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by NerblyBear_Archive
The Smiths might just have been the best band ever.
The beauty of Johnny Marr's guitar playing never ceases to amaze me. His phrasing, his rhythmic drive, and his knack for hitting upon gorgeous arpeggios make him a perennial favorite. The 12-string hadn't sounded so good since the Byrds. He's the master of tasteful yet refreshingly lush overdubs. I love how, say, on "Some Girls are Bigger than Others," he just hit on this one great progression and then just kept repeating it over and over again throughout the entire song.
And, as has been mentioned, the rhythm section is fine, too. This is a band that really *rocked*, which is a facet of their presentation that I think gets overlooked too often. Just listen to "Bigmouth Strikes Again" or "What Difference Does it Make" for evidence of this! However, with a guitar player like that, it could have very well have just been him and Morrissey alone and all my dicks would have been blown clear out of their sockets.
The keystone holding the whole wonderful structure aloft, however, is Morrissey. I'm a huge fan of everything about him. I love how, in all of his interviews from back in the day, he just put across this air of real confidence and even faith in what the band was doing. As has been pointed out, love him or hate him, he's the real deal. No matter how carefully crafted his public persona may have been, one feels that the persona wasn't formed in order to appeal to the public but was rather a genuine outbreaking of a deep urge in his character and was even a sort of artistic approach. His itch to provoke extreme reactions has always appealed to me.
I think that all of the people who deride the Smiths' songs as sentimental trash need to realize the humor and irony in so many of them. Morrissey is one of the very few singers whose lyrics aren't rendered totally embarrassing due to an attempt to strive towards actual poetry. Singers aren't poets, and Morrissey thankfully realized that and instead peppered his songs with little conversational asides and quips. Every songwriter should be sent a letter in the mail with Oscar Wilde's wonderful saying emblazoned on it in giant, red letters: "All bad poetry is genuine." The secret is that Morrissey's songs really start to mean a lot to you once you become familiar with them, even though their initial humor is so delicious.
I read a story somewhere about Morrissey's early days in Manchester, when "everyone was obsessed with Joy Division and reading Nietzsche," and Morrissey was a total outcast because he insisted on the New York Dolls and Oscar Wilde. I immediately took a liking to him. His choices exactly mirror my own aesthetic worldview.
The Smiths, for me, are a member of that elite group of bands that includes the Stones, the Beatles and the Byrds. Along with the Go-Betweens, they were probably the best band of the eighties.
Gay People Rock