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| "Knock knock. Who's there? Morrissey. Morrissey who? See, I told you I didn't have any friends!" --The Fantastic Morrissey Knock-Knock Joke, from the comic strip Great Pop Things The long-standing, long-suffering caricature of Morrissey The Melancholy (or "Morosely," as he is sometimes dubbed in Great Pop Things) looms large in rock 'n' roll mythology. And with joyless underdog laments like "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want," and "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me"--bleated with his typical heart-sleeved, slit-wristed bravado--it's no wonder the Smiths icon has attracted such a fervent following of hypersensitive bedroom hermits and other assorted asexual/pansexual pariahs. (As an aside, I must warn you single folks out there, Smiths conventions are not the places to go looking for love: If you ever meet a prospective suitor who's a card-/Prozac-carrying Morrissey obsessive...RUN! Chances are, this charming man/woman will cause you nothing but grief.) But anyway, contrary to his popular public persona as the celibate/vegetarian/insufferably Oscar Wilde-fixated patron saint of downtrodden indie bedwetters (Coldplay's got nothing on the Smiths) whose only moods are glum and glummer, the misunderstood Moz has always been a master of comic relief--the guy used to the president of the New York Dolls' fanclub, for crying out loud, and surely no man can qualify for such a position unless he possesses a subversive sense of humor. Lacing his literary lyrics with playfully self-deprecating (if at times a tad self-consciously precious) Brit wit and the kind of knowing irony with which Alanis Morissette is sadly all too unfamiliar, Morosely's offbeat wordplay has at times strayed a little too far off the beat--by the time the plain old silly "Girlfriend In A Coma" was released in 1987, that joke wasn't funny anymore--but on the Smiths' landmark third album, The Queen Is Dead, his songs strike the perfect balance between heartache and hilarity. And with the spry, nimble-fingered, and hugely influential string-plucking of indie-pop guitar god Johnny Marr--the Keef to Morrissey's Mick, the Page to his Plant--underlying even Moz's most pathetically self-pitying sentiments with a bit of much-needed levity, the result is such fleeting, indefinable magic that Alternative Press magazine even declared The Queen Is Dead the best album of the '80s. (Huh? But what about Rio, or Appetite For Destruction? Oh well, we'll have to discuss those albums some other time...) The Queen Is Dead is certainly one of that newly nostalgia-filled decade's top contenders, representing not only the short-lived Smiths at their creative and commercial peak (it was their first showing in the U.S. top 100, yet they disbanded only a year later), but also representing a significant shift towards the kind of guitar-oriented-yet-still-pleasantly-wussy rock 'n' roll that has dominated Britpop ever since (only a very, very geometrically challenged person would be unable to draw a straight line from the Smiths to such obvious disciples as Gene, James, Pulp, Marion, and Suede, not to mention America's own Strokes and about 10 gazillion bleeding-heart emo bands). Opening with the thundering, six-minute title track--a wickedly funny and incisive attack on the Royal Family and Britain's crusty class system ("Pass the pub that wrecks your body/And the Church, all they want is your money/The Queen is dead, boys")--the album immediately deflates the Morosely Myth. Smugly howling about his fantasies of seeing Her Majesty's head in a sling and Prince Charles in drag, the Moz-man hardly sounds spineless or sappy, and besides, the song is Marred with far too many layers of roaring guitar to ever warrant such adjectives as "wimpy" or "fey." Of course, Morrissey's mincing, foppish charm/smarm is more evident on jaunty ditties like "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" and "Cemetry Gates," but once again, there's scarcely a trace of his notorious woe-is-me attitude: The former is a kiss-off to an employer (a sort of "Take This Job And Shove It" for the Britpop set), and when, on the latter, he quips, "Keats and Yeats are on your side/But you lose, because Wilde is on mine," he seems to take subtle delight in poking fun at himself. He clearly realizes that all misery and no fun makes Morrissey a dull boy, and makes sure not to take himself too seriously. And speaking of fun, "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" is a major hoot--the title says it all. (It sure would be a gas to hear a female artist cover this one, altering the lyrics ever so slightly to refer to the male anatomy...just a suggestion.) Of course, there are weaker moments of unrelenting despair--no Smiths album would be complete without them--as evidenced by painfully bleak lines like "If you're so very good-looking, why do you sleep alone tonight?" (from "I Know It's Over"), "I had a really bad dream/It lasted 20 years, seven months, and 27 days" ("Never Had No One Ever"), and "Life is very long when you're lonely" ("The Queen Is Dead"). But one track is the ultimate distillation of the band's greatest elements (Sahara-dry humor, incredibly naked tenderness, impeccable melodicism, brilliant guitar work), and it is perhaps the Smiths' finest four minutes and three seconds: the epic "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out." Sweetly, hopelessly romantic but never sickly or soppy, lightly humorous (a peculiar line like "If a double-decker bus crashes into us/To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die" is guaranteed to induce a wry grin) but still heaving with the dull ache of unrequited longing, it best utilizes the infamous friction between Morrissey and Marr that made for some fabulous music but eventually, in the tradition of every band ever featured on Behind The Music, drove the Smiths to splinter apart after only five years. (When is VH1 gonna make a Smiths Behind The Music, by the way?) In short, this song is the Smiths. It's the song that Class Of '86 goths danced to, unsmilingly, at their prom. Somewhere, some teenhood couple is rekindling their John Hughes-esque doomed romance at a 15-year high school reunion, or maybe even waltzing at their wedding, while this ballad plays in the background. And if Morrissey and Marr (oh yeah--and the other two Smiths, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke) ever stage a reunion, when they play this one there won't be a dry eye or extinguished Bic lighter in the house. So sometimes, there really is a light that never goes out--as the timelessness of the music of those great pop things, the Smiths, undoubtedly proves. The Queen may be dead, but the Smiths never will be. "How many Morrisseys does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None--because there is a light that never goes out!" --The Fantastic Morrissey Light Bulb Joke, from Great Pop Things --Lyndsey Parker (email)
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