music can be. The lyrics transcend politics:
A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie
It’s never been quite the same
No hearing or breathing, no music, no colors, just silence
Rise and fall of shame
A Search that shall remain
They asked you what you see, you said you didn’t care.
Their defiance relates power to government, corruption to human folly, and lies to the media. “Your Silent Face” also confronts the robotic smugness of TV newsreaders (“A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie”). Gilbert’s organ notes provide a Bach-like pulse that elevates dance pop from generic to sublimely personal:
Signs that lead the way
Paths we cannot take
You caught me at a bad time
So why don’t you piss off?
This is superior to the narcissism of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish.
“Ecstasy” starts as a march but becomes surprisingly jolly because the band has found itself — desire and purpose are here again. On the lovely, seductive “Ultraviolence,” New Order overcomes not only Ian Curtis’s suicide, but also Stanley Kubrick’s culturally suicidal A Clockwork Orange, an elder genius’s exploitation of youthful discontent. The title Power, Corruption & Lies seemed to promise that anyone who encountered it would never be fooled again.
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New Order went on to make poppier, more expansive, greater music. Their danceable catalogue (Brotherhood, Technique, Republic, and the magnificent singles “Temptation,” “True Faith,” and “Crystal”) prove that art — pleasure — is a deliberate, conscious answer to political terror.
The significance of Power, Corruption & Lies is in the band’s daring to call out moral depravity — the social control that today’s media folk accept, especially when it’s in their favor. “Leave Me Alone” closes the album with foresight that distrusts politics altogether:
On a thousand islands in the sea
I see a thousand people just like me
A hundred unions in the snow
I watch them walking, falling in a row.
No honest person can deny the power, corruption, and lies overtaking this Millennium — and it feels good that New Order made that knowledge a valiant bequest.