The Smiths is dead. Please let them R.I.P. now, okay?

Is ferociously good music writing. Brutal but piercing.

Both the Pitchfork and Quietus reviews are excellent, and present some intelligent and balanced insight into the band. Taylor Parkes' review is particularly invigorating - he's absolutely spot on with some of his observations, and even when his opinions are a bit more contentious he at least shows a willingness to approach the band in a different and challenging way.

There's so much to appreciate and mull over here, it's impossible to pick highlights. It's comforting to see that the art of great pop writing isn't yet dead!

Refreshing.

I love how they get 5 stars in Rolling Stones, however brief it may be. Hope it features in the actual magazine.

That Quietus review is something else though. It seems like a similar site to Pitchfork and I loved Tom Ewing's review there but Quietus was quite an article.

At first I couldn't believe what I was reading and found it sacrilegious and was very pissed off - he slags off Panic and WDDIM! I take the point that the singles are overexposed, but their brilliance will never dim regardless and "Singles" is in many ways their best album for me. I agree in a sense that The Smiths peaked with the early stuff and the "William" single was the exact point.

A number of other good points he made that I never considered about the rhythm section clashing with Marr and dated 80s production and Moz's complacency by the time of Bigmouth and the self-parody of "I Started Something". All in all, interesting stuff and food for thought. Like he said, The Smiths are the most over-discussed band since The Beatles and it was nice to read a different kind of review.

I know one thing - The Smiths shall never reunite - and it's all because of you - Mike Gross. You, you. You tried to justify yourself with your team of lawyers. Mike Gross thinks that the world revolves around him, and that, that all that matters is what Mike Gross thinks. But - he is a con man. I heard that somebody torched his house-maybe. And threw fire in his burning door. I hate him so much, that con man and with good reason. Let's be clear - the three Smiths are over. And you, you want me dead. It was you that said it.
" Hang the MJ, Hang the MJ, Hang the MJ … Hang the MJ" … because the con man ... he constantly plans (& he's got no fans)…

I'm thinking about "Right now".
Don't buy any records that the con man could obtain royalties on. And it's not like he was The Smiths really, he was just, in my opinion, a part of a lawn mower. Morrissey and Marr were The Smiths - and Andy contributed at times, that is - when he was able to tie his own shoelaces. Speaking of "Right now" - from the looks of this TP thing, this thing has schizophrenia or bipolar. He is all over the place with his reviews switching from bad to good to whatever. And talking about putting the dead to sleep.
But I like that The Quietus acknowledged that Mike Gross was just a useless, pointless discombobulation of a DJ.
I give them credit because TP was on Morrissey's side on this particular lawn mower part.
Well done.

Speaking of "Right now", Morrissey looks soooo adorable, holding that beautiful little baby.
Mike Gross - you create your own misery - you can't help yourself.
So to Mike Gross-God doesn't send people to Hell - he just honors their request.
And you blatantly have many requests, don't you - Mike Gross

Hardly.. If you actually read the supposed 'description' of the album you'll see that its simply another automatically cliched comment, that describes the smiths as miserable.

Lazy Journalism is stressed here

hardly well written, completely pointless yank wank xx

Any yet noted?
Ive yet to cause a riot for Paul Weller at the Liverpool Arena on November 17th after that..not much else booked IaN

IRENIE MEANIE

Sadly this was your life
georgina slut face is marked by the slut paying in another way russell brand actually lower than a whore master cos he doesnt pay for the sluts

what does that make him?
what does that make them?

Any answers?????

irene

The Quietus review is probably one of the major critiques of The Smiths to appear in a VERY long time.

And, for a long time, it's appeared to me that people simply don't LISTEN to The Smiths but revere them for their subjective view of what they believe they SYMBOLISE in relation to their own lives.

I remember a post in relation to a previous article (http://www.morrissey-solo.com/article.pl?sid=08/10/24/0731225 [morrissey-solo.com] entitled "One reason they'll never get back together.") in relation to the relative merits of Morrissey's Smiths and post-Smiths output where a champion of the latter asked his detractors to actually LISTEN to the SOUND of the early Smiths to back up his point. He was shot down in flames by people taking the opposite view as to actually do that may have spoilt there "memories" of what the Smiths actually MEANT (as opposed to sounded like) to them.

The main thrust of that post (one I've found myself increasingly agreeing with) was that Johnny Marr (not to mention the rest of the band) simply couldn't cut it live - as the Quietus review points out in relation to the aural abortion that is the live version of MIM - and the band thus had to expand to a five-piece.

  I would go further and say he'd completely run out of ideas in the studio as well, hence "MARR'S DECISION to draft Craig Gannon as second guitarist was in fact rather shrewd". The emphasis here suggesting that JM was all too aware of his, and the band's, shortcomings.

Let's face it, whilst the Smiths really did MEAN something in the 80's their music FOR THE MOST PART simply isn't strong enough to truly transcend that era. The 20 odd years that have seen uncritical Smiths obsessives - most too young to have witnessed them in their contextual zeitgeist- cling to their own IDEAS of what the Smiths were, are somewhat akin to the creepy acolytes of, say, Lenin lining up to peep at his corpse displayed in an open casket. The trouble is that after all this time more and more people are beginning to notice the foul stench it's emitting.

Time to move on and let it lie now surely.

Re: Quietus review.

Indeed, the final paragraph does betray the rather splendid perversity of the review as a whole, which serves to illustrate the oddity of feeling caused by being a witness to someone picking fault with something they love.

That kind of challenge can lead even the most devoted heart to the margins; you'd probably start with the way your love eats biscuits, for example, or the way they occasional snort when laughing. We could all do that if pushed (and bored). And if millions fell in love with our loved one and continually praised our loved one it would probably make it even easier. The imp of the perverse is sometimes strong.

But in taking the title of this compilation as an interestingly unusual (but too literal) invitation to examine the sound of the band, it misses out on the one thing even above Marr's guitar which sets The Smiths apart: Morrissey's words. The lyrics elevated him to the extremely rare position of a genuinely new rock archetype.

Technically, whilst being part of the songs, the words are not part of the sound, but taking them out of the sound is a bit like attempting to describe someone's beauty without taking into account their eyes. Or their heart.

And if the worse thing we can stack against the mighty poetic achievement of The Smiths is some tinny production and some at times agricultural whomping from the drummer, then I think that counts as perhaps a reiteration of the suggestion that the review really is a case of Last Paragraph Standing...

David T - can't you moderate this shit? The author is either insane or an attention seeker. Either way he is becoming a pest.