Talk to Morrissey
Morrissey - Born to Hang
So the idea of a casual Morrissey fan is pretty ridiculous and my guess is that if you didn't know this song it's because you couldn't care less about the guy; but if you haven't checked out this site yet and if you were not involved in heavy tape trading scenes then there are some pretty good surprises ahead. In a way I just wanted an excuse to post the radio call in session although it seemed a lot funnier when I was fifteen, and these days I mostly just feel a monsterous empathy for this girl's loneliness.
Did you ever hear of this zine the Diane Files? This guy from Cleveland made it in the early 90s, he posted a suitably vague and somewhat suggestive fake classified ad in the back of Maximum RocknRoll [1], posing as a girl named Diane who was looking for friends/allies/partners in crime. I lost most of the details, but I remember the phrase "into violence as beauty" and also at least two references to darkness and/or black. The idea was to print all the responses from asshole dudes asking for a naked photo or dirty letter or whatever but he got such a massive response from the lonely children of the punk underground that he had to refigure the entire project; instead he filtered out the letters by most desperate, most crazy, most entertaining and most troubling and printed a cross-section in this free zine that was just left around at shows. He did another zine a while later that had a really bitter piece about how people totally misinterpreted the concept, thought that it was just this freakshow where you could laugh at the fucked up creeps who read MRR. But his intention was to show how isolated and friendless everyone in the scene actually was, how such a basic and unspectacular plea for friendship could draw so many responses, how there's obviously a problem that we need to address.
If you look at MRR right now there's barely one page of classifieds in the back, as opposed to the 10-15 pages there were back when The Diane Files happened. There's an easy reason for this, and it's the internet. Clearly if you wanted to sell Misfits 7"s, trade GG Allin videos or, and this is the big one, meet penpals, there's a much easier way to do it now. A part of me feels crazy about it though, because I used to scour those classifieds looking for this one SS Decontrol LP and now I can just search ebay or whatever, and I don't have to look past all the kids desperate to meet someone else into "anarchy, Crimpshrine, sk8ing, and fucking with cops" to spot it. I'm still totally sincere when I say punk shows saved my life but how ever many years later there are different things that are saving my life. At the same time, there's also a ton of kids whose lives are being saved right now by shows and records and patches and the excitement of a new community, and I'm at least one-third oblivious to it. And I'm 99% oblivious to the kids that are slipping through those cracks, that are so lonely and pained they'll fall for fake classifieds and call Morrissey and just scream and bawl until they cut her off. I guess I don't know what good it does to acknowledge it, but it's amazing to realize how easy it is to avoid it.
So "Born to Hang", recorded during the "Kill Uncle" sessions in 1992, is considered "unfinished" (as described by co-writer Mark Nevin in an interview) although I don't see what's missing. I like it because it has super fast, propulsive drums and you could definitely dance to it, the sloppy guitar totally begging for bent-wrists and serious faced neck-swinging like Molly Ringwald. I like it because Morrissey totally owns his own loneliness and difference, "I never have to live like you" coming off more taunt than lament; it's clearly the same guy who sang "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" but he has a different take on the whole thing. The girl who was so alienated by "those stupid shiny black shoes" and New Kids on the Block is well over thirty now, and I can imagine her living a life where she doesn't even remember how important the Smiths were to her, and maybe even has a daughter of her own who is all flipped out and friendless and she can't even relate. I can also imagine her completely on her own, three rows up at the movie theater sitting by herself, "not to have kids" and totally content with that path. Both visions tug at different parts of my heart, but I'm sort of rooting for her to have a burned CD of "Born to Hang" that's years old and she totally thinks it a waste of time for me to repost it as if everyone hadn't heard it already.
[1] by the way if you haven't checked lately MRR completely rules right now, columns especially at an all time high of interesting and informative.
No comments:
Post a Comment