The Smiths
Related: UK music - white music
Burn down the disco/hang the blessed DJ
The dangers of this kind of talk did become apparent a few years later, though, when Morrissey of The Smiths (the great white hopes of British independent rock and the UK music press readership) gave an infamous Melody Maker interview in 1986 during which he lambasted the black and black-sounding dance pop then dominating the UK charts (where it functioned he argued, as part of a radio and pop TV conspiracy against Smiths-type music). He also declared that "all reggae is vile". In the controversy that ensued, the critical supporters of dance music, soul and hip hop chose to interpret The Smiths's song "Panic", with its "burn down the disco/hang the blessed DJ" chorus, as a crypto-racist rallying cry against multicultural dance culture, pointing out the running theme in The Smiths's music and imagery of nostalgia for a bygone, semi-mythical England that recalled such notorious culturally chauvinist fogeys as Philip Larkin. In the following years, Morrissey continued to blunder into similar gaffes: Viva Hate's patronising "Bengali in Platforms" (about 1970s immigrants trying to assimilate), Kill Uncle's ambiguous "Asian Rut," and Your Arsenal's "The National Front Disco", written from the point of view of a neo-fascist youth. The culmination of this flirtation with patriotic imagery and cultural insularity came with Morrissey's performance at an outdoor rock festival during which he draped himself in the Union Jack, despite the voluble presence of skinheads in the audience. Whatever the peculiarities of Morrissey's own relationship with Englishness, it has to be reiterated, though, that the Smiths audience was in other senses politically progressive, or at least ineffectually idealistic: Labor-voting, anti-sexist, anti-materialistic, tolerant of Morrissey's clouded sexuality and homo-erotic imagery, and in theory if not in terms of their cultural consumption, anti-racist. --Simon Reynolds, springerin, early 2001
CDs
- Hatful of Hollow (1984) - The Smiths [Amazon US]
Several months after releasing their first album, the Smiths issued the singles and rarities collection Hatful of Hollow, establishing a tradition of repackaging their material as many times and as quickly as possible. While several cuts on Hatful of Hollow are BBC versions of songs from The Smiths, the versions on the compilation are nervy and raw — and they're also not the selling point of the record. The Smiths treated singles as individual entities, not just ways to promote an album, and many of their finest songs were never issued on their studio albums. Hatful of Hollow contains many of these classics, including the sweet rush of "William, It Was Really Nothing," and the sardonic "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," the tongue-in-cheek lament of "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want," the wistful "Back to the Old House," "Girl Afraid," and the pulsating, tremolo-laced masterpiece "How Soon Is Now?" With such strong material forming the core of the album, it's little wonder that Hatful of Hollow is as consistent as The Smiths and arguably captures the excitement surrounding the band even better. — Stephen Thomas Erlewine for allmusic.comyour Amazon recommendations
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