Send "The Smiths " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 There have been better bands than the Smiths, but there has never been a more perfect band, in the sense of having a distinct, deliberate, powerful aesthetic shaped by the tensions of collaboration, combined with the ability to articulate that aesthetic. This box of newly remastered editions of their albums-- four studio records, three compilations of the singles and one-offs that were their greater strength, one live obligation-- would cement their reputation for brilliance and perversity, if it needed cementing.From the Smiths' first single, "Hand in Glove", in the spring of 1983, to their breakup barely four years later, everything about them seemed like a considered and ingenious decision: their name's undertones of both facelesness and creativity, the way each of their records began with a different sort of guitar tone, the tinted monochrome photos on their sleeves, their proudly ashamed fascination with their home town of Manchester, the three-song EPs they released every few months as bulletins of their evolution, their shoplifting excursions through the used-singles bins of British popular music. (One of the small pleasures of working backward through pop history from the Smiths is stumbling across Sandie Shaw's "Heaven Knows I'm Missing Him Now" or Reparata and the Delrons' "Shoes", for instance, and thinking ohhh, now I get it.) The most obvious source of their genius was their singer, lyricist, and spokesman, Morrissey, a career eccentric who idolized Oscar Wilde and took a similar delight in pissing off anyone who had preconceived notions about masculinity. (Or, for that matter, men's singing voices, or what lyrics could and couldn't say, or whether or not it was a good idea to sing lines twice in a row if he was particularly proud of them.) His singing, then as now, was wildly affected and wildly virtuosic, bursting with growls and whoops and sly over-enunciations. And his lyrics and delivery were very, very deeply steeped in the history of gay culture, not least that in that they mimed something like being closeted: Morrissey's claims to celibacy, and early Smiths' lyrical revulsion about sex in general, are kind of hilarious in the light of, say, shirtless Joe Dallessandro appearing on the cover of their first album....full text |
| Popmatters |
| It’s hard being a fan of the Smiths. On one hand, you are treated to a band that completely shifted the UK rock paradigm in the ‘80s, highlighting the “alternative” part of “alternative rock” by providing an escape from the soulless, hollow synth-pop sounds that dominated the charts at the time. They gave a whole generation of listeners and outsiders a sense of commonality, with a sound that was soaked in honest-to-goodness guitar pop, but married to a deft lyricism that was as intensely romantic as it was literate and self-obsessed. Although it didn’t take long for the Smiths to rise to prominence, their brief stint in pop music (which, when you get right down to it, stretched a mere five years) helped define what rock music could do in the decades that followed, spawning countless imitators while inspiring just as many innovators. The band’s canon has been hyperbolized to death and back again, but even now, such praise rarely feels overly gratuitous. On the other hand, fans of the Smiths tend to get screwed over on a near-daily basis. Although the band’s canon is quite expansive, their key songs are frequently (some would say mercilessly) repackaged time after time, with an endless parade of hits and rarities compilations being churned out like clockwork, leading devotees to buy the same tracks over and over again (and this goes double for fans of Morrissey’s solo career). Case in point? The 2008 release The Sound of the Smiths was the group’s fourth post-mortem hits collection....full text |
| Uncut |
| The further we travel from the ’80s, the less it seems to matter to people, sadly, that The Smiths were once the underdogs, the opposition to all that was hateful. Their achievements were our victories; their crossover was our landslide. The year they emerged – 1983 – was a time for grabbing at morsels: a Fall session on Peel; two good tracks on a Lou Reed album; Monday night repeats of The Prisoner on Channel 4. Politics? Terrifying. The media? About to go into yuppie overdrive. Thank heavens The Smiths came along. Few bands in any era have seemed to stand for so much. The north. The ‘angry young men’ of ’60s cinema and literature. The celebration of language, wit and singularity (not to mention their gladioli and cardigan subcultures). The constant cache of cultural reference points: Warhol, Kes-like sadistic gamesmasters, “spend, spend, spend”. And the legions of the likeminded: the bashful, the thwarted, the endlessly sensitive. It took one single (“Hand In Glove”) to make them seem interesting, another (“This Charming Man”) to confirm that they were special, and then an early 1984 B-side (“These Things Take Time”) to prove that they were magnificent. Morrissey – as epigrammatic as Wilde, as nonparticipatory as Flaubert – could elevate the concept of passion-free isolation to a fine art (“I need advice! I need advice! Nobody ever looks at me twice!”), but referred so frequently to death, with the clear implication that suicide might be his ultimate gesture, that any given lyric could leave you conflicted between amusement and shock. “He is the most self-actualised person I know,” his friend James Raymonde once commented; and sure enough, here came the selfs: self-condemnation (“I’m the most inept that ever stepped”), self-glorification (“learn to love me, assemble the ways”), self-exposure (“Do you see me when we pass? I half-die”). As for self-validation, he already had the rhyme ready for it: “just meet me in the alley by the railway station.” If Morrissey was brilliant, Johnny Marr – his writing partner and musical enabler – was in the same league. Marr looked like a member of Orange Juice but played more like someone in Fairport Convention. It was novel to find a guitar-fixated songwriter-musician in the synthesiser age, when pop music to most people in Britain meant The Thompson Twins: someone singing, someone dancing and someone doing fuck-all. Morrissey and Marr wrote separately, the singer adding lyrics to backing tracks, but there was comprehensive unity in the finished results. Try to imagine the chords Morrissey heard when Marr gave him “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”, and then just marvel at the inspiration that could have put such a melody – a joyous dance for the voice – into the singer’s head. According to the accounts of bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, Morrissey’s vocals invariably came as a total surprise to everyone in the studio. But surely Marr knew, when he wrote the music for “The Headmaster Ritual”, that Morrissey would time his entrance thrillingly late....full text |
The Smiths lyrics
