The Queen is Dead
The Smiths
Score:98
Reviewer: Steve Scully
Label: Rough Trade (UK)
Reviewed: Feb 24th '10, Released:1984
‘I Know It’s Over’ is reaching its climax. Morrissey croons over the brilliant touch of Mike Joyce on drums, Johnny Marr’s minimalist, classic rock guitar and Andy Rourke’s utterly compelling bass. His lyrics are as tongue-in-cheek as they are incisive:
If you’re so funny/ Then why are you on your own tonight?/ If you’re so clever/ Then why are you on your own tonight?/ If you’re so very entertaining/ Then why are you on your own tonight?/ If you’re so terribly good-looking/ Then why do you sleep alone tonight?
Beneath Morrissey’s aggression, Rourke’s bass is perfectly-paced, but exudes life as he seems almost consciously to fumble the fret runs. It’s with the utmost skill and professionalism that The Smiths deliver their parodic, cynical masterpiece, The Queen is Dead. In the same song, Morrissey, in a moment of moroseness, smoothly sings, “Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head,” offering nice lyrical fodder for the self-pitying types, caught up in existential crises and revelatory moments of mortality. But don’t be mistaken and take this as the paradigmatic emotional underscore for The Queen is Dead. Instead, it’s the rare moment on the album where Morrissey’s quips, jibes and captious mockery are directed inward. But Morrissey isn’t dishonest – he most certainly acknowledges the pains of life, the hypocrisy of society (you need only look to their previous releases for that, Meat is Murder for example). Rather, all this pain, all this destruction, just provides more stuff for him to laugh at.
Some may say that this superficiality, this cynicism might detract from the effectiveness of a piece of art. Truthfully, Morrissey’s lyricism is so charged with energy and intellect that it makes perfect sense when sentiments like “life is very long when you’re lonely” sit side-by-side with “some girls are bigger than others/ some girls’ mothers are bigger than other girls’ mothers.”
As charged as it is with insidious wit, The Queen is Dead never sees The Smiths take their eyes off the ball, as they produce track-after-track of brilliant pop music. Undoubtedly, there are highlights. For sure, ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’ and ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ show Marr’s pop/rock genius. This is stuff everyone knows. But ‘I Know It’s Over’ is quiet and evocative, ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’ utterly hilarious and ‘Never Had No One Ever’ an experimental precursor to the ingenuity of modern-day greats.
Like his favourite linguist, Oscar Wilde, Morrissey has a biting sense of humour, and on The Queen Is Dead– while he may not exhibit a Bono-esque world citizen mentality – he most definitely remains true to himself. In ‘Cemetery Gates’, he sings “Keats and Yeats are on your side/But you lose/Because Wilde is on mine,” and he couldn’t be more correct: Wilde’s most lasting sentiment was that of ‘art for art’s sake’, and while The Queen is Dead is undoubtedly a product of its time, it’s far from being purely contextual. The Smiths were a band making music for its own sake – feather boas, wacky hair-dos and all, Morrissey made this painfully obvious, notwithstanding any political statements that came hand-in-hand with this.
