The Mighty Moz is on tour again, supporting his new album.
Dude is 55 today, so. Here’s a song that suits perfectly this drab, morosely-colored
day in New Haven. It’s from 1988 and is rather blithe (as only Morrissey can
be) about “Armageddon.” Ah, to be alive then was darkly clouded but to be young
then was certain shits. Morrissey made it a bit better for those compelled to
be disaffected while cheekily arch about it. I don’t think there’s a single
song by Morrissey or The Smiths, the band he fronted from 1984-1987, that doesn’t
provoke a wry smile while I’m listening to it.
“Everyday is Like Sunday” is no exception. I first heard
this when my daughter burned me a disc of one of Morrissey’s “best of” albums.
I had pretty much ignored the solo Moz—and, so, you know, judge me how you
wish. It’s just that much of what I loved about The Smiths wasn’t just
Morrissey’s canny lyrics and fey self-projections, but rather the guitar sound
created and maintained against all comers by Johnny Marr. And once they split
as such things go, Morrissey became more popular than ever but, it seemed to me,
by willfully courting a kind of slavish adulation that made him like the white
Brit boy Indie answer to Madonna or Prince—everything he did was cause for
comment and hysteria. I tried to live my slow crawl of the Eighties into the
Nineties while avoiding all such worthies, except to the extent that they were
inescapable.
Fitting then that my kid—after all, I’m Morrissey’s age—should
be the one to put me on to solo Moz. And this song is one that leapt right out
of the collection and inspired a carefully gradated sense of depressing
circumstances meeting captious fun. Here we have Moz trudging in the wet sand
of a seaside town “they forgot to close down.” We think we’re in some kind of
grim working-class holiday spot that just can’t cut it any longer. But he
presses on, as the strings give the song an immense lift, almost like the sun
streaking the gray on your bank holiday late afternoon to make the day not a
total wash, singing coyly, “Armageddon, come Armageddon.” So now we’re not in a
seaside town hitting an economic slump, we’re in a seaside town that should’ve
been evacuated as during the Blitz, except what they’re waiting for is a
nuclear holocaust.
Cheery, idn’t it? And
that great refrain keeps bringing us back to the song’s predominant mood, which
is gray, flecked with gold; grim, with a ribbing: “Every day is like Sunday /
Every day is silent and grey.” Enough to say that sometimes that is simply the
mood (like today) and this song helps one exult in an inner drizzle.
Hide on the promenade
/ Etch a postcard: / “How I dearly wish I was not here” / In this seaside town
/ That they forgot to bomb
With those lines we get the trenchant aspects of this song.
In other words, this place is godawful and should be (have been) bombed. It’s
not so much a “fear of nuclear holocaust” song as it is a “this place deserves
a violent end that will obliterate it all at once, and me too, please God.” Come, come, come, nuclear bomb. Morrissey
is the king of the despairing aside on the self-styled miseries of the fop or
dandy or poisonous poseur who can’t bear another moment in the tragically
insufferable scenes in which he finds himself. Such is his main gift to the
world of song. And this song manages to manifest all that but with a hummable
awareness of how rich it is to face death in such banal surroundings. “A
strange dust lands on your hands / And on your face.” He keeps repeating the
latter line to underscore, I think, what we really stand to lose. As if Roger
Daltrey were to shout “We’re all faces!” instead of “They’re all wasted!” We’re
faces facing the end. “Don’t cry / Don’t raise your eyes.”
And still that refrain rides one of Morrissey’s best
melodies and the lift is undeniable so that the song (if you ignore the words)
seems to be celebrating the Sabbath, the day of rest. Sorry it’s not sunny (it
might never be sunny again) but at least we’re not at work. Let us go to our
graves with a song in our hearts.
Share some grease tea with me.
2 comments:
I've never really needed much encouragement to exult in my own "inner drizzle", or the silent and grey days like today, but it's nice to feel I'm not so all alone. The Pretenders cover is pretty sweet, what with Chrissie's vibrato, don't ya know.....makes a nuclear bomb and strange dust falling sound positively dreamy, and it just slides in on that slide guitar.....so I'll have some of that grease tea.
Tim
Hey, I hadn't heard the Pretenders' cover. Listening now. "I sincerely wish I was not here." Sure 'nough. It is dreamy but doesn't have as much lift. Nice guitar sounds and I like the way she delivers "share some grease tea with me."
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