Thirty years ago yesterday, The Smiths released their debut
LP. I did not hear the album until 2000. The breakthrough Smiths LP for me was
the third one, The Queen is Dead (1986). That and Louder Than Bombs (1987) were
essential to my late Eighties listening, but that fact did not send me back for
the earlier albums. I’ve never been a debut album kinda guy. I remember
explaining this to Kajsa about my collection: most of the time, it’s the third
album that brings in the “wider audience.” And since I’m never part of a scene
myself, I’m part of the wider audience. The real test is that fourth album. I’ve
seen grown men pull their own heads off (or each other’s) rather than make that
4th record.
My reasoning stands to reason, in a way. The Beatles weren’t
really The Beatles until A Hard Day’s Night (the 3rd Parlophone LP); The Stones
weren’t my Stones, really, until Beggars Banquet, their 7th, in the UK, or
maybe Between the Buttons, their 6th. Dylan’s 2nd LP is great but it’s not til
he goes electric (5th album) that I’m fully aboard. In the olden days, a
musical artist took time to develop, and also released an album a year,
sometimes more than one a year. The Smiths jumped out of the box with an album a
year, but it was all over after the fourth studio LP. R.E.M. was an exception
(in many things) because I got in on them before the real “wider audience”
fourth LP (1986). I didn’t like them as much after the fifth, though they had a
great 3rd act, 1992-98.
 |
| Mike Joyce, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke |
Anyway, The Smiths were always a little off-putting to me.
Morrissey is such a character but, when in character, can be a bit much. And
the first LP is a bit much. It’s also not as stellar, Johnny Marr-wise (the ax
man), as the later LPs. Still, it’s easy to imagine that if you picked up The
Smiths when it came out, you would be like “holy fuck!”
Today’s song is only one example of why that
might be your reaction.
“The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the
world” is a line from a 19th century poem about how, really, we’re all so
susceptible to what our mothers (or nannies) inculcate in us. Daddies, who tend
to stay out of the nursery, don’t get to wield the influence that mummies do. I’ll
let you work out the Freudian implications of sons dominated by mothers, of
girls molded in the image of mom. Regardless of its aptness for that age or
ours, Morrissey takes it as his title and, since he sings the song as a man (we
assume), might be hinting that a male hand on the cradle would, well, lead to
something else. A different kind of man or woman?
When I first heard this song I was dwelling in my empty den
(as I’ve described
earlier) and it initially struck me as a good song for a
father’s involvement with his child. It made it onto a tape I made K with songs
like Lou Reed’s “Teach the Gifted Children” and R.E.M.’s “Me In Honey.”
Very wry, all that.
Because the song, while it starts with lyrics
that sound very reassuring, eventually creates a very creepy sense of
pedophilia.
Not out of place on an LP
that ends with an evocation of the Moors Murders (of kids from 11 to 17) in
mid-Sixties Manchester.
In other words,
The Smith’s debut LP was warped in ways that might not be readily apparent if
you weren’t paying attention.
Please don't cry
For the ghost and the storm outside
Will not invade this sacred shrine
Nor infiltrate your mind
My life down I shall lie
If the bogey-man should try
To play tricks on your sacred mind
To tease, torment, and tantalise
How’s that for a trio of acts? Morrissey is the type
who will “tease, torment, and tantalise” his fans, his audience, and, well, who
knows who all? Lines like “blood on the
cleaver tonight” start making us uneasy. Some might see this as a father saying
he’s willing to kill (mummy, possibly) to keep the child by his side. But other
lines like “there never need be longing in your eyes” strike us as odd notes,
even in the happy simpatico relation of parent and child. That hand that rocks the cradle is beginning
to sound a bit oppressive. “Climb upon
my knees, sonny boy / Although you’re only three, sonny boy / You’re mine / And
your mother just never knew.” Well,
there’s lots of things she might not know or never will know, now. “I did my best for her.” OK, maybe Dad’s just trying to overcome some
negative judgments here.
But it’s the bridge that really adds unease (the
three-year-old on the knee, well, that’s fine, y’know, so long as it is, and it’s
kinda daring you to hear it otherwise), because, if nothing else, “it plays
tricks on [our] sacred mind.” “I once
had a child and it saved my life”—one hears mothers say that all the time and
we know exactly what they mean, but then: “And I never even asked his name.” That sounds like the language of the
one-night-stand (we might assume that this is the mother speaking about the father, but the switch in person is dicey). Then: “I looked
into his wondrous eyes / And said ‘never, never, never again’ / And all too
soon I did return / Just like a moth to a flame”—we tend to hear serial killers
and pedophiles and other kinds of addicts of unsavory acts say things like
that.
The amazing thing about this song and why it deepened my
appreciation of Morrissey, already admiring him for getting away with a song like “Girlfriend in a Coma,”
is that his delivery makes all this seem unassuming. Yes, he’s
singing as someone who “had a child” in the way a man could mean that, and it “saved
his life.” But what did it do to the child, we might well ask. That’s not what
this is about. The point is how the song takes the “cult of the child,” even
the eroticization and deification of childhood—all rampant enough for ages—and makes
it a saving grace, with those “untouched, unsoiled, wondrous eyes.” And so it
shall be “as long as the hand that rocks the cradle is mine.” Insidious. The
only thing I can think of that comes close is Nabokov’s Lolita and how Humbert Humbert “enjoys” Lo while she is, at first,
utterly oblivious. “There never need be longing in your eyes.” They remain
innocent. Perhaps the song is innocent too, but “see how words as old as sin / fit me
like a glove.”
The glove is a detail that recalls the Moors Murders, which
haunt this album, getting direct treatment on “Suffer the Children,” much as they may have haunted Morrissey in his childhood (he
was six or seven when the trial was going on), but it also echoes the song “Hand
in Glove” with its defiant line “the sun shines / out of our behinds.” Much of the
early Smiths is about what you dare “And if the people stare / Then the people
stare.”
“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” is an extraordinary song,
though perhaps of questionable taste. I'm not bothered by it because it’s done
so well (though what if I'd first heard it when it came out, when Kajsa was five), and that voice of melting toffee that Morrissey can use so well sweetens most anything, murmuring “as long . . . as long . . . as long.” The
song is a mindfuck.
Which is a way of saying
that music is a living thing, almost. It changes as we change. True, it doesn’t
age the way people do—all you have to do is watch a performer sing a song he
first sang 20 years ago to see that—but it’s not frozen either. The recording
is preserved and endures and sounds “just like” when you first heard it,
empirically. But that’s the part that all this talk on this blog is meant to gainsay.
No song sounds “just like” when you first heard it and every subsequent
listening is different. Sometimes I just want to talk about the song; sometimes
I want to talk about hearing the song, getting to know it. Sometimes, in a way,
I’m talking about leaving the song where it remains.
