Content warning: the second section of this post deals with extremely disturbing events.)
| Songs: | The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Suffer Little Children |
| By: | The Smiths |
| Album: | The Smiths |
| Year: | 1984 |
The Ghosts In The Storm Outside [link]
There are three slow A major songs on this album - Reel Around The Fountain, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, and Suffer Little Children. If you check the track listing from the first half, you'll see that the latter two both close their respective sides; the three together mark the beginning, middle and end of the record. All three see Morrissey using a gentle, almost crooning register that we don't really hear anywhere else in The Smiths: the high camp vocal tics and mock-hysterical delivery are absent.
In The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, we get what appears to be a fairly straightforward lullaby from a parent figure to a child who can't sleep: "Please don't cry / For the ghosts in the storm outside / Will not invade this sacred shrine / Or infiltrate your mind"; "And when the darkness lifts and the room is bright / I'll still be by your side: / For you are all that matters and / I love you till the day I die". We have overtones of some kind of sexual relationship in the chorus and elsewhere: "There never need be longing in your eyes / As long as the hand that rocks the cradle is mine"; "I once had a child and it saved my life / And I never even asked his name / I just looked into his wondrous eyes and said / Never, never, never again; / But all too soon I did return, / Just like a moth to a flame".
We have an odd mixture of what appears to be parental and sexual love. The obvious interpretation is that Morrissey is eulogising paedophilia (the reading the tabloids luridly went for), and while that isn't an unfounded reading (Morrissey has always loved a bit of shock value), I think there's mainly a parallel between parental love for a child and the Greek male homosexual love of an older man for a younger one (known as the lover/beloved pairing, erôn/erṓmenos), with the latter being stigmatised in modern Western society. I think there's also an implicit attack on the conflation of homosexuality and paedophilia (much more prevalent in the 80s, but still sadly alive and well today, as the remarks the current Russian administration attest) - "See how words as old as sin / Fit me like a glove", "Your mother, she must never know".
In fact, we might be able to take the view that the narrator in this song is the person being addressed in Reel Around The Fountain. The former has an equally ambiguous tenderness: "Fifteen minutes with you / I wouldn't say no", or what scientists have determined to be the most Smiths stanza ever produced, "And take me to the heaven of your bed / Is something that you never said / Two lumps please, you're the bee's knees / But so am I..." (Sugar or welts on his skin?). Is being made "old" being taken from a childish, innocent state and made mature? Does the narrator regret this? If it's the other party speaking in the later song, perhaps his loathing of his desire (returning like a moth to a flame) is reflecting that he too is unsure on the matter. Also stirred into the mix, I think, is Morrissey's fascination with subverting dominant narrators in relationships - one is the elder, one the younger, perhaps regardless of age.
This Will Be No Easy Ride [link]
If you don't feel able to read about the harm of children and don't know this story, I strongly suggest you stop reading now.
I'm from the moors. They're a part of me; when I'm away from them I feel less. My mother was a small child in the North in the early 60s. Furthermore, I was exposed to this story from far too young an age to be able to process it in any sort of detached way; then again, I'm not sure there is an age old enough.
"The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17 - Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans - at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered on the moor in 1987, more than 20 years after Brady and Hindley's trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered." (From Wikipedia, because I can't do it myself. Sorry.)
"I happened to live on the streets where, close by, some of the victims had been picked up. Within that community, news of the crimes totally dominated all attempts at conversation for quite a few years. It was like the worst thing that had ever happened, and I was very, very aware of everything that occurred. Aware as a child who could have been a victim. All the details... You see it was all so evil; it was, if you can understand this, ungraspably evil. When something reaches that level it becomes almost... almost absurd really. I remember it at times like I was living in a soap opera..." (Morrissey in a 1985 interview)
What's the worst thing a person can do? I have no intention of comparing answers, but I think repeatedly abducting, torturing and murdering children for kicks is probably the thing that springs to mind for a lot of people, especially if they're familiar with this story. I can only look at the Wikipedia page for so long at a time because staring at Brady and Hindley's mugshots while they stare back is not something I can really deal with. The judge sentencing them famously called them "wicked beyond belief"; I think Morrissey's "ungraspably evil" covers it as well.
In everyday language we're used to hearing the word sublime to mean excellent. One etymology for the word identifies it with the same root as "subliminal" - that is, it passes under (sub) the threshold (līmen) because it is impossible to comprehend. This is the theoretical definition of the sublime (usually used with the article to avoid ambiguity): that which is impossible to understand or to express by conventional means. It is often mentioned in the context of the atrocities of the World Wars - how can anyone begin even to process, much less react, to the Holocaust, to the prisoner of war camps, to atom bombs, and before that the trenches? What can you say that isn't just a completely trite insult to the memory of what happened? How will you trust the world, knowing that this can and does happen?
Many surreal (see the interview) and/or abstract artistic movements have arisen trying to work out how art can succeed where the literal cannot. The traditional artistic forms have failed, because though they gave humanity culture, it wasn't enough. How can they help the whole world, turned into an entire planet of survivors by the event, come to terms with it, when they were clearly inadequate to start with? A horrified silence, or a mind-rending scream, or a barrage of literal or semiotic white noise might seem to start to react to the snuffing out of another part of humanity and its innocence.
This deeply traumatic event could be said to underpin The Smiths, certainly in the three songs that we're examining. "Over the moor / Take me to the moor / Dig a shallow grave / And I'll lay me down". A part of the narrator has died - are Brady and Hindley part of the audience who "took a child and made him old"? Both were still alive and in prison at the time Morrissey was writing, so "fifteen minutes" with them and the implements of his choice would be a technical possibility. The depiction of the innocent, beloved child in the parallel song takes on an unspeakable level of horror - we've seen the "sacred shrine" that the first scene takes place in, and we are told in this last song, "A woman said, I know my son is dead / I'll never rest my hands on his sacred head". Morrissey addresses each victim by name through the song, as he knows them well. We all do. The lost children deliver their curse on Myra Hindley, but on us as well: "We may be dead and we may be gone / But we will be right by your side / Until the day you die... / This is no easy ride / We will haunt you when you laugh / Yes, you could say we're a team / You might sleep... / But you will never dream"
The figure of Myra Hindley in the song is taken to represent us in this way. (That feeling of revulsion is natural and intentional. See the skin-crawling recording of a woman laughing over the end - or is she crying?) We also hear that "Hindley wakes and Hindley says: / Whatever he has done, I have done / Wherever he has gone, I have gone". The other woman who is given voice in the song is the child's mother. Despite her promise (or one like her) that "My life down I shall lie" if someone tries to harm her child, she has failed. Hindley has failed as well because she has passively supported Brady's horrifying project - she casts in her lot with his (the incantation-like Whatever he has done etc) despite taking a lesser part in it. We hear the refrain, "Oh, Manchester, so much to answer for" - the entire city has blood on its hands because despite the killers' complete recklessness it took years to catch them. Myra Hindley also claimed in prison that she had been brainwashed by Brady into doing his bidding (having been asleep, here), a ploy familiar as the Nuremberg defence ("I was just following orders") in its most famous use that almost always fails to convince anyone of anything other than its user's utter shameless spinelessness.
Brady is never mentioned by name in the song - he is only a nameless he like some kind of demon. There is also the very old naming taboo that Morrissey is invoking in that if you say an evil thing's name it has power over you (where we get the word euphemism). The implicit rejection of this explanation (the children will not leave Hindley or us alone because of it) makes us confront the more horrifying reality than demonic possession - we all have the capacity for that level of evil within us, even if it just results in us standing aside.
A thing that jumped out at me while I was writing this post was that one of the main repeated melodies in the vocal line (first to the words "Lesley Ann with your pretty white beads") has a tritone (on pretty white here), which is only ever used as a brief passing tone, so it doesn't attract attention. The thing is, the Smiths' melodies are almost always very carefully written - I can't think of another example off the top of my head where either of the melodists use this interval which has been called "the devil in the music". I don't mean to imply that Morrissey sat down and planned this out, but the jarring dissonant note hiding amongst the gentle pastoral figures has a very obvious and worrying resonance with lines like "Fresh lilaced moorland fields / Cannot hide the stolid stench of death". It suddenly feels very cold in here.
As a short biographical note, this was apparently the first song that Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote together, which to me further cements the notion that this is the song at the core of The Smiths. That gentle, finger-picked pattern on the guitar must have sounded like a lullaby for Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey, Edward Evans, John Kilbride and Pauline Reade, one that at the same time meant that we could never sleep as soundly ever again.
In Summary...
I'm sorry if the latter section was upsetting, but I think it's key to understanding The Smiths (who are frequently called depressing, mopey etc). For the record (ahem), I don't think of The Smiths as mopey - if you do, I think you're probably missing the humour that runs through pretty much all of it (except for the latter two songs, for obvious reasons). I find there's nothing scarier than a Smiths fan who doesn't notice the humour - the number of people I've seen who think Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want (which Morrissey has described as "a punch in the face") is a sincere love song is frankly chilling... There's also plenty of happy moments scattered throughout: I particularly like the silly happiness of Shakespeare's Sister - "I'm going to meet the one I love! At last, at last, at last!" - or Ask, an enthusiastic consent anthem that's probably the most upbeat thing they ever did.
I think that the two things I value most are honesty and humanity, and I think part of that is not pretending that unhappiness doesn't exist, or that it makes people or their outlook any less valid. (People in the premodern era - in my book pre-1990 - weren't so great at dealing with mental illness or treating depression like an actual thing. If you think people can be insensitive now, look at media and talk to people from around then...) If you ask me, The Smiths manage to make something deeply beautiful out of both.
(I hope that articulated what I meant it to - I hope as well that you think it was worth a week or so slip in our update schedule. Next week we'll be back to less harrowing subject matter.)
