Last year, Disney took a lot of heat for appropriating the cover of Joy Division's 1979 album Unknown Pleasures, fusing the iconic image with the outline of Mickey Mouse's head. The shirt was a curious bit of branding: Was there a connection between Mickey Mouse and Ian Curtis that Disney was hoping to hint at? Was Disney presenting a layered critique of their stringent trademark values? Were they suggesting that The Happiest Place on Earth was merely a grand metaphor for the robotic, vapid, and soul-sucking nature of capitalism and the American Dream? Probably not. What's more likely is that Disney severely miscalculated how beloved Unknown Pleasures, as an album, really is, and how its minimalistic album cover is revered as if it's a sacred document from a powerful religion.

"As pretty much with all groups and their first releases, they knew what they wanted on their cover," recalls Peter Saville, who helped create the cover that would come to mean so much to a particular musical subculture. For many, the cover was just a random image, one that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. The flat lines followed by jagged lines followed by flat lines was potentially representative of the music within, with its wandering, dormant atmospherics threatening to explode at any moment. The stark white-on-black contrast also served to underline the tension within the music itself, on which Curtis explored both assonance and dissonance and lyrical themes both alienating and somehow universal. The cover art was not wholly a creation of Seville's. Rather, the band had pulled the image from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. The image itself is essentially data — a visualization of the frequency of a signal from a pulsar (i.e., a rotating, pulsating star). As Saville explains, the diagram is of the first pulsar ever observed, by researchers at Cambridge University. "The diagram itself is a cutting of the continuous readout," which is then stacked to give it that layered, mountainous look. The fact that the image comes from a source so ethereal only adds to the many ways in which the album cover can be seen as an embodiment of Joy Division, their music, and art more generally. Science is controlled and logical yet also extremely experimental and frightening; art and music also rely on logic, from harmonies and scales to patterns and colors, and yet can be deconstructed, subverted, or blown up at an artist's will.

Unknown Pleasures is a minimalist masterpiece because it gets at the very heart of what minimalism is capable of: exploring a gold mine of imagery and imagination in an economical form.

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