The Smiths

Listening to The Smiths is like crawling into a womb.  A heartbeat pulsing in the background, my body slowly makes its way into the fetal position, wrapped up in the lilting resonance of Morrissey’s voice. 

“The time’s for a change.  See the luck I’ve had could make a good man turn bad.  So please, please, please, let me get what I want this time...  Haven’t had a dream in a long time.  See the life I’ve had could make a good man … bad.   So, for once in my life, let me get what I want.  Lord knows, it would be the first time.”

The sentiment is sad and introspective (and yes, even a bit melodramatic), but it’s so entirely lovely when Morrissey begs for something to go right, and most people understand that bone-deep longing to have something we want, but can’t have.   His pain becomes our pain vicariously.  Or rather, he is channeling our pain and expressing it in a way we just hadn’t thought of yet.  The music becomes everyone’s, even if the words don’t match my thoughts, he can harness emotions just by humming or singing absolute nonsensical syllables over and over.  It stops mattering what he sings and changes into how he’s doing it.  His music becomes a place I want to go – to wallow in – to dream about.

“What she said, ‘How come someone hasn’t noticed that I’m dead?  And decided to bury me?   God knows, I’m ready!’   What she said was sad, but then, all the rejection she's had, to pretend to be happy could only be idiocy.  What she said, ‘I smoke ‘cause I’m hoping for an early death, and I need to cling to something!’”

Oh Morrissey, your lugubrious words somehow make me happy.  No, I don’t want to die (don’t be ridiculous) but life tends to come and go (while I might be dead in this moment, I’m very much alive in others, Mr. Vonnegut) and everyone sometimes just wants to be noticed.  Some people blend right into the wall, and if they weren’t breathing loudly, you might never notice them at all.  What I love about Morrissey is that he’s over there by the wall screaming, “NOTICE ME!” while he complains that no one sees him.  Is he maybe the original emo guy?  Could be. 

“You should know, time’s tide will smother you.”

It already is.  Time marches blithely on, regardless of what we do.  One thing we can’t do is stop the slow march of seconds and moments and days and months and years – friendships and love affairs and revelations and endings.  The tide comes in and erases, deposits, and moves on.

“Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before…

 Nothing's changed , I still love you, oh, I still love you
...Only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love.

I smelt the last ten seconds of life; I crashed down on the crossbar, and the pain was enough to make a shy, bald, buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder.  And, so I drank one -  It became four
And when I fell on the floor ...
...I drank more”

 Understandably bad advice.  Don’t drink until you pass out on the floor and then drink more (which is actually physically impossible if you think about it).  But the sentiment remains legitimate:  sometimes people do things to us that break out hearts a little.  It takes a small chunk out of us that we might never recover, but we still love the person who did it – just a little bit less.  Sometimes it hurts so much that the pain is enough to make a pacific monk think about retribution and revenge, so what hope is there for the rest of us who have less control of our emotions?  Less will power?  The point is that his words strike a chord with anyone who has been crushed a little because of someone else’s disregard or cruelty.

“I’ve come to wish you an unhappy birthday, because you’re evil and you lie, and if you should die, I may feel slightly sad, but I won’t cry...may the lines sag heavy and deep tonight.  So drink, drink, drink, and be ill tonight.  From, the One You Left Behind.”

Hateful, spiteful lyrics … sung with a perky little background tune.  This dichotomy is my love affair with The Smiths.  My faith in love is still devout.