Jon Savage on song: The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead is an anthem for our times | Music | guardian.co.uk

Yep,

The Queen Is Dead is the Smiths' mature masterpiece. The playing is faultless: the rhythm section is both supple and relentless, while Johnny Marr's wah-wah guitar is constantly in motion, in total sympathy with the song's mood changes: rhythmic and viciously propulsive one minute, ambient the next. Morrissey's lyrics are pointed, witty and tricksy, with their implied rhymes: "castration" instead of "strings" to take just one example.

Best of all, they give a thorough portrait of how it feels to be an outsider, rooted in a precise physical and psychological place – "hemmed in like a boar between arches". When you hear the line "but the rain that flattens my hair" you can think of no other place than Manchester, and in many ways The Queen Is Dead represents the highpoint of Morrissey's lyric writing – when he was still informed by his city and its past.

This sense of rootedness is important. You intuitively sense that the musicians have experienced, indeed have deeply felt, what they are communicating. They know of what they speak. This sense transmits itself to the listener, who in turn finds a reflection of their own experience, and so the bond is forged. And that sense of connection remains: two and a half decades after I first heard it, The Queen Is Dead still rings proud and strong.

[via somedizzywhore]

Washed-Up Morrissey: Still Racist, Still Worshiped

The fact that people are upset about this quote proves that there's nothing that frightens Americans more than complex thoughts and complete sentences:

Did you see the thing on the news about their treatment of animals and animal welfare? Absolutely horrific. You can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.

The forceful deployment of languages against obvious wrongs only inspires the weak-minded to pieties and moralism.

What Morrissey said was rude. What those who abuse animals do is evil. Learn the difference.

Morrissey's Guardian Interview Comes Early: All Bow Down and Shriek - somedizzywhore.com

Vocational advice:

Referring to his own experience, he tells me, "Once you feel it and other people feel it, too, you stand and are authorised as a poet. I was the boy least likely to, in many ways. I was staunchly antisocial. It was a question of being a poet at the expense of being anything else, and that includes physical relationships, strong bonds with people. I think you discover you are a poet; someone doesn't walk up to you, tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, you are a poet.' "

Morrissey's Desert Island Thoughts

Morrissey picks his Desert Island Discs:

"I'm fascinated by the brevity of life and how people use their time, because we all know the actual fall. It's as inevitable as you and I sitting here now, that the Tuesday will arrive when you, Kirsty, are not here," Morrissey explained. "So we all know this fact, and with that in the forefront of our mind in everything we do, I find it fascinating how people spend their time."

The Smiths

Johnny Marr was all about the chiming interplay between the guitar and the bass, with Keith Richards moves thrown in for show.

Morrissey was all about class anxiety, vulnerability, and anger.

"Still Ill" by The Smiths in 1984.



"Headmaster Ritual (Cover)" by Radiohead

"I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris" -- Morrissey

Hey, it's Morrissey's latest single, and while it's a terrible video, it's a nice song. And what's the world coming to when the new album gets an 8.1 from Pitchfork of all places. As for the video, alas, we're all getting older aren't we? Still, if Moz was once the epitome of the awkward, gawky, gangly, geeky teenager, what does that make him today as he nears 50? And what of his fans who've aged, for better or worse, right along with him?

Morrissey - I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris

There Will Always Be a Morrissey

A four star review for Morrissey in the Times:

That he is comfortable with that legacy was confirmed by his decision to open his first UK show in nearly two years with How Soon is Now. The song was as you remember it, but the singer - who sang much of it while lying against the drum riser - bore only a passing resemblance to the effete young thing who sang it in 1984.

If the greying quiff, brown shirt and tie gave Morrissey the air of a hard-bitten Seventies football manager - in the Brian Clough or Don Revie mould - the parallels seemed apt. He addressed the crowd with a brisk: “Hello, West Ham”. His band, too, played with a fists-up zeal, redolent of football teams that emerge from the tunnel to a world that they're told wants them to fall flat on their faces.

Who even knows what half of that means? My anglophilia draws a line at futbol jibber-jabber. Still it's funny that Morrissey is criticized for having outdated notions of Englishness when you try to parse that description.

All the same, it's an astute review that reminds us that the Smiths were a long time ago, Johnny Marr wasn't all that, and these are the good old days when it comes to the world of Moz.

God Help You All

Morrissey ends his five night stand in New York, and all I got was giddy approbation:

Resplendent in studded denim, his shirt halfway unbuttoned, Mozza was bathed in heavenly lights. And his every utterance was received with adolescent-type fervor: “It is an indisputable fact that no American musician of any consequence has ever been on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.” Giddy approbation.

In his stubborn refusal to just go away already, Morrissey has transformed himself into an icon of adolescence, even as he nears the improbable age of 50. His longevity is testimony to a certain sort of longing in life, and a certain sort of personality that can find no other outlet or expression except through the embarrassment of persistence.

Here's a clip from the glory days of The Smiths, and even then Johnny Marr seems sort of annoyed that they can't just play the song like a regular rock and roll band. Note how Marr keeps focusing on his Chuck Berry moves while steadfastly ignoring Morrissey's rolling around the floor.