Anti-Climacus

Paint a Vulgar Picture



One should note with appropriate irony that the process described in the song has worked itself out in Morrissey's own solo career. You too can own the 20th Anniversary reissue of Bona Drag. Smiths fans needn't worry: the band's demise was acrimonious and followed by many, many years of lawsuits. Other venerable bands from the 80s may reunite and produce markedly inferior new music, but so long as the hate between Morrissey, Marr, and the other two remains strong, their legacy is secure.

"Paint a Vulgar Picture" is from the last Smiths album, Strangeways, Here We Come, the best to choose as your favorite if you want to appear to others as a serious fan. The environment in which the album was, as the above paragraph implies, fractious. Johnny Marr wrote and completed the musical portion of the album before Morrissey had written any lyrics: the album is one extended karaoke performance. The Smiths were a strange band, who would take extreme stands on certain musical questions only to contradict themselves later. They once vowed never to use synthesizers, but later did; Marr frequently claimed he would never take a guitar solo, but there's one here.

What makes this song rise above a typical satire of the record industry (e.g. "The Under-Assistant West Coast Promo Man") is the sudden and strange inclusion of the first person perspective--"I walked a pace behind you at the soundcheck/ You're just the same as I am." The music industry may be all cynical manipulation, the motives of the artist compromised by the fact that their art must also be their living, and a steady, slow abandonment of the idealism of youth.

But it survives because in spite of all these ugly realities--no one emerges from adulthood unscathed or uncompromised--there remains within the work itself that moment of real, pure connection. I don't, for various reasons, subscribe anymore to that vision of reality that is reflected in the Smiths. Their music is excellent and I have the reflection of all those initial feelings, but all I feel now is the humanism of their work. The expressions of hatred are sharp, the humor witty, but neither distinguishes them from many other bands. Not many could sing this lyric and mean it, unironically:

It's so easy to laugh
It's so easy to hate
It takes strength to be gentle and kind

But in there is a real, and serious, masculine (and human) ideal. In early performances, Morrissey was known for carrying flowers with him onstage, while he sang. As he explained it, the flowers were meant as a rebuke to the Manchester scene of the time, which he understood to be cold and mechanical (think Joy Division). The Smiths were concerned foremost with recognizing the various sites of human cruelty and offering, in their place, an alternative picture of life. This led them, at certain moments, to be overly romantic, but the error is understandable.