Oh Well, Enough Said.
A very brief jumble of words about an old song.
“It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate
It takes strength to be gentle and kind”
Britain in 1986 was, largely, not a happy place.
Still in the throws of post-war recovery, the unemployment rate rose beyond 11% as the end of the country-wide miners’ strike struck a significant blow to the power of the trade union movement. The pound collapsed. A generation raised by parents who had seen a still-unprecedented global war is navigating the height of their adolescence and the blossoming of adulthood. The world marches toward a new age of technological prosperity, the world changing overnight, every night, with Britain being no exception.
Too early to grow alongside the technological globalisation of the nineties and noughties, too young to really remember the war and understand what it had done to the world, what was lost and could never be reclaimed. To feel adrift, at the mercy of a society that has no place for you is not a new feeling. The generation primed to hear The Smiths were perhaps more predisposed to this feeling than any that preceded them.
It is the group’s own discontent, fuelling the creative engine, that produced their defining masterwork The Queen Is Dead. Often likened to a state of the union, the third studio album by the English indie outfit is a frank and often frenetic examination of finding solace in a world that wants nothing to do with you. Recorded throughout 1985, the album is an emotional crisis in musical form: Morrissey is at his most maudlin and silver-tonged, oscillating between total rejections of authority and desperate pleas to be accepted and loved, by himself as much as others. Often, a lot of what makes The Smiths work is lost in listening to assorted singles, or skipping through compilation albums. Perhaps Morrissey comes off as smarmy, self-obsessed or mopey. What you might miss, and what The Queen Is Dead proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the funny, introspective and ultimately hopeful man exists alongside the seemingly self-condemned crooner.
The guitar work of Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke here (on electric and bass respectively) is a marked departure from the bright, clean melodies that drove hits like “This Charming Man” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. The jangle and glam of previous efforts are present in spirit but toned down, welded together with a rougher, more organic sound.
I want to take some time to write about my favourite song on the album, perhaps my favourite from the group’s entire discography, “I Know It’s Over”.
To call this track depressing is to both sell it short and misrepresent it. The sharp, cutting bravado of the previous tracks has gone. It’s a lull in the momentum, but entirely intentional and pointed. It’s a story as old as time: Morrissey’s lover has left him, and moved on with another man. He cries out to his mother, telling her “I can feel/The soil falling over my head”, the crushing emotional weight of loss like a living death. As he sings “I know it’s over - still I cling/ I don’t know where else I can go”, the instrumentation thickens and swells, the emotion one feels when first actualising the worst of their thoughts: it really is over, for good. The second verse repeats the first, the instrumental dissipating; the ebb and flow of loss and grief.
Contemplations of suicide with “The sea wants to take me/the knife wants to slit me” are quickly followed by the line “Do you think you can help me?”. It’s an emotional tug-of-war we have all felt, the loss of love compelling us to cry out for help and to wish for it to all be over. Either will work, but this pain must cease. Morrisey’s ego is dissected and laid bare with frank recollections of his lover’s blunt words: “if you’re so very entertaining/then why are you on your own tonight?”
The self-aggrandising language paints a vivid picture: His vanity came before his love for the woman he now mourns the loss of. These lines are followed with the most powerful and most famous phrase of the song “it’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate/it takes strength to be gentle and kind”, then repeated with “guts” replacing “strength”. His repetition of her wounding words tore his ego down, now he rebuilds himself with lamentations over the man he’d like to be. Before, her new man was the “loud, loutish lover”, now “love is natural and real/but not for such as you and I”
“I Know It’s Over” succeeds in no short part because it encapsulates what made The Smiths so compelling: a complete, succinct story that says something true of all of us. We lose something we love and we mourn. We look inward, tear apart our faults, question our decisions, and hate ourselves for failing. But when we hit rock bottom, we climb out by envisioning not only the recovery from heartache we so desperately crave but the dream that, perhaps, we can be even better than we were.
The song ends with the repetition of “I can feel the soil falling over my head”, each line climbing the vocal scale, descending into little more than atonal wailing toward the end. It’s a crashing and emotional crescendo: the lines that opened the song still plague Morrissey’s mind, but this time backed by energy and freneticism that make it clear: it will get worse, but it will also get better.
Recovery and healing are not linear. A good day can be followed by a sea of bad ones. Several weeks of optimism and smiles can be crushed by a familiar scent, a drunken text, a cherished song that once symbolised something so beautiful but now, something else.
Love is natural and real. It is also beautiful. It is rarely easy.