New Order’s 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies remains an iconic challenge to today’s pop music, which prioritizes social-justice narcissism over ethics. In contrast, the British band’s album insisted that listeners recognize the world’s ethical disorder. New Order emerged from the ashes of Manchester’s Joy Division, after the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. The remaining members moved forward, developing a new moral ethos. Punk turned post-punk, skeptical of both Margaret Thatcher’s establishment and British socialist fashion. New Order celebrated life and conscientiousness, transcending punk anger through philosophical post-punk musing and largely instrumental, existential rhythms.
The album’s title, Power, Corruption & Lies, indicates the band’s avant-garde, intellectual interests and rebellious attitude toward the music industry. 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.
Side Two bursts with sheer beauty, particularly “Your Silent Face,” an enigmatic, mostly instrumental love song. The lyrics transcend politics, confronting the robotic smugness of TV newsreaders. Gilbert’s organ notes provide a Bach-like pulse that elevates dance pop from generic to sublimely personal. “Ecstasy” starts as a march but becomes surprisingly jolly, while “Ultraviolence” overcomes both Ian Curtis’s suicide and Stanley Kubrick’s culturally suicidal A Clockwork Orange.
New Order went on to make poppier, more expansive, greater music. Their danceable catalogue proves that art and pleasure are a deliberate, conscious answer to political terror. The significance of Power, Corruption & Lies lies in the band’s daring to call out moral depravity and 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. 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.
