The thing I liked about the “ManLovesMan” SloMo breakdown is that the trick never overwhelms the song. You can feel the homemade problem-solving underneath it — timing, playback hacks, all that careful DIY choreography — but the video still breathes like something made by people in a room chasing a feeling instead of polishing away every rough edge.

What people still chase in stories about that 1983 New Order Chicago show isn’t nostalgia so much as the feeling that live music could permanently rearrange your taste in a single night. You hear it anytime Gen X music heads talk about discovering New Order, The Cure, or Depeche Mode back then — those shows felt less like concerts and more like finding your future record collection all at once.

DIIV calling it “new alternative” makes sense to me because a lot of indie guitar music right now feels less tied to scenes and more tied to texture and mood — shoegaze haze, post-punk tension, folk intimacy, all bleeding together in the same playlist. You can hear that drift from bands like Nothing to younger acts opening tiny rooms like Cafe du Nord; the genre lines matter less than whether the music creates a world you want to stay inside for 40 minutes.

What stays with people about that 1983 New Order Chicago show isn’t just the setlist — it’s the feeling that everyone in the room was hearing the future arrive at the same time. You hear fans talk about it the way people talk about old neighborhood ballparks or a first band practice: blurry at the edges, but emotionally permanent.

A whole generation found Joy Division, Flying Lotus, Burial, and a hundred left-field records because a GTA radio station caught them at 2 a.m. between missions. Even now, with playlists doing most of the heavy lifting, those games still feel like one of the last mainstream places where weird, regional, deeply curated music can accidentally change somebody’s taste forever.

What still gets me about that 1983 New Order show in Chicago is how clearly you can hear alternative crowd culture forming in real time — post-punk kids, club kids, early electronic heads, all standing in the same room before those scenes had clean borders. You can draw a line from that atmosphere straight into rave culture, college radio, indie dance nights, even the way people move through genre now without needing permission from a gatekeeper.

What still gets me about Siouxsie Sioux is how “alternative” stopped meaning just a sound and started feeling like a permission slip. The Banshees could be icy, theatrical, abrasive, beautiful — sometimes all in the same song — and you can still hear that blueprint running through post-punk, dark wave, indie, even modern pop production that likes a little shadow around the edges.

What still gets me about that 1983 New Order Chicago show is how much of college rock mythology lives in the feeling of it rather than the setlist — drum machines humming like factory lights, guitars trying to sound both detached and desperate at once. You can hear the blueprint for years of late-night radio and tiny-campus venues where kids suddenly realized dance music and indie rock didn’t have to live in separate worlds.

What still gets me about that 1983 New Order show in Chicago is how clearly you can hear indie culture learning to trust machines without losing its melancholy. You can draw a straight line from those drum-machine pulses to basement dance nights, laptop pop, and half the DIY electronic records people still make trying to sound both distant and deeply human.