Panic, The Smiths

March 10, 2007

Let me admit right away that this is an album that goes way back for me.. like to the 8th grade. I can reliably date my Smiths listening because of this picture of me wearing a Smiths t-shirt:

I remember vividly my precious Louder Than Bombs cassette and the unfolding liner notes with that wealth of lyrics. I listened to these songs a lot.. I mean a lot.

Much of the music I listened to back then has dropped away from me. I have no desire to listen to the Cure again.. nor to Bauhaus.. and the list could go on. But beginning a few years ago the Smiths and Morrissey made a strong comeback. Why them? The short answer would be that they are great.. and I mean that. A longer answer might be that the music of the Smiths allows for two distinct ways of listening, one for an adolescent and one for an adult. Morrissey is expert at presenting the kinds of emotions running through an adolescent. Here are some lines from "Unloveable":

I wear black on the outside
Because black is how I feel on the inside
I wear black on the outside
Because black is how I feel on the inside
And if I seem a little strange
Well, that's because I am

I listen to that now and hear it as a morbidly introspective spoof of "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones. But back in the day it meant something more to me.. and I again have photographic proof:

I certainly felt a little strange.. and I dressed in black too.

With a decade's worth of distance between me and adolescent angst, the Smiths and Morrissey started to sound not like the voice of adolescence as the ventriloquist of adolescence. That is to say, I could hear that Morrissey was presenting knowing vignettes of adolescence.. and using the "heaven knows I'm miserable now" emotions to draw characters.

"Panic" is a song that stands out from Louder Than Bombs. It was released first as a single in July 1986.. and only in 1987 did it get released in the US on this album. It begins with a bang that is never quite explained:

Panic on the streets of London
Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
Could life ever be sane again
On the Leeds side streets that you slip down
I wonder to myself...

This is the language of riots and violence. Panic! Life will never be the same! But at the heart of this alarm is an emptiness: what is causing this stir? We don't know and are never told. The music pushes forward.. and we are still running:

Hopes may rise on the Grasmeres
But Honey Pie, you're not safe here
So you run down
To the safety of the town
But there's panic on the streets of Carlisle
Dublin, Dundee, Humberside
I wonder to myself...

That reference to the Grasmeres recalls the pastoral world of William Wordsworth. That green world may be where "hopes may rise".. but the narrator pointedly tells his "Honey Pie" that she is not safe in this quiet place.. perhaps she too is strange. And when this girl runs to town she finds herself no safer, but is caught up in some kind of panic.. still unexplained.

The place-name dropping song has a long pedigree in rock music, from Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" to the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA". The grandfather of this kind of list-it approach to place would be Walt Whitman. In each case the motivation is the one articulated best by Stephen Vincent Benét:

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin titles of mining claims,
The plumed war bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

All those wonderful names continue to run around in our heads.

Morrissey drops place-names for a different reason. He begins with London and then moves on to Birmingham. But then we get to Leeds with the "side streets that you slip down".. and Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside. Morrissey is hardly evoking a landscape to be explored and enjoyed.. rather a landscape of empty urban shells. Large and small these places are caught up in the panic.

Although we will never be given the cause of this panic, we are finally given the aim toward which Morrissey would like to direct the enraged crowds:

Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life

Having evoked swirls of rage, he now throws everything at the DJs.. and the song will end with Morrissey chanting over and over again: "Hang the DJ!" This condemnation comes about because the music that the DJs play "says nothing to me about my life".

We can infer from this that Morrissey's musical program is quite different.. his music will say something to the listener about his life. It will be relevant and timely.. and deal with the places where people actually live.. not some fantasy world. Thus his shout out to urban centers great and small.. known and unknown.. is a strategy for telling listeners that this music will address them.

One can listen to this song as a wished for attack on the unimaginative music system.. and that is probably the way this song was meant to be heard. That call can be broadened to address any system that fails to address the real issues of our lives. From movie makers who churn out empty computer animated visions, to politicians who keep us in a fantasy world, to scholars that engage in issues that "say nothing to me about my life". It is too bad we cannot conjure a panicked riot to tear all that down. That dream of destruction and change is what Morrissey gives voice to.

Here is the song in the version it was shown on MTV's program 120 Minutes.. and there was a period in my life when that program was very important..