the smiths
i recently acquired rhino’s new smiths compilation the sound of the smiths. while i already have 95% of the material on here, i was hoping johnny marr’s remastering would be a revelation. it turns out i get the same effect playing with some settings on my itunes. nonetheless, it’s always nice to spend some time with morrissey. if nice means chortling and snorting and eyerolling and cunting it up, that is.
i remember when i first heard of the smiths in the late 80s. there was this kid who was also named alex at my junior high. alex was a rare bird in many ways. he was a fair blonde in a school overrun with swarthier latinos and black kids. alex was obviously gay. i hadn’t come out yet, but i could already tell who was and who wasn’t (and i eventually saw alex at a miami gay bar, so i was right!). alex also wore all black. long sleeve shirts with safety pins on them. black fedoras. dark sports jackets, slacks rolled up to reveal his doc martens with lots of white out painted on them. there was something about alex that said to me there was another alex i could become. there was something out in the world more interesting and exciting than hialeah, florida. and let me tell you there are few places more provincial than hialeah. growing up there gave me an appreciation for folks who grew up in small, repressed towns. even though hialeah is part of incorporated miami dade county, it’s a ghetto backwater.
i asked alex, “what music do you listen to?” this was very important to me because i was starting to look for music to express this sense of other i felt about myself. i liked my showtunes already, which is about as other as you can get in hialeah. but i began listening to a sunday night “alternative” radio show to find my own sounds. at the time, alternative to me meant 10,000 maniacs, u2, r.e.m. and tracy chapman (don’t laugh! these were very exciting to me back in 1987-1988). but alex listened to the cure, the smiths, siouxsie and the banshees, depeche mode and new order (probably even cocteau twins too i bet!). these were dark and myterious bands that sang about dark and mysterious things (new order? really? i thought this?).
i eventually grew to love all those bands. but my connection to the smiths is the strongest. i remember the first time i heard them (and morissey’s solo stuff which started coming out around then), i had no idea what to think. i got a whiff of something queer from the smiths, but they really didn’t sing about gay stuff per se. moz’s voice was a thing of beauty to me then. it had a pleasant vibrato, which always appeals to me. it was an operatic warble that ached and ached and ached. but frankly, a lot of it just went over my head. perhaps it was their englishness, and by englishness i mean their sense of snarky humor. i was too green, too ghetto, too latino (we are a passionate, but unsnarky people) to get it. nonetheless the music stayed in my life with many of my friends playing it around me well into the mid 90s. i liked “this charming man” and “pretty girls make graves” and moz’s “hairdresser on fire” a lot.
one day at a boring temp assignment (this had to have been 1996), i brought a smiths comp (singles, i believe) to work and it all hit me. because i was laughing hysterically through most of the songs. “and if a double decker bus crashes into us?” genius! “girlfiend in a coma/i know/i know/it’s really serious” pure gold! “how can you stay with a fat girl who says ooooohhh?” lulz for days. and as a result, morrissey’s maudlin drama became available to me once i got his humor. even though “how soon is now?” is a total emo fest, i felt every word of that song at the time.
i think the smiths connected me to my inner bitch. i never used cutting humor to shield my vulnerabilities. i just felt vulnerable. i looked for opportunities to really feel. and feeling “depressed” was a badge of honor. i was stupid and obviously not really “depressed.” but college and graduation gave me my first emotionally challenging experiences. i often felt lonely and confused. i felt unattractive and desperate to please others. i had no idea how i would pay the bills. my parents’ marriage was falling apart. i realized i couldn’t always feel these things deeply. sometimes i needed to deflect with a bit of a cocked eyebrow and a bon mot. i am not good at this, not then. not now. but morrissey takes me by the hand and shows me how every time. he graciously lends me his wit every time i need it.
as the economic downturn, the battle over gay marriage/equality, and a dozen personal battles rage inside and around me these days these songs were very welcome yesterday. “the boy with the thorn in his side/behind his hatred/there lies a murderous desire for love.” indeed, moz, indeed!
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