The fierce final stand of all I am, inDEED
"Please keep me in mind. Please keep me in mi-ind."

There are equal measures of dread and comfort in the knowledge that the Smiths' second LP, Meat is Murder, is now 31 years old. If you can remember 1985, it may give you a little shiver. If not—either because it's older than you are, OR on account of ravages—the fact that this consummate artifact of a certain ember of adolescence that never fully stops smoldering, was there waiting for you when you needed it most, should lend some tiny morsel of hope for the future.

The generic way to lead into an appreciation of this kind would be to say that Meat Is Murder was an explosion of vibrancy in a gray (or, I suppose grey) musical landscape. But that really isn't the case. 1985 was a very good year for music, even hit music—Like a Virgin was the number one album in February '85, having replaced Born in the USA and Purple Rain—but it was also the year of Fables of the Reconstruction, Tim, Around the World in a Day, Psychocandy, New Day Rising, Slave to the Rhythm, Rum Sodomy and the Lash, Rain Dogs, Cupid & Psyche '85, How to Be a…Zillionaire!, Up on the Sun, 3-Way Tie (For Last), and Whitney Houston.

If anything, Meat Is Murder worked exactly the reverse: focusing all the synthetic vibrancy of its era into a monochromatic wave of inward-facing intensity, articulating the human capacity for untrammeled longing even from the depths of despair better than any of the above. Here was a record that was all the more powerful and lovable for not being perfect, with a relentlessness that makes it stand out from everything. Its subject was singularity, and few albums in the history of solitude have ever done the subject better. Which is why, despite the time-stamped sounds—a different '80s than Scritti Politti's, sure, but still unmistakably the '80s—Meat Is Murder also remains timeless.

In case you need some distraction today, below is a compendium of stuff about Meat Is Murder, including multiple versions of every song, and excerpts of reviews from the time of its release, and the years since. Enjoy:

THE HEADMASTER RITUAL
Pantomime version from UK TV:

Live on Spanish TV

6:31- Johnny Marr Plays the guitar riff

NME review, 1985, by Paul DuNoyer

It’s not as if the words and music sound ‘made for each other’: they don’t. Of course, they don’t clash or contradict, they simply work independently of one another. Morrissey’s singing preserves a quality of solitude; the instruments and voice operate in eerie detachment, but often to beautiful effect. Morrissey and Marr don’t so much sink their talents into one as give you two for the price of one.
…
What difference will [the propaganda of the title song] make? Not a sausage, so far as my diet goes, I’m afraid, yet the roast beef of Old England will never taste quite so good again. I’m sure that many wavering recruits to the vegetarian cause will be won over. Whatever, on that track and on the record as a whole, The Smiths’ artistic achievement is genuinely beyond doubt. As a unit, they’ve never sounded so sure, so confident, while Johnny Marr is certain to emerge from the relative neglect that’s been his lot till now.
Naturally, the personality of Morrissey will remain basic to The Smiths, appeal. We afford him the sort of licence that’s normally only extended to children and idiots, sensing the presence of an innocence and simplicity that’s been civilised out of the rest of us, and a kind of insight also.

RUSHOLME RUFFIANS

Live

Live w/ "His Latest Flame" (from Rank)

Live (into “This Charming Man”)

Demo

Rolling Stone review, May 23, 1985, by Tim Holmes

A man of deadly serious sensitivity, Morrissey recognizes emotional as well as physical brutality, assailing the cynicism that laughs at loneliness ("That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore"). Despite feeling trapped in an unfeeling world, Morrissey can still declare, "My faith in love is still devout," with a sincerity so deadpan as to be completely believable.

Though he waves the standard for romance and sexual liberation, Morrissey has a curiously puritanical concept of love. He's conscious of thwarted passion and inappropriate response, yet remains oddly distant from his own self-absorption. The simple pleasures of others make him uncomfortable, as if these activities were the cause of his own grand existential suffering. Morrissey's uptight romanticism wears the black mantle of a new Inquisition.

I WANT THE ONE I CAN’T HAVE

Live, 1985

Live, 1986

Live Morrissey solo at Glastonbury, 2011

Morrissey interview with a round table of fanzine writers in Melody Maker, March 16, 1985:

“the whole idea with Meat Is Murder was to control it totally and without a producer things were better. We saw things clearer. I mean, in very simple terms we are very, very angry. We’re angry about the music industry. We’re very angry about pop music. And I think it’s about time that somebody said something and somebody did something that is of value.”

DEBRIS: What about musical aims - it seems a bit harder.

Yes, it does. And in a way that's intentional, because now that we have quite a big audience it's really important to me that people realise that we haven't become sloppy and we haven't become cushioned and we haven't become fat and lazy. Because we didn't want to go into the big league, as it were, and adhere to all the rules. That's pointless. It makes the entire history of The Smiths totally pointless. There has to be something that separates us. And to be quite honest, we are very angry. I mean, in very simple terms we are very, very angry. We're angry about the music industry. We're very angry about pop music. And I think it's about time that somebody said something and somebody did something that is of value. Which is always very difficult because when you try to say something with value and intelligence, you have to stand trial, you have to go before the jury, as it were, and explain yourself. People who are idiots and idiotic and bland and pointless and stupid and poppy - they can do what they like and nobody pins them against a wall and says, 'Why are you doing that?' But if you try and do something with a grain of intellect, you have to answer for it every single day of your life. Which to me is the most irksome part of the music industry. In a way, it means you are being taken seriously, but then as I recollect, it was always the very, very dull people in music who were ever taken seriously. So there's really a lot to do. It's not easy.

WHAT SHE SAID

Live from Rank w/ “Rubber Ring” Intro fakeout

Live Morrissey Solo 2015

Melody Maker review, 1985, by Ian Pye

The Smiths' second studio album is a brooding missive from a blackness that's quite sickening to contemplate. In retrospect, the camp flamboyance of 'Charming Man' seems like the work of a joyful recluse in comparison. Even the songs here that appear more linked with the past than the present offer some kind of defiance in place of the void that follows. …
Morrissey may despise the brutality of life but he's desperately fascinated by it, and in many ways it's the source of his inspiration. …

If 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore' flirts seriously with the notion of suicide, 'Well I Wonder' is virtually a valedictory note; certainly the most moving and disturbing revelation on the whole LP. Open yourself to this song and feel your throat dry and then close to the point of choking. There's a sadness here that is truly overwhelming. Ironically, after this, the title song seems weak, operating in a dimension that's far less affecting. An anti-meat-eating song, it begins and ends with animal noises which immediately sabotage its credibility. Sentiment replaces the imagery of protest and the genuine becomes almost risible. Such Old MacDonald foolishness was the last thing this piece needed, especially when it's one of Johnny Marr's most dirge-like compositions.

Elsewhere the guitarist has developed the thrilling mix first unleashed on the wonderful 'How Soon Is Now?', fusing psychedelia with his own style of ringing, circular chimes. It's quickly apparent that his understanding of the instrument's potential and beauty is second to none. Other references include garage punk, early acoustic rock'n'roll, folk, and even funk! An eclectic spread that's remarkably cogent and quite capable of matching the intensity of Morrissey's pained lyrics. There is, however, a constant suggestion that both music and words are very much separate entities, a product of the way The Smiths work, I suspect, but a fault frequently saved by the quality of the vocals. Morrissey hasn't quite steered clear of his own cliches - that particular style of overtly romantic phrasing which has swooned its way through many a Smiths song - but he has broadened his approach. His falsetto flights are especially arresting: I never realised he could yodel, and sometimes the timbre of his voice is so tender he might be crying.

The Smiths may have been misguidedly elevated to the level of gods by their followers but their music is well beyond the trivial novelty we've come to know as pop. 'Meat Is Murder' is not for the squeamish, but the real torture of this record has little to do with the righteous accusations behind the banner sloganeering. That phrase is just a useful handle that really belies the very personal and far more unsettling account of a murdered soul. Raw, bloody, and naked, the meat on the rack is Morrissey's.

Morrissey to Melody Maker, March 16, 1985:

"When I wrote the words for that, I was just so completely tired of all the same old journalistic questions and people trying, you know, this contest of wit, trying to drag me down and prove that I was a complete fake. And I was tired of that because it just seemed that, like, even the people within popular music, even the people within the music industry, didn't have that much faith in it as an art form. And they wanted to really get rid of all these people who are trying to make some sense out of the whole thing. And I found that really distressing."

THAT JOKE ISN’T FUNNY ANYMORE


Live in Spain, 1985

Live Morrissey Solo

Live Morrissey Solo at Hollywood High (w/hilariously painful audience singalong):

Creem Magazine review, 1985, by Robert Christgau:
Meat Is Murder [Sire, 1985]
It makes a certain kind of sense to impose teen-macho aggression on your audience—for better or worse, macho teens are expected to make a thing of their unwonted hostility. These guys impose their post-adolescent sensitivity, thus inspiring the sneaking suspicion that they're less sensitive than they come on—passive-aggressive, the pathology is called, and it begs for a belt in the chops. Only the guitar hook of "How Soon Is Now," stuck on by their meddling U.S. label, spoils the otherwise pristine fecklessness of this prize-winning U.K. LP. Remember what the Residents say: "Hitler was a vegetarian." C+

HOW SOON IS NOW

Live 1986 (omitted from Rank)

Live Morrissey Solo at Hollywood Bowl 2007

Johnny Marr solo 2013

Morrissey to Melody Maker, March 16, 1985:

IO: Do you see yourself as a humorous writer at all?

Yes, I do. Nobody else does, I don't know why. And it's distressing because I often feel that if people don't consider me to be remotely humorous, who on earth do they consider to be humorous? So I do feel that I need some recognition in that area. But then again, knowing my luck, people will probably start comparing me to... um... it's so difficult to name names these days... you meet people at Top Of The Pops and they're incredibly civilised and it spoils everything, because you really want to get in some horrific criticism.

NOWHERE FAST



Live in Spain, 1985

Peel Session version, 1984

Colin Meloy of the Decemberists in Stereogum for the album’s 25th anniversary in 2010:

Like a bomb specifically designed to detonate at the perfect time and altitude so as to exact the maximum amount of carnage, Meat Is Murder came into my life exactly when it was intended to strike. Literally 15 clumsy and shy. The song “Well I Wonder” spoke to me so much that even I, all pimply and introverted, thought it bore almost too much resemblance to my life. I wore that cassette thin...

Drew Daniel of Matmos in the same Stereogum feature:

Cut to 20 years after these early puppy-love imprintings and unresolvable resentments. From out of nowhere, just last month I was ambushed by a bite-size Proustian madeleine of keening nostalgia courtesy of this era of the Smiths. My band was setting up and getting ready to play in San Francisco at a big anniversary bash for the SFMOMA. We were dutifully booting up software, tuning oscillators on synths, and making sure that MaxMSP/Jitter patches were running smoothly on the video processing rig. I was testing a microphone when the DJ put on “Well I Wonder,” the B-Side to “How Soon is Now?,” and I was instantly teleported back into my awkward, closeted teenage self. Then, bitterly stung by unrequited love for a straight bandmate in my high school hardcore band, I would play “Well I Wonder” over and over to myself while wallowing in hopeless ardor: “Well I wonder / Do you hear me when you sleep? / I hoarsely cry…” at which point a wordless sighing croon erupts in the place of yet more useless demands. Within the contracted world of this song, it’s a foregone conclusion that the answer to such human-doormat questions is a resounding No — and yet that knowledge doesn’t extinguish the impossible desire for love, but only inflames it further. Like James Brown’s “Prisoner of Love” or John Dowland’s “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” it’s the kind of song you can listen to until your tears distort the room.

Channeling my teenage self, years later the words poured out of my mouth and into the microphone as I lip-synced like a drag queen for a now kinda confused Matmos audience. They thought I was being snide and condescending; surely this electro-noise-improv-musique-concrete group has nothing but contempt for the heart-on-sleeve gush of the Smiths. Technology and abstraction killed the necessity for such vulgar displays of cheap sentiment, right? Embarrassingly enough, I remembered every one of Morrissey’s words as they flooded through me: “Gasping / But somehow still alive / This is the fierce last stand of all I am…”

The words don’t sound so out of place today — or do they? To be sure, there’s plenty of hopelessness to go around in modern music: from the stark, gloomy anorexia of countless dubstep 12″ singles to the suicidal smoke signals of Xasthur and Apathia on the depressive black metal scene to the Hobbesian brutality of Prurient on the noise scene, there are many hopeless musical worlds which are, paradoxically, deeply pleasurable in their effect and entirely current in their aesthetic. But there’s nothing cool about the hopelessness of the Smiths: their hopelessness runs hot with desire, spilling over with basic, grubby, guts-on-the-floor emotional need. In this sense, it is not really hopeless at all, but rather over-full of a hope that is utopian, impossible, a painful burden which is going “Nowhere Fast” but which won’t go away. People take the piss out of the Smiths for the relentless and mawkish self-pity of Morrissey’s most over-the-top lyrics (“I Know it’s Over,” anyone?). In the case of “Well I Wonder,” it is an excruciating listen — but that’s because of a skinless vulnerability that skirts egotistical bathos and goes somewhere more interesting instead. The speaker never turns away from acknowledging the wider world of other people — on the contrary, he obstinately presses for a singular place within that wider world. Walter Benjamin wrote that “The only way of knowing someone is to love them without hope”; it is this stance that “Well I Wonder” (beautifully) refuses to achieve. The speaker of the song can’t quite abandon longings for which he knows there is no hope in this world, and the music cradles its listeners from imminent proof of that fact for as long as it can. Letting indifferent nature have her say, in its final minute we gradually hear a field recording of steadily falling rain. Eventually, the song ends. It never gives up.

WELL I WONDER

Live solo, 2013 (brief a capella excerpt at 2:05, when the lights go out)

Pitchfork review, November 18, 2011, by Douglas Wolk:

...better recorded than The Smiths, although it's more a bunch of songs that didn't fit on singles than a coherent album. When it's good, it's great: "The Headmaster Ritual", especially, is full of chills-down-the-spine moments from Morrissey (the wordless, yodeling chorus that rhymes with "I want to go home/ I don't want to stay," the second verse's thrilling deviations from the first). "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" is a legitimately uncanny slow one that builds up to a bullseye triple-entendre— "it was dark as I drove the point home"— then recedes, surges back up, and fades away again. Still, Morrissey's often painfully out of tune on Meat's lesser songs, and a lot of tracks here stretch out at considerable length. That works remarkably well for "Barbarism Begins at Home", seven minutes of tense funk, but flops for the title track's tedious, eye-rollingly earnest animal-rights manifesto.


BARBARISM BEGINS AT HOME


Seven-inch single version


Live on The Tube (UK TV), 1984

Live on Rockpalast (German TV), 1984

Live in Paris, 1984

From The Quietus, March 2, 2015, by Angus Batey:

you were left in no doubt that this was a decision you had to actively take. Until February of 1985, whether I should eat meat wasn't really an issue I'd ever given a great deal of thought to: it was just something I did without thinking. And while I can't say that Morrissey was the difference between me giving up meat and not, this record was a significant part of the process that led to a decision that made a huge difference to how I've lived my life for the three decades since. There have been other records that have opened my eyes to subjects I'd never properly thought about before, and other artists whose political and social views have helped form the background to decisions I've taken or attitudes I've chosen to adopt - but I don't think any one record has had such a considerable, sustained and existential impact on my life.

That fact seems all the more bizarre when I consider that, of the nine songs on the record, the title track is by far my least favourite. By placing it at the end of side two, it's also been the easiest one to skip, and as a result is probably the track on the album I've listened to the least. This may be because of a sense of guilt it helped inculcate right at the start, and if that's the case then that's testament to its power, and forms at least some sort of explanation of its impact. Bits of that come from the sound of the piece: the juxtaposition of the jarring, discordant, treated piano hits, the screaming of what one supposes is an industrial saw, the voice of the cattle and Johnny Marr's plaintive, maudlin melody isn't meant to uplift and captivate - it's designed to be part elegy and part horror-film soundtrack.

It's also far from Morrissey's best work as a lyricist. It's clear he cares deeply, but he isn't at his best writing protest songs (acoustic guitar notwithstanding). You can take it apart and find fault with the logic ("It's death for no reason, and death for no reason is murder," he sings: well, not entirely - if a double-decker bus killed the both of us, to die by your side would most likely be a tragic accident rather than murder) but to do so is to miss the point. You're supposed to be repulsed, so if you're not keen to listen repeatedly, that may simply be evidence of the job being done to perfection: and if the lyrics stick in your mind - for any reason at all - then the song has achieved what it presumably set out to do. So one of the band's least appealing and ostensibly least successful songs actually stands as arguably their single most powerful moment.

You didn't get the sense, as one sometimes does from songwriters, that they were trying to make it sound like they were doing all this to provide escapist or aspirational entertainment - the characters Morrissey wrote about were you, or the folks around you, or the people you thought you might one day be. They looked like a band, they had that indefinable star quality, and there was the strangeness of Marr's music and the ambiguity around Morrissey's in-song personas that meant you were never thinking they were just the same as you - but they were a lot nearer to being people you might know than the rest of the pop world of the mid-1980s. So as great as the music was, and as unique and untouchable as parts of it undoubtedly were, these records felt like they could have sprung from you, your mates, your wider social circle. As Thom Yorke put it, introducing Radiohead's cover version of the opening track from Meat Is Murder during a 2007 webcast, "this is about when we were younger - but we didn't write it." And in Marr's capable hands, each lyric was arrowed into your head and your heart with the most appropriate and individual accompaniment, music reinforcing the lyric's emotions and making the songs impossible to not have some kind of personal reaction to and relationship with. These songs became your friends.

From The Smiths’ “Meat Is Murder” is nauseating to vegetarians and carnivores alike from the Songs We Hate By Bands We Love, in The Onion AV Club, January 28, 2015, by Erik Adams:

When Meat Is Murder was released stateside in 1985, the Smiths-iest of Smiths singles, “How Soon Is Now?”, was included as its centerpiece. Yet even that song’s (brilliant) sad-bastard rallying cry—“I am human and I need to be loved / just like everybody else does”—sounds like an understatement in comparison to “Meat Is Murder”’s sanctimonious refrain: “It’s death for no reason / and death for no reason is murder.” Ethics, the legal definition of murder, and Morrissey’s extra-curricular foot-in-mouth disease aside, “Meat Is Murder” is just a flaccid piece of songwriting, a startling miss from a melodically gifted act whose lyrics can be found wherever undergrads are currently peacocking their taste in music. (No, you raided the Morrissey-Marr songbook for LiveJournal post titles in the summer of 2005.) If its opening passages were abbreviated to a brief experiment in musique concrète, it might be tolerable. As a full track, however, it’s the PETA sidewalk petitioner of the Smiths discography, to be blown by swiftly and with minimal eye contact. If this is the way “Meat Is Murder” has to go about spreading its message, you don’t have a minute for animal rights today—let alone six minutes and 13 seconds of Morrissey splashing red paint on passersby.

MEAT IS MURDER

Live in Spain, 1985

Live Morrissey Solo, 2012

Live Morrissey Solo at Glastonbury, 2011

Live Morrissey Solo in London, 2014

From My Favourite Flbum: Meat Is Murder by the Smiths in The Guardian, October 14, 2011, by Katherine Viner:

From a distance, the Smiths look unlovable, safe, and strangely, considering Morrissey's gladioli-wielding androgyny, overwhelmingly male.

Well, they were none of those things at the time. If you were a teenager in the 80s, perhaps – what are the chances? – misunderstood and alone in a fraying household in a northern city with only books and records to save you, well, you might have fallen for them too.

It's a record full of yearning("I want the one I can't have, and it's driving me mad"), the humiliating obviousness of when you want something ("It's written all over my face"), low expectations ("Please keep me in mind"), the melodrama of youth("This is the final stand of all I am"), and romance ("My faith in love is still devout").
It's also funny. "I'd like to drop my trousers to the Queen," sings Morrissey on Nowhere Fast. "Every sensible child will know what this means. The poor and the needy are selfish and greedy on her terms." It's hard to hear the song without wondering if Morrissey is already, on only his second album, parodying himself: "If the day came when I felt a natural emotion, I'd get such a shock I'd probably jump in the ocean."

Sometimes I wonder if a love affair with the Smiths is an 80s, self-absorbed, teenage thing, something you grow out of – perhaps when the day comes "that you feel a natural emotion". But those witty, thoughtful lyrics; that beautiful guitar; an album containing the great line, "a double bed, and a stalwart lover for sure – these are the riches of the poor". It's a wonderful thing.

Morrissey to Melody Maker, March 16, 1985:

MM: Several of the songs on the new LP seem to have a much more direct and stronger narrative line than on the first LP...

Yes, they do. That's certainly there. I didn't really have any intention of being misunderstood with the words on this LP. A lot of people wrote about the first LP and they said things that were very poetic and very interesting and absolutely inaccurate. So I just felt that on this LP people should really know which hammer I'm trying to nail, as it were.

MM: So to what extent are we to take these songs as autobiography as opposed to social observations?

I think they'll always be autobiography, and when the day arrives where I can't write in that sense or I'm drained, I'll just step down. I won't go on. There's nothing worse, really, than the writer, the singer, who's outlived their usefulness and who've really drained their diaries, as it were. Which I still haven't done. There's nothing more embarrassing and pointless and sad than that. So when I've drained the resources, I will step down, much to the relief, I'm sure, of the British public.

DEBRIS: Do you consider yourself to be an ordinary or an extraordinary person?

I'm probably extraordinary.

IO: Do you think that everyone should listen to The Smiths?

Well, I've not yet discovered a reason why they shouldn't.