THE SMITHS: THROUGH BEING COOL

THE SMITHS: THROUGH BEING COOL

Features

by

Merle Ginsberg

Annie Lennox, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson—if 1983’s music had any message at all, it was: “Be beautiful, be hip, be cool—be like me.” New music has inevitably led up to the same indulgences as old music.

Well, that was last year. You can forget that now. It’s history. How personally involved could you get in that music, anyway? Wasn’t it really Annie, Simon and Michael’s make-up and moves that intrigued you? Sounds like creeping ’70s-ism to me. I repeat—last year (if not last decade).

Well, you can relax—the Smiths are about to make the world safe for emotions again. Their message, not unlike. Dylan’s or Joplin’s in their time, is “You don’t have to be cool anymore. In fact, the cooler you are, the less interesting you are.”

“We’re so uncool—we’re the fucking coolest,” is what Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr says on that subject. “In fact, we alienate potential record buyers by not dressing up. We want people to understand what we are; we refuse to alienate the good people who want something real—who are into music for the right reasons.”

Here’s the deal: The Smiths aren’t about anything. They’re probably the first successful post-new music band to come out of England and the only one that got there without having hired a team of imageenhancers. What they are is a four-piece (guitar, bass, drums, vocals) group from Manchester, with tons of emotion, directness, simplicity, purpose and real charm. Musically, it would be far too easy to associate them with the new guitarpositivism of a U2 or a Big Country, or lump them with reborn hippies like R.E.M.

To my mind, their songs are like Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward plays, or even Blake poems, put to music. The lyrics (always discernible—how refreshing!) are poetic miniatures of emotion, idealism and charm sweet, soft, comforting even. They feel like a blanket that’s both intimate and protective enough to preserve a precious world that usually disappears once you leave your own bed (ex.: “As long as the hand that rocks the cradle is mine”). The guitar melodies are the same—charming, lilting, with a hook that’s made out of pure emotion rather than the usual pure motion.

The Smiths are not part of the so-called “folk revival,” either. If anything, they look to the New York art-music scene of the late ’60s and the late ’70s as a vital influence. Says Marr, “We’re not really rock ’n’ roll. We regard ourselves as artists. Like the Velvet Underground—they were art. We love them massively. Patti Smith and Television, too. We try to compress deep thought and musicality.”

Marr, a young, articulate, anti-style guitarfreak with shoulder-length hair and flannel shirt, writes the music. Morrissey (the only name he goes by) pens the words and looks like what Keats or Shelley would have looked like if they’d been born in the ’60s—lithe, delicate, a bit too sensitive, open-butconfident, usually in a white tunic, and, •sometimes, some very un-ostentatious beads. At the Smiths’ live shows in the U.K. (they’re heading stateside as you read this), Morrissey has been known to toss fresh-cut flowers out to his adoring audience.

Neo-hippieism, then?

“No,” Johnny Marr says emphatically, “but it is definitely neo-something. I question hippie ethics. Even hippies became fashionable. We’re whatever Jack Kerouac is—permanently counterculture. Individual. Iconoclastic.” Ah, I’ve got it: Bohemian.

Morrissey seems to have brought a whole new vocabulary back to English and certainly a new lexicon to pop—he colors songs with words like “handsome” and “charming,” most notably in their biggest single, “This Charming Man.” That might sound terribly twee, but not the way Morrissey pulls it off. If there’s anything the man has, it’s conviction. Beacoup de conviction. The man crusades for beauty—a seemingly faded occupation (last held by romantic poets), but still a necessary one. “I use those words,” he told me, “to encourage people to feel good about themselves. It’s better than feeling unemployed, and better than always thinking, ‘I wish I could be like Simon LeBon.’ Everyone is as charming and handsome as they feel. It’s too easy to forget that.”

Morrissey is about the most articulate, well-bred, well-read and lovely individual I’ve ever talked to. Yet he comes from the average working-class background of England’s Manchester, and didn’t have any particular educational privileges. His is an educated soul. How did he get so wise, so... centered?

He dismisses all compliments, saying that his idealism is purely “mind over matter”— and that a person can live up to any idea they have of themselves, positive or negative. The British press made a big deal out of the fact that Morrissey has recently emerged from a deep depression—and he admits this—and that the Smiths are his own anti-maudlin campaign. Some journalists consider him arrogant, so purposeful and confident is he about the Smiths. A good Morrissey quote: “We’re the most important band in Britain right now. I mean, how could you even compare us to, say, the Police?” A willing Smiths-disciple, I find his attitude fresh, uplifting and exhilirating.

“Our music is the music that’s needed in England now—and even more so in America. It’s just simple guitar music played with real heart and soul. And I hope people realize we’re playing it because we have to. We’ve no use for the surreal or oblique or glamorous. Or the cool.”

Their first LP, The Smiths, is out, and it lives up (and down) to all the band’s claims. You’ll see. Positively...charming.