Morrissey: Still ill.
How Soon Is Now?
ROCK AND ROLL is full of natural men. Elvis Presley — whose genius resided not in his mind, but in his voice and his body — was the first of these. Part of the importance of Elvis as a rock myth is his almost divine naïvety, the way he seemed to act without thinking, to change the world without knowing what he was doing.
Elvis, the man of action, makes an appropriate figurehead for early rock and roll, because for the first ten years of its life, rock was all about action. The songs were invitations to dance, incitements to riot, or none-too-subtle propositions for sex. And the singer’s desire was always backed up by the music — the most intensely physical music a mainstream white audience had heard up to that point. Sweat, exertion, desire and spontaneous action created the foundation on which rock and roll was built, and over this the music’s architects constructed their machines for dancing and doing. By 1965 these included the Chuck Berry duckwalk, the Sun Studio slap, the Phil Spector Wall of Sound and the Bo Diddley beat.
Bo Diddley’s ‘shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits’ rhythm is, as Toby Creswell says in his book, 1001 Songs, ‘one of the essential parts of the vocabulary of rock and roll’.1 The famous beat first came to light on Bo’s 1957 hit ‘Bo Diddley’. His producers, the Chess brothers, made him change some of the song’s lyrics so it would get played on the radio:
Bow-legged rooster told a cross-legged duck
Say you ain’t good lookin’ but you sure can…crow2
But even if he’d scrapped the lyrics entirely, no-one who heard the music would be left in any doubt as to what the song was about. The Bo Diddley beat is pure desire.
In 1964, Andrew Loog Oldham overheard Keith Richards singing snatches of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ over a Bo Diddley beat played on his acoustic guitar, and knew he was listening to the next Rolling Stones’ single — it was recorded two days later.3 ‘The Bo Diddley feel is a suggestion in Buddy’s version,’ said Tony Calder in Andrew Loog Oldham’s 2 Stoned, ‘and a call to arms in the Stones’’.4 ‘Not Fade Away’ heralded a tough and threatening new sex drive in the Stones’ music which would become a hallmark of their sound from this point on. ‘I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be,’ sang Mick Jagger, not messing around any more, ‘you’re gonna give your love to me.’5
The Stooges’ ‘1969’ is also built on the Bo Diddley shuffle. But while the desire in the rhythm is still strong, the simple sense of purpose it had in the Stones’ hands is gone: the song still thrusts and kicks, but in a flailing, hopeless fashion. ‘1969’ seems to go on forever, locked in its two-chord drive to nowhere, and the wah-wah guitar solo sounds more like a tantrum than a come-on.
In 1984 the Bo Diddley beat was back — though in barely recognisable form. On The Smiths ‘How Soon Is Now?’, the sound that had framed a litany of desire in 1957 and a call to arms in 1964 seemed finally to have worn itself out — the song sounds like ‘Not Fade Away’ played on a Walkman with a dying battery. This was a dance record for those who find dancing — along with any other form of spontaneous action — impossible. The singer introduces himself in the first verse:
I am the son
And the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular.6
Self-loathing, self-pity, bad jokes; we’re a long way from ‘you’re gonna give your love to me’. Where would an underground man find the grounds for a statement like that? As the song unfolds, the gloomy young man gets some unsolicited advice. Don’t sit there tormenting yourself, say the men of action, go out there and have some fun. Dance! Enjoy yourself! ‘You could meet somebody who really loves you.’7But the singer knows even before he gets in the car and drives to the club that things will end badly. In fact, he’s so smart that he’s seen into the future, and knows that everything, everywhere will end badly.
As with Dostoyevsky’s basement-dweller and the singer’s own subterranean hero Howard Devoto, Morrissey’s world-weariness is a result of his intelligence — which he would gladly trade for the ability to act. ‘I’m obsessed by the physical,’ he told Simon Reynolds in Blissed Out, by way of explaining his ongoing fascination with criminals and toughs, ‘it always works — instead of creeping around and relying on your thesaurus.’8
But Morrissey has not succeeded in making an insect of himself, he is decidedly not what Dostoyevsky refers to as ‘l’homme de la nature’. ‘I don’t feel natural even when I’m fast asleep,’9 he sings in ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’. Time and again, in Morrissey’s songs, the hero is about to take action and finds, for one reason or another, that it’s impossible. And this would be fine if he’d somehow managed to transcend his earthly desires — to make himself into the Buddha of Manchester. But as he reminds us in ‘How Soon Is Now?,’ he is still human, and he still needs to be loved.