Dec. 15, 2010 - Issue #791: NYE Guide 2010
Old Sounds
The Smiths
The Queen Is Dead (1986)
It's tough to assign the success of The Queen Is Dead to either the timeless guitar lines of Johnny Marr or the dichotomy of wit and melodrama Morrissey brings to the table. The magic of the Smiths has never rested with Morrissey alone, but it's difficult to ignore his adhesive force in this otherwise eclectic album. The aural chemistry between Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce creates a record where every element complements the others—not a toe is stepped on.
But on an album where no two songs are alike, Morrissey, by the sheer gravity of his curious personality, creates remarkable cohesion. He remains that intelligent, well-read, flamboyant ray of punditry for every disenfranchised young listener who discovers him in their catcher-in-the-rye hour of lost innocence. Every lyric drips with snide awareness, whether speaking to inevitable death and the pursuit of love or instead giving the brit-punk double bird to the naysayers in his cheeky, vainglorious way. The former constituting the entirety of ballads like "I Know it's Over," "The Boy with the Thorn in his Side" and "There Is a Light that Never Goes Out." The latter is well exemplified in "Frankly, Mr Shankly" but perhaps even more so in "Cemetry Gates," written in response to criticism accrued by borrowing from poets such as Elizabeth Smart and Shelagh Delaney. He mimics his critics with his lines "If you must write prose-poems / The words you use should be your own / Don't plagiarise or take "on loan" / 'Cause there's always someone, somewhere / With a big nose, who knows / And who trips you up and laughs when you fall." He goes on to indict them directly with the final chorus "A dreaded sunny day / So let's go where we're wanted / And I meet you at the cemetry gates / Keats and Yeats are on your side / But you lose / 'Cause weird lover Wilde is on mine," eliciting Oscar Wilde's notorious "Talent borrows, genius steals."
The album is surrounded by all sorts of lore like this. For example, rumour has it "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" fades out in the beginning because it was an unofficial mix given the band as a proof before they'd paid for the recording. Or consider the backing vocals on "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and "The Queen Is Dead" being attributed to one Ann Coates who in reality was a pitch-shifted Morrissey.
Aside from all of this, so much of the album is so anthemic it's hard not to fall in love with it when you remember every word after one or two listens. The Marr-Morrissey duo is so unencumbered by boundaries, planting its flag in a plethora of genres before the album lets out, dotting the i's with Marr's amphetamine strumming and crossing the t's with Morrissey's entrancing charisma. It's one of those infamous rock 'n' roll duos, the mysterious guitarist and the magnetic vocalist, that push the genre forward into the future like a light that never goes out. V
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