I took a rock music class at UT. We had a hippie graduate student as our teacher who said that if it was up to him, he would have had the class be nothing but focusing on "race music" i.e. early blues, slave songs, etc, and it showed not because he did it, but because after a certain point, he really started to lose the thread on his knowledge and based his lectures on the PBS series....which, as you know, is full of holes, focuses on what most people tend to already know like a trip down memory lane, and doesn't go more indepth than "wow, man, I listened to the Beatles all night long, and now me and my buddies are big rock stars with drug problems!"

But this lecture on the Smiths...that is a problem when you are a huge fan of anything because your view is going to be distorted in favor of what you like about them. Morrissey and Marr were big style freaks to the point of shopping for designer duds when possible which fits in well with what everyone else was doing in the 80's. Marr owned a BMW. They couldn't wait to get rid of their label in favor of more money. Their coverstars might have been from movies about working class lives, but those stars were still inherently different because in real life they had fame. Moz spent his waking hours trying to meet them all and pay homage to them by tying in their movies with what he is trying to say with his lyrics. You don't see anyone who is not famous on his early album covers. He opts for pictorial representations of working class life. Not real ones.

Even Johnny Marr spent his time trying to chase after the idea of being like his heroes. It's like both of them spent their lives trying to make themselves meet somebody else's standards. Keith Richards. Oscar Wilde. James Dean. Elvis. etc and tying in their lives in a way that makes themselves feel worthy against their heroes' standards.