The Personal is Political
Morrissey of The Smiths
The Personal is Political
Print
Email
ShareAs noted earlier, Manchester bands have proven that the more locally evocative their music, the more that music has filtered into other future music slipstreams and pathways. Joy Division is no exception; indeed, perhaps more than any other Manchester band, their influence has far transcended the commercial popularity of the band in their playing days.
After the suicide of Ian Curtis in 1980, Joy Division’s most immediate legacy arrived in New Order, a band consisting of the remaining members. Their chart-friendly experiments in alternative electro-pop throughout the next decade provided another, separate chapter of innovation and inspiration in relation to rock developments. Elsewhere, the Joy Division effect can be perceived in many other bands and genres.
Goth, which took off in the early ‘80s, drew from the dark and gloomy sounds, impulsive rhythms, and deep Teutonic vocals of Joy Division. Successful rock bands like U2 and The Cure have also openly paid homage to Joy Division; indeed, the latter spent much of the early eighties copying the Mancunians’ every move, even as they transitioned into more electronic manifestations as New Order.
Today, Joy Division’s Kafka-esque musings and mechanistic song constructions are still evident in reverent revivalists like Interpol and Bloc Party, as well as in some recent Manchester acts like the Doves and Longview.
Three recent films show that what was once called “the cult with no name” continues into new generations. Both the documentary Joy Division and the bio-pic Control were released in 2007, while 24 Hour Party People (2002) covered the larger history of Factory Records, while dramatizing Joy Division as the company’s defining, centerpiece act. These filmic tributes offer concrete evidence of the growing legacy of Manchester’s most intriguing and original post-punk band.
But perhaps U2’s Bono captured their larger impact most poignantly when he commented recently in the band’s autobiography, U2 by U2, “It would be harder to find a darker place in music than Joy Division. Their name, their lyrics and their singer were as big a black cloud as you could find in the sky. And yet I sensed the pursuit of God, or light, or reason…a reason to be. With Joy Division, you felt from this singer that beauty was truth and truth was beauty, and theirs was a search for both.”
The Smiths / Indie Rock
There is just one Manchester band that has a greater posthumous popularity and influential legacy than Joy Division and that is The Smiths. Despite their common depictions of the darker sides of life, The Smiths—unlike Joy Division—invariably tempered their sad tales with a literate wit that, although not softening the blows of the woes, at least broadened the palette of emotions for receptive listeners. And if Joy Division’s music offered a sonic documentary reflecting the dour conditions of modern Manchester, The Smiths addressed those conditions lyrically, often simultaneously fleeing into a nostalgic enclave of the past for self-reflection, yearned-for innocence, and unsatisfactory solace.
Whereas Joy Division’s cold existential abstractions had their literary equivalents in the works of Franz Kafka, The Smiths revived the incisive social observations of Oscar Wilde. Gifted with Wilde’s subversive strain of humor, lead singer Morrissey satirized self and society with equal measures of mordant wit, highlighting the despairs and disappointments of early eighties British life with both eloquence and elegance.
Like Ian Curtis, Morrissey often assumed a first-person narrative address but spoke of personal circumstances in ways that echoed through Manchester and northern culture, as well as through the nation at large. Indeed, the appeal of both artists beyond Britain’s shores—both then and since—reflects how their localized scrutinies were also universal in appeal and application.
While Joy Division evoked architectural and city-scape portraits of their surroundings, The Smiths painted social pictures populated by people in crisis, unable to escape their loneliness, misery, and alienation, except through the futility of the imagination. “Miserable Lie” (1984) tells a Manchester tale of everyday poverty, where struggle and ambition bring no reward and love is fated for failure. “What do we get for our trouble and pain but a rented room in Whalley Range?” Morrissey queries wearily, referring to a dead-end section of his city as the last-stop destination.
“Rusholme Ruffians” (1985) takes us to another section of the city, and to the fair, where ubiquitous violence and inevitable loneliness are the realities that dampen what should be adolescent joy and excitement. Manchester’s violence is not only limited to the arenas of ruffians and hooligans, either, for Morrissey sees an endemic geo-social condition of sadism within the city’s institutional systems.
He looks back to the cruelties of school in “Headmaster Ritual” (1985), declaring that “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools / Spineless bastards all”. An even more sinister portrait has Morrissey delving back to the infamous Moors murders in “Suffer Little Children” (1984), where the singer appears to align the incident with a violent streak inherent to the city itself when he bemoans, “Oh Manchester, so much to answer for.”
For Morrissey, as for Ian Curtis, Manchester serves as a metaphor for the modern condition, one where harsh environments suffocate hope, and geography imposes upon culture and psychology. Yet, despite the sour notes, Manchester is seen as neither exceptional nor as an aberration in relation to the larger national circumstance.
Morrissey’s indictments of southern England, symbolized in his characterizations of mainstream pop groups, industry executives, and politicians, are even more caustic than his local reflections. The South represents the greed, consumerism, and cut-throat cruelties that Morrissey associates with the period’s so-called Thatcherism and its figurehead spokesperson, Margaret Thatcher herself.
His distaste for the-then Prime Minister, for her indifference to suffering and lack of concern for the poor and outcast, is apparent both in songs by and interviews with The Smiths throughout the ‘80s. In one noteworthy early interview, Morrissey suggested that “the only thing that can possibly save England is Margaret Thatcher’s assassin,” while in a later song, “Margaret on the Guillotine” (from his solo album Viva Hate!), he asks longingly, “When will you die?”
Such over-the-top declamations were amusing in their extremism, but they also played to a northern constituency that rarely voted for the Conservative Party, particularly not for Thatcher’s brand of it. And if Thatcher was The Smiths’ symbol of money-grubbing capitalism and a divide-and-rule politics that favored the rich and demonized (or ignored) the poor, Thatcherite bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet were her equivalent symbols within national music culture.
Indeed, the name The Smiths, with its connotations of the average common folk, struck a pointed contrast to the pretensions and pomposity implicit in contemporaries like Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. And as these “new romantic” clothes-horse acts dressed up in flamboyant costumes and sang about holidays in Rio, Morrissey parodied their glam-bitious affectations by wearing cheap national health glasses, a hearing aid, and gladioli in his jeans back pockets.
Strangeways, Here We Come, The Smiths declared in the title of their parting album in 1987, vowing to head straight for Manchester’s local women’s prison. It is this theme of imprisonment, of inescapable fate, that has so resonated with like-feeling fans over the years.
Post-Smiths fans populate all corners of indie rock and emo cultures today, though many are unaware that the rock roots of their subcultures/genres and the artistic roots of their feelings and interests reside in this Manchester band from the ‘80s. Smiths “types” today, as before, relate to a clear-eyed honesty in addressing often teary-eyed topics; they relate to the courage to confess and to articulate emotions with candor, precision, perception, and poetry.
No band in the history of rock has expanded the vocabulary of the pop song further than The Smiths, and no band has used humor with such moving purpose and to such incisive effect. Without that literate wit, with its sarcastic bite, wry self-deprecation, and tempering relief, The Smiths’ despondent songs of death, misery, rejection, and loneliness would be too much for many to bear. As it is, though, The Smiths currently stand as their nation’s most beloved rock band, and, more significantly, as its most articulate, intelligent, and humorous practitioners of the art form.
