Morrissey You Are the Quarry (Attack)
Here’s a quick sampling of those “horrible things”: In a 1984 interview with defunct UK rock rag The Face, Moz was asked, “If I put you in a room with Robert Smith, Mark E. Smith and a loaded Smith & Wesson, who would bite the bullet first?” His response: “I’d line them up so that one bullet penetrated both simultaneously. . . . Robert Smith is a whingebag.” Five years later, in a notorious interview for the British music magazine NME, he tartly asserted that the Cure had added “a new dimension to the word ‘crap.’” (Quick, finish this Morrissey lyric: “I will not change, and I will not . . .”)
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Historically, the burden of proof has always been Smith’s. While the music press has often been willing to acknowledge that a Cure record is good, few if any of the band’s albums have been declared important. In NME’s December 2000 poll to name “The Most Influential Artist of All Time,” Morrissey’s old band the Smiths logged in at number 10 (of 20) and the Cure didn’t place at all. When that magazine ranked the 50 “Greatest Artists of All Time” two years later, the Smiths edged out the Beatles for the number one spot–and once again the Cure was entirely absent. (To give you an idea of what a drubbing this is, the Charlatans, the Manic Street Preachers, and Bez–the dancer from the Happy Mondays–all made it.)
Truth be told, the Cure has always been easier for critics to hate–you don’t see 311 covering Morrissey on the sound tracks to Adam Sandler movies, after all. While Moz has built his persona around dry wit and indirection, Smith has always been blunt and declarative. Morrissey: “If you ever need self-validation / Just meet me in the alley by the railway station.” Smith: “Let’s go to bed.” And for all his preening and pouting, Morrissey has never played up his appearance to the degree Smith has–it’s no coincidence that so many Cure reviews have mentioned Smith’s hair and makeup. He’s made himself into a cartoon, a garish woeful kabuki, to further pummel you with his sadness (in case lyrics like “It doesn’t matter if we all die” somehow failed to drive it home).
Morrissey used to lay bare society’s foibles with the finesse of a fisherman deboning a halibut, but here he seems misguided and desperate. Ninety seconds into the record he sniffs, “America, it brought you the hamburger”–which in addition to being a naff lyric is also technically untrue. Worse yet, he rhymes it with “America, you know where you can shove your hamburger.” It’s a sad record of a spectacular failure of imagination that the pop genius who wrote “Break Up the Family” is reduced to telling a nation to molest itself with a Quarter Pounder. Equally distressing, he’s stripped his sadness of its black humor–he just plops it down on the table like a soggy pillow. To put it another way: Morrissey has become a whingebag.
Smith’s frenzied, scenery-chewing performance binds the record together. Far from sounding spoiled or bored–and the Cure’s discography is littered with moments where he’s sounded both at once–he howls and yelps like a man impaled on a wrought-iron fence. He sobs his way through the dour “Anniversary,” spits disgusted profanities in “Us or Them,” and wails like a lost and lonesome ghost in “Labyrinth.” His gusto is such that you can mostly ignore what he’s saying–a bit of a blessing, actually. There are no profound observations on The Cure, no hanging gardens or lovecats or heads on doors. Smith’s prose is workmanlike, his sentiments accessible and universal: “I can’t find myself,” “We were so in love,” “Death is with us all,” “Tomorrow I can start again.” This lack of poetic ambition precludes the kind of clunky philosophizing that bankrupts You Are the Quarry–it’s easy to forget there are words at all, and instead hear Smith’s voice as simply a vehicle for the melodies.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Kevin Estrada, James Crump.
