Morrissey is the unquestioned Poet Laureate of the 80s on February 20, 1984


February 20, 1984. The year George Orwell warned us about has already arrived, only instead of Big Brother it’s Maggie in her power-blue suit and the dole queue snaking around the Arndale Centre like some great socialist python digesting yesterday’s dreams. It's Ronnie in an arms race, Dodge Caravans in suburban driveways, and corporate megamergers. The kids are wearing anoraks the color of wet concrete, the radios are pumping Duran Duran and Culture Club and all that glossy, shoulder-padded, pastel-synth nonsense about Rio and karma chameleons, and the newspapers are full of gold medal winners, nuclear nightmares, and Princess Di’s latest hat. 

And then—wham—Rough Trade Records, that scruffy little indie bunker in London that smelled of damp cardboard and revolutionary zeal, ships out the vinyl. The Smiths. Self-titled. Ten tracks of pure, unadulterated Northern English misery wrapped in the most glorious jangle you ever heard. The cover: some poor doomed American actor from a 1950s movie, staring out like he already knows how this decade is going to end. Inside the gatefold: Morrissey’s quiff, Johnny Marr’s Rickenbacker, the gladioli wilting in the back pocket of history itself.

At the center of this sonic swirl stands a figure of high-collared defiance, a man named Morrissey. Look at him! He is the Anti-Star. In an era of neon spandex and cocaine-fueled synthesizer bloat, he appears in an oversized cardigan—heavily laundered—with a bouquet of gladioli stuffed into his back pocket like some floral weapon of the proletariat. 

This debut album is not merely "pop music." No, no! It is a Manifesto of the Marginalized. While the rest of the 1980s is shouting about "Greed is Good" and "Atomic City," Morrissey is quietly, articulately, and with a devastatingly sharp tongue, chronicling the Inner Life. He is the Unquestioned Poet Laureate of the Decade, the only man capable of turning a miserable bus ride or a botched encounter in a cemetery into a high-art liturgy.

He captures the Real England—not the glossy version on MTV, but the England of "Hand in Glove," where the sun shines but "it's not for us." He possesses the Verbal Dexterity of a Wilde, the Dandyism of a Byron, and the Aesthetic Determination of a man who knows that a hearing aid worn as a fashion accessory is a stroke of genius (or sometimes just a warm gesture of solidarity with a hearing-impaired Smiths fan self-conscious about wearing hers).

You put the needle down and—zing!—"Reel Around the Fountain" comes swirling out like a Victorian waltz in a council-estate disco. Morrissey’s voice, that reedy, trembling, half-celibate, half-libertine moan, croons about stolen kisses and childhood fountains and things you can never get back. Then "You’ve Got Everything Now"—bang—the savage put-down of every smug success story in Thatcher’s Britain: "I’ve never had a job / because I’ve never wanted one." By the time "Miserable Lie" kicks in you’re already ruined for all other music forever. The guitars chime like cathedral bells on acid, the bass throbs like a guilty conscience, and Morrissey is up there confessing sins he hasn’t even committed yet.

Side Two opens with "Pretty Girls Make Graves" and suddenly the entire decade of glossy magazine beauties and Page Three girls is exposed as the grotesque meat market it always was. "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" whispers about maternal madness and working-class ghosts. "Still Ill" declares "England is mine—it owes me a living," the single greatest anti-Thatcher line ever sneaked onto a pop record without anyone in the Tory Party noticing. "Hand in Glove" is two minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure sexual ambiguity wrapped in flowers and defiance: "We may be hidden by rags / but we’ve got something they’ll never have." And then the closer—"Suffer Little Children"—a lullaby about the Moors murders so tender and so terrifying it makes you want to burn every tabloid in the country.

Steven Patrick Morrissey, this pale, bespectacled, hearing-aid-wearing, gladioli-waving librarian from Stretford, turned pop lyrics into literature for the 1980s. Not rock poetry. Not singer-songwriter sincerity. Literature. The kind Philip Larkin would have recognized if Larkin had ever been allowed near a Rickenbacker.

Morrissey quoted Shelagh Delaney and Oscar Wilde and the New York Dolls in the same breath and made it sound like the most natural thing in the world. He took the drab, rain-soaked, chip-fat England that Thatcher was trying to pave over with shopping malls and turned it into high drama, high camp, high art. When Prince was singing about 1999 like it was a party, Morrissey was singing about 1984 like it was the autopsy.

And we kids got it instantly. We bought the record in the thousands. Morrissey did for the teenage bedroom what Byron did for the Greek coast. He validated the shyness, the clumsiness, and the exquisite agony of being young and literate in a world that felt increasingly illiterate.

So yes—unquestioned, unchallenged, unassailable—Morrissey became the Poet Laureate of the 1980s the moment that debut album hit the shops on February 20, 1984. The 1980s had plenty of loud voices, but only one Voice. On this day in 1984, the decade finally found its soul. Morrissey took the grit of Manchester, the wit of the Victorian salon, and the raw power of a four-piece band to create something utterly, frighteningly original and artistically, intellectually subversive. The passive-aggressive revolution had begun.

Location: Manchester, UK

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more