my trouble with the smiths
Two facts about me:
- I was born with an extra rib.
- I like The Smiths.
Music has always been the go-to medium for me to figure out an emotion. Listening to the Smiths feels like a hand entering my side, taking my rib and fashioning something tender.
I'm not very invested in the band as people. I don't even know Morrissey's first name and I didn't find out about the fate of Andy Rourke until a couple months ago.
I do not like Morrissey1. He's a racist, miserable old bag of a man. A good singer, but musically dull without the rest of the Smiths.
Of course his racism makes me feel a certain way (if it didn't, check my pulse), a bit guilty and naughty for enjoying something that has been cordoned off for 'everyone else'.
What did Edward P. Jones say in the introduction for Notes of A Native Son?
This is Baldwin, with his “special attitude,” talking of Shakespeare and the cathedral at Chartres and Rembrandt and the Empire State Building and Bach: “These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.”
The rib is mine; I fashioned something tender.
Allegedly, the other band members would tease him in interviews lol↩