Every Day Is Like Sunday

And a strange dust lands on your hands
And on your face...

Artist: Morrissey
Year: 1988
Rating: Hot!

Cemetry Gates by the Smiths

Cemetry Gates by The Smiths

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Already used in my post about my musical DNA, Cemetry Gates is one of my favorite Smiths songs, and it makes me utterly gleeful when I hear it. I love the jangly guitar melody, Morrissey's British pronunciation of "plagiarize," the assertion of the main character that his compatriot is on the (staid and canonical) side of Keats and Yeats, while he himself is on the (free and life-filled, and perhaps homo-) side of Wilde.

Year: 1986
Rating: Hot!

I Know It's Over by the Smiths

People seem to think The Smiths are melodramatic and whiny, but I'm not in that camp. Well, whiny at times, but this song, which essentially equates thwarted or lost love with death, or the fantasy of death, is right up my philosophical alley (see: my graduate thesis on death anxiety in intimate relationships).

Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head
And as I climb into an empty bed
Oh well. Enough said.

While Morrissey's emotive crooning works at the pop level of melodrama, the lyrics tell a deeper story of love/loss and the ascendancy of heterosexual love (or perhaps normative relationships of convenience, as in "though she needs you more than she loves you") over implied "unnatural" loves (whether queer or celibate, as Morrissey claimed he was for many years):

Love is Natural and Real
But not for you, my love
Not tonight, my love
Love is Natural and Real
But not for such as you and I, my love

Wow. This is so much more fun to write about than Melanie Klein's theory of love/hate in the merger and individuation of the infant and its mother. But it's all layers of the same onion.

Year: 1986
Rating: Hot!