And so to 1985. This was the year of Live Aid, the year Mikhael Gorbachev became Russian Premier and had his first meeting with Reagan. And so, despite the usual run of smaller wars, terrorism and revolutions, this year has a generally more positive vibe to it, the first for a very long time.
Yes, there seem to have been a very high number of airline crashes, and several tragedies in football stadia, but also the birth of quite a few cultural milestones. Windows 1.0 is released. The first Blockbuster opens. Studio Ghibli opens. Japan launches the Sakigaki space probe, the first space-borne object not launched by the USA or USSR. Nintendo release the NES and Super Mario Brothers (a good year for Japan all round).
For the first time, I’ve heard of all of the artists for this year, although I think the proportion of the albums that I’ve heard before is roughly the same as ever. And like 1984, there’s a reasonable mix between MTV-friendly commercialism and eminently listenable alternative, but not any real oddballs that I could see.
I mentioned for The Cocteau Twins recently that their music lived in that dichotomy between the harder-edged instrumental tune and the drifting ethereal vocals, and in a way The Smiths live in a similar place. Mainly thanks to the difference between Johnny Marr’s jangly guitars, and Morrissey’s miserablist lyrics, the music of The Smiths finds a mid-point somewhere between joy and despair. Of course, such disparity can often contain the seeds of a band’s demise as well but while it works, it can produce some unique sounds.
Much like a Leonard Cohen track, in some ways it doesn’t make a difference to Morrissey’s drifting vocals what Marr and the rest of the band are doing behind him except to serve to give each track a different flavour. Sometimes a bit rockabilly (Rusholme Ruffians), sometimes some classic rock (What She Said), most often the characteristics Smiths/Marr jangle. Meanwhile Mozzer pontificates about death and beauty side by side - “Well, it suddenly struck me, I just might die with a smile on my face after all” from That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, or “I smoke 'cause I'm hoping for an early death, and I need to cling to something!” from What She Said or “And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion, I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie in the middle of the street and die” from Nowhere Fast. Morrissey conveys the same sense of ennui and isolation that you’d find in tracks by The Jam, Elvis Costello, or Bruce Springsteen, a mix of societal and personal failures. And yet, somehow, I didn’t come away from the album feeling like I’d listened to somebody else complaining for forty minutes, and this, I think, is where the neutralising effect of the instrumental elements come in.
There are two tracks where Morrissey and Marr really come together to create a unified mood. Barbarism Begins At Home is for me the best track on the album, an excoriation of senseless parental discipline where nothing the child can do is right - “A crack on the head is what you get for not asking, and a crack on the head is what you get for asking”. It has thematic similarities to Lennon’s Working Class Hero, of being trapped in a lose-lose situation. The title track, meanwhile, is a mournful way to finish the album, almost as if it’s a funeral dirge for the animals heading to the slaughterhouse for human consumption. These days there’d be people complaining that the song has a “woke agenda”, when what they really mean is that the message is not subtle.
Now, I eat meat, but not often. I eat eggs and dairy and, to be honest, I wouldn’t be able to excuse at least meat-eating from much of a rational perspective – in a post scarcity society where we don’t need to use meat as a vital protein and energy source, there’s not really any need for it. Sure, if you’re a pre-industrial farmer and one pig can be turned into preserved meats to cover you over lean times, go for it. I’d advocate more for just eating less meat so that animal husbandry doesn’t need to consume so many resources, the density of farming could decrease, and thus animal welfare would be easier to maintain. Because, if you’re going to use animals for anything, at least give them a good life while they have one.
But before I go off into too much of a side tangent – the album was okay. There weren’t any of The Smiths’ songs that are among the famous ones on here. It’s their second album and where the sound is really solidified, but for me once you’ve heard one Smiths song, you’ve kind of heard them all.
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