Permafrost

There is a song so cold it warms you, a song with so little heart your own bursts upon contact, bursts into thousands. It's a song that says nothing of "love," but it drips with desire, its drawn-out face reaching out to you, reaching through you with greedy eyes. It's fierce and you like it and it's sexy and you want it, and you couldn't care less if he means it, if anyone means it, because it's the quintessential love song in so many ways:

As the day stops dead
at the place where we're lost
I will drug you and fuck you
on the permafrost

It's Magazine's "Permafrost," a song that sounds as if it were itself written on permafrost, edgy lyrics carved into ice, a vast expanse of nothing-ness. And in a way, it was, because when punk killed itself, only two years after its birth on the Bill Grundy show in 1976, it left a void — a void post-punk bands like Magazine filled and stretched as they pleased, no rules, no nothing.

Only this time around, it wasn't for anger, it was for art — it was DIY or die, baby, in "this deranged world." The outsider status became the insider status, paranoia ran rampant, and the bass drove deep into unfamiliar intellectual territory. The Pathetic became the driving force, artists withdrew within themselves, and shit just didn't matter because everyone was doing it, everyone was making it.

This period of incredible apathy lasted just long enough for Magazine to put out Secondhand Daylight — home to the song we're righteously calling paramount — in 1979. One year later and they were already on to The Correct Use of Soap, which was nowhere near as brilliant or genre-defining, though it was seminal and in that seminality worth discussing. "A Song From Under the Floorboards," its most well-known single, shines a perfect light on the post-punk motivation: masochistic existentialism.

Howard Devoto opens with his trademark strung-out waver: "I am angry I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin." It's clear this comes directly from Dostoevsky, from his parade of horribles in the opening line of Notes From Underground: "I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." We think of the Russian 1860s, of the reaction to European liberalism and utopianism, the self-hatred that grew like an itch being scratched to the point of bloodiness. And we think how this must have been relevant in the British late 1970s, how foolish and futile Johnny Rotten and the other Sex Pistols must have seemed in the face of what followed — their rapid and humiliating descent. “Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?” Rotten asked his audience as the band and his life fell apart.

But Devoto continues: "I am an insect, I have to confess I'm proud as hell of that fact." It's absurd, it's surreal, it's Kafkaesque. It's the band saying they're different, different from you, opposed to all — not even human. And it makes sense that at a time when most contemporary artists were reeling in their own insignificance, Magazine would separate themselves, would self-preserve by isolation.

Of course punk rebelled too, against the common conception of "good," in its histrionic craving to express individuality, but there was no enjoyment in that rebellion. Here there is enjoyment — a clear enjoyment of suffering, a suffering that was to awaken you and bring you to something higher than yourself, higher than human consciousness:

I know the highest and the best
I accord them all due respect
but the brightest jewel inside of me
glows with pleasure at my own stupidity.

It's irrational egoism, but through a sort of Freudian lens, it makes sense. Because when punk cleared the way for post-punk and left that void, tension and bitterness still lingered. The music of the day wanted none of it, so where did it go? It remained heavy on the backs of the artists themselves, consequently imposing a sense of guilt and a need for self-punishment. But because it was internalized, because these post-punk artists didn't scream just "whatever" like their doomed predecessors, those artists who were most introverted and most innovative were paradoxically the most likely to revel in their guilt.

Because if punk was the expressed desire for revenge or change, post-punk was inactivity. Post-punk was satisfaction with being unsatisfied:

I used to make phantoms I could later chase
images of all that could be desired
then I got tired of counting all of these blessings
and then I just got tired

Post-punk was legitimate because it was created bottom-up from something real, from something dynamic. Bands like Magazine saw through the unsatisfying ideological detritus that had crowded punk music; they saw it for it was, and tired of it: "I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit."

And of course they didn't actually know the meaning of life, but what's significant is they recognized that knowing it wouldn't help them any, long before this belief was scientifically adopted.

A paper published in 2003 proves that wanting something and enjoying it once you have it connect to two different neural systems, so you want all kinds of things that won't make you happy. They are different chemical systems: satisfying your wants quiets the wanting chemical system, but doesn't activate the happiness chemical system. So we end up living life pursuing what we think we want, but that does not make us happy. All the choice in the world, and it is not enough, because we inevitably choose the wrong things.

It's a bleak truth, one that "Permafrost" in particular seems to embrace, in its utter rejection of the utopia punk imagined. They're not talking about some perfect form of love here, about some ideal that will crash and burn when projected onto our fallen reality — they're talking about a desire that's already fallen. "I have no idea what you want," Devoto shrieks, and there is no pretense. Never do we think it will work out, and never do we resent that. In fact, we "want" it — we want to be drugged and fucked and forgotten, to be tricked and desired, to feel pain.

Because it's so dark, so selfish, so aloof, and so "honest," Magazine's post-punk wasn't just a foreshadowing of what would come, as has been claimed. It was a movement in its own right, even if it only lasted moments, and it meant something.