My mom has been so slugsville lately that I have gotten all my presents for myself; which is nice, but not a lot of fun. The Silver Lenas will go on as scheduled and perhaps they can once again double as a very late birthday party for me (that's how it started, so innocently, 14 years ago...)

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I sat in the grayish beige (really, it's all that dull - carpet, chairs, walls, ceiling, fixtures, everything) waiting area of the Women's Unit yesterday, thinking about Joy Division's Ian Curtis. Now, you might think, what (besides having met him once) does Green have to do with him?

My mind wandered; a mother was reading to her little girl to keep them both occupied. An easy-listening station was playing "If You Leave Me Now" by Chicago. I got to feeling a little bit claustrophobic. I tried to imagine what Manchester was like, what the Curtis's neighborhood was like. But I'm not writing about him, nor am I really writing about physical space. Psychic space - does it exist? Musical space - does that exist?

Musical space is simply created when you hear a song, or (more literally) when you buy an album or single. You give your time and/or money to something, and in return, gain something back that can range from pleasant to life-changing. If you are a musician, you can also gain inspiration for your own work.

When Ian Curtis died a great deal happened, and I am not sure how much of what I am thinking is real, how much conjecture. Clearly he was a genius, impossible to mimic, irreplacable (though New Order rose from the ashes in a way that was touching and invigorating). But still: Curtis was gone, gone by violent means, gone too young. Only after his death did they have a hit single.

This may well have been the impetus for more than a few New Pop groups - not to do anything on his behalf (how could they?) but to show, just as Joy Division had done, that pop music could be both popular and something else - cool, technical, weird, hypnotic - in a word, different. Not like Chicago or Lionel Richie or Sheena Easton. Different. New Pop thrived like wild seeds in a fallow field. Or, put another way, it was as if the recess bell had rung, and near-anarchy took over the playground.

I wish I could say that the New Pop movement was like the Magnificent Seven or something like that, but it wasn't even as organized as them. Adam and the Ants were the first band to prosper, in the fall of 1980, when Green was still trying to figure out where Scritti Politti could go next. At the same time, OMD were singing mournfully about nuclear war (the otherwise chirpy "Enola Gay"), which made Malcolm McClaren's attempting to get people upset with a song about home taping ("C30 C60 C90 Go" by Bow Wow Wow) look fairly lame, as if he was trying to upset record companies & not the public. (Hmm, maybe that was what he was trying to do.)

Green, I believe, also wanted to be subversive, or at least use the whole music industry as a cover for his deconstruction of politics, sex and the song itself. This was fine, but as 1981 continued and New Pop became more popular in the dual spectacles of the Brixton riots and the wedding of Charles and Diana, Green found himself in the awkward position of having a song on C81 (a tape that was a Rough Trade primer sold via the NME that summer) - "The Sweetest Girl" - which everyone liked, but it wasn't released as a single until late November, when its hazy beauty and musings on political and romantic love were lost in the haphazard distribution of Rough Trade. It should have done better than it did, by a long shot; but no. And in New Pop, having a really great song was the first step; the second, somehow getting it into the charts and (most hoped for) getting invited to appear on Top of the Pops or appear the cover of the NME or Melody Maker. Anything, to be heard and out in the marketplace, so the subversion and strangeness would be that much easier to see and hear.