My introduction to The Smiths came through a connection that now feels like a figment of my imagination. That person must have seen something in me that I didn't at the time, pointing me in Morrissey's direction when I had yet to discover my own voice as an outcast who would be as angry being accepted as rejected.
"I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does" he sings in the iconic "How Soon Is Now?"
The driving force of that song is Johnny Marr's tremolo guitar, which throbs with the uneasy feeling of a racing heart losing the battle against anxiety. If Sartre was right that "hell is other people", then the answer to the question "What fresh hell is this?" is the name of whomever the new person we have met is. The heart of Morrissey's philosophy is that people are everything that is wrong with life, but also everything we want out of it.
I have come back to The Smiths in recent days, because that idea is one I cannot escape. Like Morrissey, I want to feel connected to the world, to have people I matter to. That has proven elusive, as time has shown me that my own universe is much like the one we live in; entropy pushing everything further away. There are days... ok weeks, when getting two words out of people is the heaviest burden I can carry.
Yes, I do feel like "Half A Person", and yes, I can say "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" when it is thrown in my face that even people I thought I held dearest view me as being their last resort. It raises questions of what affection is if it is only expressed when things are not going their way. Too often, these people either disappear or stay quiet when they are enjoying their personal successes, returning only when the tides turn and they think I can commiserate with their misery... if you pardon the wordplay.
There was an episode of the show "Daria" that dealt with this phenomenon, where Daria was the sounding board for everyone after a tragedy, because she was 'the misery chick'. Whether we want to use that terminology, or the concept of the 'confidence friend' who is kept around only to make yourself feel better about your own life, either option is insulting... and yet the only attention that sometimes comes along.
Is it comforting to think that someone else has gone through the same pain you have? That's an interesting question, and I'm not sure there's a good answer to it. If we take a zero-sum approach, the pain someone else has felt limits how much is left for us. If we don't think in finite terms, it isn't encouraging that pain spreads as widely as it does, but it can help not to think we are the only ones to be cursed by fate.
Morrissey is not one of those people who will tell you that feeling sad is selfish, because other people have it worse than you. That particular morsel of advice has been given to me, and is no more helpful than those who say that 'everything happens for a reason'. They never do explain the reason, or why we are supposed to be grateful for being put in those positions if there was a choice available by a larger force to do things differently. It speaks of cruelty to me. Morrissey is also cruel, but more to himself than anyone else. He knows what he is saying, and the honesty of the approach is certainly worth noting.
The truth about Morrissey is that he is insufferable, and seeing yourself in him probably means being insufferable as well. Because of this, The Smiths are one of those bands who veer wildly from songs of near brilliance to the most self-serving tripe imaginable. Their discography is short, but spotted with festering wounds as if scarlet fever has washed over the whole of it.
"If you have fifteen minutes, I'll tell you the story of my life" he sings in "Half A Person". It wouldn't even take me that long to run through the highlights. "This Charming Man" always has an "Unhappy Birthday", and the worst thing of all is this; despite everything, there are people I carry a torch for, and with that "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out".
The goddamn Smiths. I love to hate them, and hate to love them. The needle is pointing in the wrong direction right now.
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