The Smiths - are they overrated or not?

I'd love to hear Malmsteen try and play some of Marr's Smiths material. Imagine "This Charming Man" sprinkled with widdlyiddly bits through an overdriven Strat.

 

I'd rather not

 

I was part of the Bohemian crowd, so the decade for me was a bit of a counter culture. It was REM, The Replacements and The Smiths spinning all the time.

 

LEAVE YNGWIE ALONE!!!

 

For so many of us, that was the case. Certainly for me and for all of my friends back then.

 

Marr was like Mozart, not in that he wrote symphonies and operas or whatever, but in the sense that, while he was playing in the same sandbox as his peers in his musical idiom, they were building sandcastles while he was building the Taj Mahal. It's like the myth in the movie where Salieri is like "why can this insane adult child write Le Nozze di Figaro and I can't?" Salieri knew the same notes, theories, compositional styles, etc., but, you know, Mozart was ultimately a genius and he wasn't, which is pretty much my take on Marr vis-à-vis other guitarists. Marr's songs are also, in miniature, like Mozart's music, in that everything is perfect, elegant, concise, and sort of self-evidently obviously the best musical choice, yet, again, it was somehow only self-evident to Marr. I know the chords to "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," half of which are nicked from Marvin Gaye via the Stones and the Velvet Underground, I theoretically could have written that song, yet Marr did, and you and I didn't. As with Mozart, there was also a bit of a child prodigy aspect to Marr: while Marr wasn't a literal infant child prodigy like Mozart, stop and think about this: when the Smiths split after producing their incredible body of work in four years, Marr was more or less the same age as John Lennon when Lennon and the Beatles arrived in New York for their Ed Sullivan debut. Everything Marr did in the Smiths, he did between the ages of 20 and 24. By contrast, Peter Buck was 26 or 27 when R.E.M. released Murmur.

Marr is also like Miles Davis in that he understands that what you don't play is perhaps more important than what you do play. Many musicians pay lip service to this idea, but few actually follow through on it. Or, conversely, someone like Peter Buck at the beginning of his career didn't solo because he couldn't solo. So he made a virtue out of necessity. Marr, on the other hand, could clearly do whatever he wanted to do on the guitar, yet still chose not to solo or overplay. One of my favorite moments in the entire Smiths' catalog is the instrumental b-side "Oscillate Wildly," in which Marr builds up these beautiful interweaving lines on piano and harmonium, over a harmonic bed that is miles ahead of the typical rock song, and then it comes time for his big guitar break … and he does this little triplet strum of one dampened chord, or maybe even just of his palm damping the strings, and it makes me laugh every time, because that's so perfectly what the song needs, yet so few virtuoso players would have the sense to leave it at that. And then Marr's little anti-solos, like the guitar break in "Bigmouth Strikes Again," exhibit more creativity in five seconds than most other guitarists do over the course of an entire album.

 

Excellent, thank you, I think we can close the thread now.

 

I never got the appeal for this band, honestly. The singer sounds like he's half-asleep and the guitarist isn't bad, just repetitive.

So yeah, I think they are overrated. Maybe you just have to be British to appreciate them?

 

no. just...no. lol

cheers,
rob

 

If there are direct opposites in this universe it must be Johnny Marr and Yngwie Malmsteen.

 

I feel a generation gap with my students (and over on r/vinyl, too). Most of them want concision, too. Can't deal with discursion. Twitter generation thing, you suppose?

 

I can apreciate this kind of statement. But I'm curious to unpack what you mean by great. I think you mean "four equally talented players, who are readily identified by name." Like The Monkees.

Or two well-known frontmen/players backed up competently?

Does Radiohead fit that criteria?

I think it's actually on target. One definition of "hipsters" is that they're folks who wears identical costumes of individuality, like most people's visions of "hippies"

 

It's a very good question. What makes a band truly great as opposed to just good? It has more to do with a feeling than actually analyzing their output and achievements. So Led Zeppelin? Truly great. The Stones? Yes. The Smiths? Yes. Not really an answer, but it's the best I got.

 

I think despite being good songwriters/performers, the Smiths were iconic and influential, they also created an image, putting the rockab' imagery/haircut back on the scene in the mid 80's and their record covers were instantly recognisable. Their sound was like nothing before them. At 18 Johnny Marr was showing an incredible musical maturity. Morrissey was writing witty and funny lyrics. What makes a good band from a great band? Marketing? Journalists? Record sales? Appeal to the mainstream?

 

Or an open-minded American?

 

Is there a gay/queer element? A great writer (like Morrissey) transcends such things I think.

I don't know whether it was a big secret or not, but I had no idea about Morrissey's sexuality at the time. All I knew was he said he was celibate. The songs are so good I think they appeal to everyone. I don't think the lyrics really had a gay/queer element as such, they were pretty much open to interpretation.

I just don't get the gay/queer thing at all. As far as I was concerned I thought 'at last, a singer who is real, not so macho posturing idiot'. What made the Smiths so popular and essential to my generation was that he was 'normal' and really reflected in his lyrics how kids felt, their problems and insecurities. His sexuality was nothing really to do with anything. You have to remember he was the first person to openly be that un-macho in those circles. I mean Stipe was still playing the rock god to an extent for years.

 

Of course they did. There was absolutely no mistaking it from the start in songs like "Hand in Glove," "You Handsome Devil" and "This Charming Man" and the like, despite Morrissey's protestations of celibacy. It was right on the surface of the music and it was very much in that tradition of coded gay English lit of the empire -- but even being in that coded tradition at that point in the '80s was a kind of reference that brought the whole thing to the surface. You didn't need to dig for it, it was very obvious. While I, as a straight 20 something at the time had one kind of relationship with the music and the songs and the sense of empathy and otherness, and while not all the songs had explicit gay sexuality in them -- there's plenty of universal loneliness and otherness in those songs, or in entirely different songs like "Ask," -- my gay friends had a very different sort of connection to the music.

 

Perfectly said.

 

Don't forget the song 'William, it was Really Nothing' which was about his friend Billie McKenzie, singer of The Associates. The last band answered that song of The Smiths with their 'Stephen, You're really Something'...

The late Billie McKenzie was much more open about his sexuality, but if they were good friends or boy friends we will never know...

 

As a gay teen I thought the gay/queer thing was obvious! Definitely more so at the beginning. Just look at the first album cover....
A few lyrics off the top of my head;

I would like to give you what I think you're asking for. Oh you handsome devil.
And when we're in your scholarly room who will swallow whom?

All men have secrets and here is mine. So let it be known.

"You shut your mouth, how can you say I go about things the wrong way? I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does." That spoke volumes to me as a teen.

 

Up with Oasis as totally and utterly overrated

 

Oh, yeah, I forgot about "who will swallow whom...." forget about the "coded" gay lit of the empire!

 

Even I picked up on "Handsome Devil." As for the rest of the songs … "fifteen minutes with you / well, I wouldn't say no" could apply to anyone, gay or straight, and, let's be honest, the appeal of the songs was not so much to gay or straight listeners as to listeners, like Morrissey himself, who probably struggled to form a connection with anyone, male or female. He wasn't the great poet of gay love so much as he was the great poet of unrequited or thwarted love - "in the darkened underpass / I thought "Oh God, my chance has come at last" / but a strange fear gripped me, and I just couldn't ask" is the key lyric in the entire oeuvre, I should think.

 

"Macho" or "rock god" is the last word I would use to describe the Stipe we see in the "So. Central Rain" video, for example. The appeal of Stipe and Morrissey was exactly the same, as you note, "at last, here is a singer who is not a macho posturing idiot." In what many would consider, then and now, to be the wasteland of 80s music, the Smiths and R.E.M. were twin beacons of hope, and "alternative," in the truest sense of the word, to what passed for mainstream culture at the time.

 

They are very admittedly not openly or specifically gay and open to interpretation for sure. That's part of the greatness. And it really was only a part of the appeal to me even as a teen. The anti-macho (gay or not) was more important to me. The teenage loneliness, angst, longing etc. These are universal and not gay themes.