Also Into You: Three Songs From "The Smiths" (Part One of Two)

(Here we are with another song analysis. I thought it was a good idea to split this one into two halves, considering both the length and the fact that the second half is really quite harrowing - the reason I've left a few weeks since the last post is because I wrote this piece and then couldn't quite face the second half again. Anyway, this half is okay.)

Song:	Reel Around The Fountain
By:	The Smiths
Album:	The Smiths
Year:	1984

I'm an overeducated Northern student musician, of course I love The Smiths. I also feel like a lot of people I know are put off by the perception either of them as effete, self-indulgent hipster-bait or of Morrissey as a vapid, racist egomaniac. I'll happily concede that he absolutely is that, but in the context of The Smiths I think he's almost unparallelled. It's pretty upsetting.

Now, for me one of the most interesting things about The Smiths is that it isn't just Morrissey and a backing band: Johnny Marr's incredible, melodic guitar figures get just as much room at the front of the sound as the vocals, and Andy Rourke's bass parts are some of the most inventive in their genre since Paul and John Entwistle (of The Who). I've mentioned that I play drums, so you might be expecting me to gush about Mike Joyce's drumming with the band as well, but while his playing is solid and tasteful, I don't find it much to write home about. There's nothing wrong with that - it's far better to have non-flashy, solid parts than sloppy flailing, but I wouldn't list him in my top however-many drummers ever. Anyway, The Smiths being an intriguing, multi-part beast is the first thing I'd like to suggest. If you read interviews with the band members, the instrumentalists (led by Marr) would apparently come up with songs that they would tape and send to Morrissey so he could come up with his part separately. It's really quite impressive how they made it mesh so well.


Shyness That Is Criminally Vulgar [link]

Before we get to the songs I'm examining, I'd like to tackle Morrissey's Smiths persona explicitly. I think for a lot of people he feels fey, arrogant, pretentious and self-pitying - and if you look at some of his work out of context I think it can look that way ("Hand in glove, the sun shines out of our behinds... And everything depends upon how close you stand to me - And if the people stare, then people stare; I really don't know and I really don't care...").

But within the context of Morrissey's delivery and the rest of the songs (and maybe with a familiarity with the traditionally rather dry Northern sense of humour), I think the colour of the lyrics becomes clear. He's taking the piss, guys, almost all the time. Hand In Glove (from the previous paragraph) was their first single, and I think this puts the exaggerated swaggering into perspective. You can see the narrator's insecurity poking through the façade with lines like "No, it's not like any other book - this one's different because it's us!" If you're a band cutting your first single and hoping that it's going to chart (especially one where you've opened up so much of yourself in the writing of it), that sense of obstinate bravado might be the only thing that stops you collapsing into a corner and whimpering to yourself as you'd like to.

But the persona that Morrissey adopts isn't really about the fear of being rejected by the music-buying public. I think in these days where cryptic lyrics and depressive subject matter are almost mandatory in particular genres (guess who that came in from), it's easy to miss the contrast that The Smiths seem to have made with their contemporaries. Instead of the libidinous rock frontman singing about seducing girls (and/or boys) by force of personality, face-melting guitar solos and liberal use of stage make-up and the word "baby" in choruses, Morrissey is a) a scrawny Manc kid who b) doesn't seem to be straight or particularly into sex and c) wants to mix references to 60s girl groups with 19th century poets without d) writing songs like his life is one big amazing party.

Smiths songs create beauty out of the pain of self-doubt and rejection, leavened by the self-deprecating realisation of how ridiculous you sound even inside your own head. For me the purest expression of this comes in the latter section of The Boy With The Thorn In His Side (itself a rather overblown, homoerotic title, don't you think?). The triumphant, almost joyful guitar line is set against Morrissey's "But when you want to live, / How d'you start? Where d'you go? / Who d'you need to know?" (after telling us, "Behind the hatred there lies / A murderous desire / For love") and a heart-breaking falsetto vocalisation (it sounds uncomfortably close to someone breaking down completely) that comes almost in counterpoint to the guitar lines. After being rejected ("How can they see the love in our eyes / And say they don't believe us? ...") and deciding to reject those who have done the same to him, the narrator is pulled apart by the fact that he still needs love and companionship from the people around him. (More familiar might be the chorus of How Soon Is Now?: "You shut your mouth, how can you say / I go about things the wrong way? / I am human, and I need to be loved / Just like anybody else does".)

It's also possible, I think, to read Morrissey as the son and heir of a music hall-style tradition of camp. In response to the ugliness of homophobia and rigid gender roles, the artist presents a distorted version of what society "wants" from its members. In Morrissey's case this frequently involves exposing the seediness inherent in a lot of mainstream rock lust songs - the chorus of Handsome Devil has the memorably revolting "Let me get my hands / On your mammary glands", and the lyrics of Bigmouth Strikes Again (linked rather than reproduced for serious domestic violence triggering) seem to show the rank misogynistic entitlement in the classic take-me-back song expressed as nauseatingly violent impulses that the narrator tries to brush off because they were "only joking". Is either of these examples so far from Gary Glitter (and we all know how he turned out) or Run For Your Life? Morrissey also plays with the expectations of the hypersexual, hyperdominant, hypermasculine frontman in the way he uses tormented, self-doubting lyrics about being romantically dominated, frequently delivered in falsetto with weird grunts and yelps (like in the choruses of The Headmaster Ritual and This Charming Man) and eerie tape effects to add himself on backing vocals, but in what is traditionally a female vocal range (famously in Bigmouth Strikes Again, also on Meat Is Murder (being a militant vegetarian went down so well in so-manly-I-want-to-punch-a-steak land) and Death Of A Disco Dancer). It's almost as if he's saying, Isn't that what you think I'm trying to do? Be a creepy approximation of a woman? Fine, have it your way...


It's Time That the Tale Were Told... [link]

I started with The Smiths' third album (and for my and many people's money, their best overall), The Queen Is Dead, but I feel like I only really started to "get" The Smiths properly when I started at the beginning, with their self-titled debut.

I'm kind of a sucker for whole album readings (having cut my teeth on Pink Floyd), and I think it's often useful to know where the side break is on albums that came out on vinyl first. Here's how it goes down on The Smiths:

Side One	Side Two
Reel Around The Fountain	Still Ill
You've Got Everything Now	Hand In Glove
Miserable Lie	What Difference Does It Make?
Pretty Girls Make Graves	I Don't Owe You Anything
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle	Suffer Little Children

In classic 60s fashion they didn't include this period's single, This Charming Man, on the album, but most CD reissues (and American LPs, again like 60s groups) add it in between the two sides.

If you bear the format in mind you can get the joke in turning the LP over and being met with Still Ill; even if you don't, it stands out that we begin the first track of the first album with the line, "It's time that the tale were told / Of how you took a child / And you made him old". We are instantly informed what the character of this record is going to be like - we're hearing the breaking of a long silence over some kind of trauma, and in the context of the song as a whole we aren't sure to what degree the "child being made old" is consensual (mirrored by the fact that the chords shift from F# minor to D major under the line, a classic tear-jerker manoeuvre that nevertheless ends major).

The organ part (the only time one is used on the album) suggests a religious experience, though whether this confession comes at a funeral or a benediction is left open. (We end the song with a repeated "I do" like a wedding vow, as well...) It's interesting to contrast the use of this slow, warm A major dirge to kick things off on the LP rather than starting with the fast, desperate F minor Hand In Glove like the single. I get the feeling it's meant to serve as a sort of gentle introduction to the ground that the album's going to be covering. It reminds me of Disorder being the first track on Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures - fast, Eb major and comparatively joyful given even the next two tracks on the record. It also starts with a (what I think is very consciously) strongly scene-setting line: "I've been waiting for a guide to come / And take me by the hand." Ian Curtis' persona has been hoping for some sort of external help, but it's too late for that. It's the only time he really suggests that he wants to be helped; from that moment on, he is resolved to be on his own. (Various members of The Smiths have commented on being influenced by Joy Division, incidentally, but I think it's a fairly general trope - Homer starts the Iliad with the word "wrath" (mênin) as an overture to his main subject matter, showing that people haven't really changed since.)

(And this is the somewhat arbitrary dividing point. In the second half we'll be looking at the other two songs The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Suffer Little Children, which I'm afraid gets pretty heavy. After that we'll be moving to other stuff, though.)