9. The SmithsMeat Is Murder
Similar to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, there was something so superior about Morrissey. It was some of the first music where musically I had nothing to really find to really like in it: it’s pretty square. Really the attraction was Morrissey and this vengeful nature of his intelligence, similar to what Holly Johnson had – you can see that in the 80s, all my tastes were to the megalomaniac. Now I see Morrissey, he’s much more of a melancholy melgalmonaic, but nothing captures teenage alienation quite like Morrissey. I think there’s a certain reaction to depression that Morrissey really codified: everybody turns depression into something else, and you can trace that back to Morrissey. A song like ‘The Grudge’ off Ivory Tower – you cannot get that without Morrissey.
It seemed like British music was more reflective and wore its intelligence – intelligence leading to cynicism and humour – on its sleeve a lot more than so-called earnestness, which I find always more manufactured. I found that with these larger-than-life characters like Holly Johnson and Morrissey and Heaven 17, there was more truth in that than someone who’s pretending to be real. You look at the album cover for Penthouse and Pavement – it had so much of the supervillain. They’re already referring to themselves as a ‘corporation’ and asking really important questions about what it is to be a musician and the idea of entertainment versus art.
Morrissey, to my mind, is not that far from a rapper – the beginning of ‘How Soon Is Now’ – ‘I am the son, the heir…’, the way he uses these puns and the way that they cut so deep, really reminds me of how a rapper uses humour and that humour is always masking something deep, even in a Lil’ Wayne punchline. You British guys, whether it was a fact of being dandies or gay, whatever it was, in the mix of these British artists that I liked, I think it was that they were the rappers of their time for me.
