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| "Academics of the world unite for a gig with the Smiths" - London Times |
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posted by davidt
on Tuesday March 29 2005, @09:00AM
rifraf writes:
Thought I'd post this link. Manchester Metropolitan University is devoting an entire academic conference to the Smiths' music and lyrics.
Here is the short version on yahoo! news / AFP:
Long-defunct British pop band inspire academic conference
Here is a cut and past from the longer and more complete tuesday 3/19 London times:
March 29, 2005
Academics of the world unite for a gig with the Smiths
By Sean O’Neill
LITTLE did those original fans of the Smiths imagine, as they waved bunches of gladioli above their heads in sweat-drenched concert halls, that the most brilliant British band of the 1980s would become a suitable topic for academic debate.
But 20 years later the words and music of Steven Patrick Morrissey and Johnny Marr are to be subjected to rigorous intellectual analysis at a two-day symposium this week.
Appropriately, the event — its title, Why Pamper Life’s Complexities, has been borrowed from the song This Charming Man — will be held at Manchester Metropolitan University in the band’s home town. As well as academics from Manchester and Britain, there will be contributors from the United States, Portugal, Japan, Ireland, Norway, Turkey and Australia.
Kieran Cashell, of the Limerick Institute of Technology, will address the symposium on Subjectivity, Suicide and the Smiths, and Tonje Hakensen, of Oslo University, will concentrate exclusively on the poetry of The Boy with the Thorn in his Side.
There will be a paper about the Smiths and Englishness, another arguing that the band is more accurately described as “Manchester-Irish”, and close looks at fan culture and musical innovation.
Justin O’Connor, director of the university’s Institute of Popular Culture, said that the Smiths had “huge cultural significance and personal resonance” that warranted sustained academic attention. He added: “They looked like nobody else and sounded like nobody else and their music had an emotional depth that moved people in a way that no band has managed before or since.”
Fans of the band, who were inspired to style their hair into bad quiffs and mope around in ill-fitting topcoats, can be expected to have a range of reactions to news of the symposium.
Many, now in their serious forties, will be delighted that the finest minds will be trying to make sense of their youthful attachment.
The more solipsistic devotees, and they are many in number, will be appalled that the lyrics that so succinctly summed up the essence of their very personal bedroom angst will be publicly dissected and discussed.
Purely hedonistic fans are more likely to respond with bemusement. Is there really any need to study the deeper meaning of lines such as “Let me get my hands/ on your mammary glands” or “Hand in glove/ the sun shines out of our behinds”? The Smiths symposium follows a long line of academic study of popular music — from the Beatles to Madonna and many more in between — and defenders of the event say that study of the band is long overdue.
“The Smiths had a lot to say about issues of class, gender and sexuality, subjects that have been at the forefront of cultural studies,” Kaye Mitchell, of the University of Westminster, said.
“They also had a preoccupation with a certain kind of Englishness, simultaneously profound and introspective but also rather parochial. They make you think of draughty seaside towns and teashops and slightly odd old people.
“They were always very culturally aware and there is rich potential for intertextual discussion, because they refer to a lot of other areas of study. For example, Morrissey is always citing Oscar Wilde, while the album covers used still photography from the 1950s and 1960s.”
Study of the band, Dr Mitchell said, may have been delayed by its obsessive and protective fans, who themselves may be a worthy subject of examination.
But too much study may rebound. One of Morrissey’s lyrics may have a hidden warning for those who plan to analyse him too closely. “But now you know the truth about me, you won’t see me any more,” he sang in What Difference Does It Make?
RISE AND FALL
# The Smiths played their first gig, in October 1982, at The Ritz, Manchester
# Highest chart position: No 8 with This Charming Man in August 1992
# Album charts: in March 1995, eight years after the group split, there were seven Smiths albums in the UK chart at the same time
# Bestselling: highest-selling single on first issue was Panic, sold 125,000 copies and reached No 11 in 1986 with the refrain “Hang the DJ”
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