"How Soon Is Now?"... Too Soon, & Too Late

When the white smoke rose into the sapphire sky to signal the election of Morrissey as the 'Pope of Mope', I'm not sure many would have believed Morrissey would have made the transition from being the person reflecting and comforting our sadness into a person who made us sad for letting him into our lives. The moniker still applies, but with a far different meaning. Maybe the lesson to be learned is that sadness will always be lingering in the air, lying dormant inside us until the right moment comes for our defenses to be low enough to succumb. Morrissey is sort of like that, his voice always in the back of our minds, springing out of the shadows like a spring-heeled attacker to our well-being.

The maddening thing about Morrissey is to realize how much you detest the man, and yet he is one of the few people to ever write words that explain parts of who you are. That's especially true when the words you write for yourself are neither read, heard, or understood, which leaves only Morrissey's for friends to try to glean from.

"I am the son, and the heir, of a shyness that is criminally vulgar"

So begins The Smith's seminal song, "How Soon Is Now?", the most enduring musical statement Morrissey has ever been a part of. Opening with Johnny Marr's tremolo guitar, the recording sounds as if the speakers are broken, the sound fluttering very much like the rhythm of a heart amidst a panic attack. The percussive thump of blood trying to drown our better senses is a feeling not everyone is familiar with, but once you are, the sound is unmistakable. I don't know if Morrissey was inspired by experience, or happenstance is what happens by chance, but the song became an anthem for the forgotten and awkward for obvious reasons.

What is a shyness that is criminally vulgar, you ask? We have all heard about the two personality types; extroverts and introverts. What is more difficult is for each group to actually understand what life is like for the other. Extroverts are able to go through life either without questioning themselves in the context of other people, or at least having the confidence and/or sociopathy to glide along as if personal gravity can never falter. For introverts, those experiences can be like magnets with the like poles pointed toward one another, an unseen force pushing us away before getting too close can cause any damage.

For a certain group of us, that is taken to further extremes. Our hearts race at the thought of introducing ourselves to new people, our bodies mimic the symptoms of illness to tell us socializing will make us sick, and words stumble out of our mouths in the wrong order and with the wrong meaning. Whether nature or nurture, that kind of introversion is a sentence of isolation that slowly rots whatever faith we might have once had in people.

"I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does"

The key line of the song is Morrissey's plain declaration that those of us who are cold and distant are not always that way because we are misanthropes, but simply are unable to ask for, to reach for the same things as everyone else. We lack the skills to connect with other people, and our experiences have tilted the scales far enough that pain will never be balanced, but it was not a choice most of us made voluntarily.

"There's a club if you'd like to go... so you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home and you cry, and you want to die"

I have memories from my days in college of being dragged to parties and karaoke bars. I would call myself a wallflower if I thought there was any blossom there to make the metaphor work, but instead they were close-up experiments in seeing how the other half lives. As I watched people with no discernible charm get everything they ever wanted, it raised questions in my mind about whether confidence and ignorance were synonyms for the same unexplained phenomenon. When you can feel pheromones in the air, and they make you as nauseous as a scented candle, you discover the world is not meant for people like you. At least not any world you have been invited to be a part of.

And then people who should be able to see the anguish you are going through take advantage of the situation for their own amusement, putting us in compromising positions 'for [our] own good', or holding back the one shred of evidence that the impossible was merely improbable. Those experiences create a feedback loop, feeding the cynicism until it can no longer be contained.

"See I've already waited too long, and all my hope is gone"

That is where we end up if not lucky enough to find someone who can guide us through the process of learning and failing. Hope is not a finite resource, but it needs to be nurtured if it is not to sublimate into the ether. What was true when Morrissey wrote these words in 1984 is still true today. The only difference is that we can be reminded of it 24/7 with no means of escaping into a cloud of peace. On a macro level, having hope in people has been made difficult as we see what lies underneath when the veil of society is pulled back. On a micro level, having hope in people has been made difficult by the realities of life pulling us in different directions.

Time means only the most important are able to hold on and climb up the rope through the hourglass. When you are not one of those people, and the task feels like Sisyphus for those with less upper body strength, you revert to things like music to carry you through to the next low tide of depression. Morrissey has written a couple of lighthouses that can guide us toward that shore, which is a comfort I am grateful for, but also an admission I hate having to make.

"How Soon Is Now?" drones and repeats, the verse copied and pasted for emphasis, because when you are trying to tell people something uncomfortable, they rarely want to listen. You have to tell them again and again before it will register, which only infuriates us even more for having to relive those feelings, and the struggle it takes to voice them.

The titular now feels like it will never come, and maybe it won't. Maybe that brief instant of silence between the bursts of guitar is all that life is. So is "How Soon Is Now?" a great song? That's a difficult question to answer. On an 'objective' level, I don't think it is. The song is six-plus minutes that only has one real idea contained within, and the trick wears thin before the time reaches its end. However, the song is The Smith's most memorable anthem for a reason. No other song they wrote connected with the audience of misunderstood miscreants in the same way. "How Soon Is Now?" isn't my favorite Smiths song, nor is it the one most attached to my memories, but I can't deny it's the one song that never fades away, because it's the one time Morrissey spoke the most truth.