Moz vs Smiths

[Worm]

Interesting points about age coming up here.

I suppose those of us who are old enough to have know The Smiths from the start have an additional dimension to those songs now. Nostalgia. Ahh, all those memories......

Plus, we heard them "In context", against the backdrop of the '80s. This ground breaking, mold shatering new sound, new voice, new attitude rising from the rubish which was popular music back then. It rose up and hit us in the head, and no one who ever discoveres these songs even a few years later, never mind 20 years on can ever realy appreciate what that was like.

I don't, however, agree that just because fans missed out on this exquisite chance to see/hear the band rise from the mediocre malle which was the 80s should have their oppinions quashed - in fact, perhaps their distance from these memories and this nostalgia gives them an open mindedness which we don't have?

Very true.

Age is a huge factor in listening to pop music. It might even be one of the decisive factors in what we listen to. The way we listen to pop music as teenagers involves so much more than playing a CD. As you said there's a world of context to consider. Half of my collection consists of songs that are a deep part of my memories as a teenager, and the other half are "just songs" I've liked a lot since getting older. The first group are much more meaningful to me. Pop music is always tied to time and place, rooted in your own past but also reflecting the world from which it sprang. I too think that no one who was not around in the mid-80s understands The Smiths as well as those who were, just as I will never totally comprehend glam rock or the first wave of punk bands in the Seventies.

By the same token, it is possible that a kid listening to The Smiths in 2007 hears things I can't even begin to imagine. Perhaps the distance brings out certain qualities I miss. Perhaps, also, there is something about being an adolescent in these times, coupled with hearing this wondrous music for the first time, that makes a younger person's love of The Smiths stronger. Be that as it may, it is still difficult, and probably impossible, to understand just how magical The Smiths were when they were around. I feel that way about the first few years of The Smiths, before I was a fan. I never turned on the TV to watch "This Charming Man" on Top Of The Pops as an acne-scarred thirteen year old boy. Even to have missed that much makes me feel not quite with it.

That's why, even though I do think there's a difference between how older and younger fans hear and experience the music, I don't think it translates into any kind of superiority or privilege. Unless you were there, in the middle of the scene, shuttling between New York, London, and Manchester for a period of about ten years (1977 to 1987), catching every gig and TV appearance, visiting every club, and (oh by the way) possessing expert knowledge of history, politics and sociology, then to some degree you're at least one and possibly several removes from "what really happened" with punk, post-punk, and The Smiths in particular.

 

[Duncan_Dhu]

For me, The Smiths are perfect all their songs are great they 're like the beatles perfect from start to finish.

Morrissey no.

 

[SNS22]

Anyone who was not BORN when The Smiths Broke up should be INELIGIBLE For this THREAD

I actually meant this as a joke

It's just funny how some people compare Apples and Oranges...

Fergal Sharkey's solo career was better than The Undertones
Sting's solo career was/is better than The Police
The Bubblemen are better than Love And Rockets...

Anyone who believes any of those statesments to be true needs to check their blood/sugar levels

ETC ETC ETC

 

[faroffplaces]

Well, these stories are apparently meant to go these ways but in fact Wilde's downfall could have been avoided and the same is true of Morrissey's downfall (if you can call it that). Clearly Morrissey himself thought he was in a court case for the ages, a fight for his life in which his soul was publicly dragged in filth by the unjust and the wicked, and he may have had Wilde in mind when he sat in court. But his case falls well short of Wilde's in pathos, and this is nowhere seen as humorously and strikingly as in the comparison between "De Profundis" and "Sorrow Will Come In The End". Who knows? If Morrissey knew nothing of Wilde and "the way these stories are meant to go" he might have won the court case.

Oh, I don't think I can call it that; as I was trying (fairly ineffectively) to say at the end of my post, it's a pretty imperfect idea to try and map stories onto each other so specifically.

By "the way these stories are meant to go" I meant in the eyes of modern archetype and/or the demands of the celebrity-loving public for a certain type of narrative around a given genius. I wasn't suggesting that I believe an objective force exists that forces popular artists with some degree of iconic pull to fall in a certain direction - though perhaps Morrissey does.

I've never quite worked out the extent to which Moz deliberately self-mythologizes; I assume it's quite a lot, given his remarks about journalists who harass him, and such - that they "just want to stay part of the story" - also his intense James Dean studies. He seems to take his own myth quite seriously, and this can seem at odds with the basically, heroically human and unmythic quality of his work - to the significent detriment of attempts to criticize him and discuss him academically. Critics love mythology, and I haven't read one yet who escapes it enough to proceed to a full discussion of Morrissey's actual writing. (I've talked up Michael Bracewell here in the past and I still think he comes the closest.)

I'm not sure of the extent to which I actually reacted to what you said, sorry.

 

[SNS22]

I think it's safe to say that very few artists solo career exceed their band's....

The exception might be Billy Idol v. Generation X

I think we should vote on whether Limahl was better before or AFTER Kajagoogoo

 

[Alcoholic Afternoons]

i think the smiths could've been much better with a different singer

I know you're kidding, but that was actually my first reaction to hearing them, 1985, Meat is Murder.

I've come around since then . . .

 

[SNS22]

I know you're kidding, but that was actually my first reaction to hearing them, 1985, Meat is Murder.

I've come around since then . . .

I think they could have been better with a different cheerleader/deaf kid on stage with them....

 

[TrueToYou]

I think it's safe to say that very few artists solo career exceed their band's....

The exception might be Billy Idol v. Generation X

I think we should vote on whether Limahl was better before or AFTER Kajagoogoo

how about this one.
Paul Weller - Better on his own than in style council, not as good on his own as with the jam....

 

[TrueToYou]

I think they could have been better with a different cheerleader/deaf kid on stage with them....

is it true that that Morrisson bloke who sang for the smiths is gay?

 

[SNS22]

how about this one.
Paul Weller - Better on his own than in style council, not as good on his own as with the jam....

True...I have The Best Of Style Council, but all I ever listen to is My Ever Changing Moods and A Solid Bond In Your Heart

I think we should have a poll on what was Terry Hall's best project...Specials, Fun Boy Three, Colourfield, Vegas, (That trio where he covered Love Will Keep Us Together), back up singer/co-writer for The Lightning Seeds, or Solo

The same could be done for Paul Carrack

 

[TrueToYou]

True...I have The Best Of Style Council, but all I ever listen to is My Ever Changing Moods and A Solid Bond In Your Heart

I think we should have a poll on what was Terry Hall's best project...Specials, Fun Boy Three, Colourfield, Vegas, (That trio where he covered Love Will Keep Us Together), back up singer/co-writer for The Lightning Seeds, or Solo

The same could be done for Paul Carrack

i REALLY liked the terry hall solo album. the one with "I punched the gift horse in the mouth" on it.

 

[SNS22]

Most of his stuff except The Specials is unavaliable here..I once asked Jane Wiedlin if she wrote the song "My Boyfriend was a Teenage Hustler" about him, and she asked me if I knew something about him she didn't

 

[Worm]

I wasn't suggesting that I believe an objective force exists that forces popular artists with some degree of iconic pull to fall in a certain direction - though perhaps Morrissey does.

I've never quite worked out the extent to which Moz deliberately self-mythologizes; I assume it's quite a lot, given his remarks about journalists who harass him, and such - that they "just want to stay part of the story" - also his intense James Dean studies. He seems to take his own myth quite seriously, and this can seem at odds with the basically, heroically human and unmythic quality of his work - to the significent detriment of attempts to criticize him and discuss him academically. Critics love mythology, and I haven't read one yet who escapes it enough to proceed to a full discussion of Morrissey's actual writing. (I've talked up Michael Bracewell here in the past and I still think he comes the closest.)

The question of an objective force is an interesting one. If I remember correctly Wilde believed that he was fated for disaster, never more than one step away from doom. Ellmann speculated that this might have accounted for his unwillingness to flee into exile before the final trial. He wrote that Cassandra's speeches before she enters Agamemnon's house in Aeschylus haunted Wilde all his life:

Look how Apollo now in person strips me,
rips my prophetic robes, the god who watched,
as my friends in their hatred turned on me,
mocked me so savagely in these very clothes—
they thought they knew what they were doing.
But they were wrong. I heard them call me names,
"beggar," "starving wretch"—I endured them all.
And now the prophet god is done with me.
He's led his prophet to her place of death.
No father's altar for me here—instead
a chopping block awaits, slaughtered
in one hot stroke of bloody sacrifice.
But we'll not die without the gods' revenge.

...

Alas, for human life. When things go well,
a shadow overturns it all. When badly,
a damp sponge wipes away the picture.
Of these two, the second is more pitiful.​

I can't say whether or not Morrissey shares the same tragic, ancient Greek view of life that Wilde believed in, but you can almost imagine Cassandra saying "Life is a pigsty" and "No one knows what human life is". ("Honey Pie you're not safe here", not so much.)

As you said he does self-mythologize. And I think you could say that the "heroically human" aspects of his work make up one of his biggest mythologies, not his cleverest escape from illusion. Somewhere along the line he realized this and dropped the pretenses (tattered Levis traded in for Gucci). He accepted his calling to be the brave and individual artist who reminds the rest of us about the beauty of being a lowly human, one of the funniest paradoxes of modern art, high and low. Ginsberg calling himself a shit and piss factory in a poem. Turturro lecturing Goodman about the common man in "Barton Fink". That sort of thing. I can imagine that there are moments in his life when Morrissey mythologizes himself as the greatest, rarest creature on the planet, an immortal poet standing above the age, and his sacred mission is to let the rest of us know and accept what it is to be-- mortal. Still, Morrissey also has a splendidly self-deprecating and ultimately redeeming sense of humor about his life.

You're absolutely right about the critics. No one has successfully analyzed his lyrics or his persona (Will Self came within a mile or two, once). I think the reason for this is that Morrissey's lyrics never stand alone. You're always absorbing so much more. Lyrics, music, imagery, an entire imagined history of the romantic loner/bookish outsider. To write academically about him is therefore almost useless. You're going to miss the point. All you can really do is separate individual subjects and write about them academically. For instance you might know Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept" but it doesn't get you a whole lot closer to understanding why "What She Said" works the way it does. I wish some journalists would try a little harder-- most of the comments about his songs are stupendously lazy-- but at the same time it's hard not to let yourself drift with the magic of the music. Pop journalism is often stupid, but can it be otherwise? It would be like explaining cocaine to a Martian by saying it's a crystalline tropane alkaloid that blocks your dopamine transporter. Not exactly to the spirit of things.

 

[faroffplaces]

As you said he does self-mythologize. And I think you could say that the "heroically human" aspects of his work make up one of his biggest mythologies, not his cleverest escape from illusion. Somewhere along the line he realized this and dropped the pretenses (tattered Levis traded in for Gucci).

Oh, that's a good way to look at it. Hmm.

He accepted his calling to be the brave and individual artist who reminds the rest of us about the beauty of being a lowly human, one of the funniest paradoxes of modern art, high and low. Ginsberg calling himself a shit and piss factory in a poem. Turturro lecturing Goodman about the common man in "Barton Fink". That sort of thing.

Hahaha! I don't think that's a paradox, though, at least in Moz' case. The line, more, is embracing all that humans are capable of, from art to shit (and puke).

I've always felt that Morrissey's vision is pretty inclusive - that he does feel awfully special, but truly believes (or once did, or at least did up to the middle 80's) that most people could make both puke and art...if they really tried.

For me, this kind of thing only hurts when an artist specifically sings of the virtues of being a non-artist, or rather of being a person who doesn't understand the point of art and doesn't need to - being "the common man," perfectly adapted, perfectly adjusted, certain of his way, exactly what every artist isn't - and nonexistent. It's different from singing about your own humanity and relationship with various universals - indeed, going off about "the common man" and the non-exalted life is the opposite of that; it's virtually an insistence that either you or the person you're discussing isn't human.

Moz has brushed this ("I wish I'd never even heard the song..." and the slight edge of wistfulness, I suppose, in "The Ordinary Boys") but I think he's usually pretty level-headed about it.

I think the reason for this is that Morrissey's lyrics never stand alone. You're always absorbing so much more. Lyrics, music, imagery, an entire imagined history of the romantic loner/bookish outsider. To write academically about him is therefore almost useless.

I think it can be done - though not within the strictest rules of academic writing. (Of course, I hope eventually to do some writing about him when I'm a real academic, so I've probably got some sort of brain process taking up half my energy right now trying to deny the truth.) It'd have to be very impressionistic, though without much of an autobiographical component (that always seems to lead to the long-winded, soulful "Morrissey saved me, but also, he torments me!" story and/or the ritual denial of profound influence - either of which can be interesting and sympathetic on a personal level, but extremely unhelpful to interpretation and thought).

In other words, I think Camille Paglia would be fully up to Moz - not always right, but a key component of any good Morrissey criticism, I think, would be that it'd be at least 1/4 bullshitting. Not many others.

You're going to miss the point. All you can really do is separate individual subjects and write about them academically. For instance you might know Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept" but it doesn't get you a whole lot closer to understanding why "What She Said" works the way it does.

Yup. He just can't be close-read, nor discussed (weirdly enough) in terms of the artists who made him. Also, aside from the central semi-innovation of transposing literary ideas to popular music, and some concerns of meter and rhyme, he's not much concerned with form for its own sake. He's virtually the most non-academic writer I can think of. Ain't life grand?

Pop journalism is often stupid, but can it be otherwise? It would be like explaining cocaine to a Martian by saying it's a crystalline tropane alkaloid that blocks your dopamine transporter. Not exactly to the spirit of things

::laughs!:: Nope. Strangely enough my favorite pop writers (Jon Savage, Bracewell and Paul Morley - come to think of it I sort of wished I knew pop writing well enough to be able to name a favorite who doesn't know Morrissey personally) are all mildly academic, and don't really try (beyond Bracewell's turns of prose) to replicate the feeling of the music. This whole business attracts paradoxes like nothing else.

 

[Worm]

I think it can be done - though not within the strictest rules of academic writing. (Of course, I hope eventually to do some writing about him when I'm a real academic, so I've probably got some sort of brain process taking up half my energy right now trying to deny the truth.)

What are you studying? Will you actually end up writing a thesis or dissertation on Morrissey?

It'd have to be very impressionistic, though without much of an autobiographical component (that always seems to lead to the long-winded, soulful "Morrissey saved me, but also, he torments me!" story and/or the ritual denial of profound influence - either of which can be interesting and sympathetic on a personal level, but extremely unhelpful to interpretation and thought).

In other words, I think Camille Paglia would be fully up to Moz - not always right, but a key component of any good Morrissey criticism, I think, would be that it'd be at least 1/4 bullshitting. Not many others.

Very funny and very true. Actually I find that the best criticism written about Morrissey happens in odd places in the middle of interviews. Just a line here or there interjected between Morrissey's words to help shape the image. Mostly the journalist should allow the artist to speak for himself. You can't solve the riddle if you're the journalist, but you can frame the riddle in such a way as to suggest the answers you may privately believe to be correct. I don't know about Camille Paglia (I'm not a fan of hers), but any article written in the classic New Yorker style would be superb; there's a piece on Paul McCartney in last week's issue that was excellent.

Yup. He just can't be close-read, nor discussed (weirdly enough) in terms of the artists who made him. Also, aside from the central semi-innovation of transposing literary ideas to popular music, and some concerns of meter and rhyme, he's not much concerned with form for its own sake. He's virtually the most non-academic writer I can think of. Ain't life grand?

Part of the reason music writing is so difficult is that a lot of people don't realize they're actually discussing a mild form of madness or frenzy. Or another kind of mental warp: Morrissey himself likened pop music to a drug addiction ("but there are no rehabilitation centers"). Creating easy threads running from A to B to C is all but impossible. If you stop and think about it, most of us have the most bizarre reactions to the myriad elements of pop music. For me it's the homoerotic angle-- even after hundreds of viewings of the Tim Broad video for "Sister I'm A Poet" it still was only slowly, slowly dawning on me that I was just like those bare-chested boys flinging themselves at Morrissey onstage. Now, I am not gay, and I'm sure many of them weren't gay, so what accounts for this behavior? What accounts for thousands of people singing along with an erotic death wish in "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out"? Academics can explain this behavior. But I don't think academics can explain this behavior to lay people in a way that is interesting or (more to the point) not insulting.

In addition to the writers you mentioned I would also single out Simon Reynolds, who writes wonderfully informed and urbane stuff about seemingly every group that's come along in the last twenty or thirty years. I think his writing is a great example of how to approach these subjects with seriousness and humor, but above all with an understanding of where to locate that threshold beyond which any attempt to explain pop music is futile. He's almost like a zoologist, really; "Rip It Up And Start Again", his masterpiece, is more of a field guide than anything else. The other style is to write about your own personal experience with pop music, and that's hit or miss-- far more on the 'miss' side unfortunately. I like it best when the writing is simple and direct, as for example John Updike's:

But you never really say goodbye; popular music is always there, flavoring our American lives, keeping our mortal beats, a murmuring subconscious sneaking up out of the car radio with some abrupt sliding phrase that hooks us into jubilation, into aspiration. I like it when, say, Madonna's 'True Blue' comes on: catchy. Long ago, driving to school with my father on cold winter mornings, I would lean into the feeble glow of the radio dial as if into warmth: this was me, this yearniness canned in New York and beamed from Philadelphia, beamed through the air to guide me, somehow, toward a wonderful life.​

 

[faroffplaces]

What are you studying? Will you actually end up writing a thesis or dissertation on Morrissey?

Literature. In the fall, I get to start teaching my way through a state school for M.A./Ph.D. - hopefully I'll find some interesting work in the field after that, though I'm kind of pursuing the degree for its own sake.

And I doubt that it'd be my thesis/dissertation, just because I think trying to write a very extended piece of Morrissey criticism would drive anybody completely insane - you'd get lost in his world, there'd be no frame of reference. He might be a really carefully-done article or a portion of a thesis (he touches on most of my fields of interest, unshockingly - the connection of sensuality and religion in art, gender in popular culture, gay/lesbian/bi/trans/Morrissey studies) and I'd totally do that, if I could make it not suck.

Mostly the journalist should allow the artist to speak for himself. You can't solve the riddle if you're the journalist, but you can frame the riddle in such a way as to suggest the answers you may privately believe to be correct.

True that. Nothing worse than a journalist with an overly-heavy hand (though I think it's vaguely possible to be so excessive that you wind up
making something surprisingly clear - like the infamous Antonella Black interview, when you can literally see pieces of his naivete dying. That requires liberal use of actual direct quotes, however, so no, the should-be-equally-infamous Doug Coupland "Big Head" interview doesn't count.

"I DON'T BELIEVE IN INTERVIEWS AND I DON'T BELIEVE MORRISSEY DOES, EITHER.

I BELIEVE MORRISSEY HAS SEX NOW!!??!!

I BELIEVE MORRISSEY, IN HIS SPARE TIME, ENJOYS BAKING BREAD AND PRAYING TO A SNAKE GOD OF HIS OWN INVENTION.

I BELIEVE ANYTHING RATHER THAN BELIEVE THAT MORRISSEY DIDN'T REALLY GIVE ME ANYTHING OVER THE COURSE OF OUR TALK. I DOUGLAS COUPLAND, I AUTHOR, I FIND THIS IMPOSSIBLE.")

...I find it a little distressing that nobody seems to like giving us a Morrissey interview in pure Q&A form these days. When we do get one, it always surprises me how much more reasonable and likable he seems when simply, directly quoted - and it's not really as if being reasonable and likable makes him less interesting, unless you're bent on thinking Morrissey = Marilyn Manson and is all about the stylized portrayal of Darqueness.

I don't know about Camille Paglia (I'm not a fan of hers), but any article written in the classic New Yorker style would be superb; there's a piece on Paul McCartney in last week's issue that was excellent.

See, I'm troubled by the fact that I tend to find Paglia's criticism absolutely fantastic (though I've only read Sexual Personae)...because it's gleefully crazed, veering around the work, occasionally striking at its heart, but generally specializing in wild utterances that generate more subtext more than trying to pin down some hard Truth - which results in a brilliant book. But then, when one reads something she says outside the structured/deliberately ubstructured context of a book or essay, it's much easier to realize that Paglia is actually quite serious about her ideas - which implies that much of what's genuinely great about Sexual Personae, its ingenious loosey-goosiness, is unintentional. So.

What accounts for thousands of people singing along with an erotic death wish in "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out"? Academics can explain this behavior. But I don't think academics can explain this behavior to lay people in a way that is interesting or (more to the point) not insulting.

Arguably, if they can't explain it without being insulting, they haven't explained it at all. My own vice tends to be trying to explain why people hate Morrissey, though, so it's all easy for me to say.

He's almost like a zoologist, really; "Rip It Up And Start Again", his masterpiece, is more of a field guide than anything else.

I'll have to check that out, thanks. It had been floating around the bottom of my list - I'll send it to the top.

But you never really say goodbye; popular music is always there, flavoring our American lives, keeping our mortal beats, a murmuring subconscious sneaking up out of the car radio with some abrupt sliding phrase that hooks us into jubilation, into aspiration. I like it when, say, Madonna's 'True Blue' comes on: catchy. Long ago, driving to school with my father on cold winter mornings, I would lean into the feeble glow of the radio dial as if into warmth: this was me, this yearniness canned in New York and beamed from Philadelphia, beamed through the air to guide me, somehow, toward a wonderful life.​

That's lovely.