The best song on ‘Meat Is Murder’, according to Johnny Marr
To address the elephant in the room, what Morrissey became after his heyday in The Smiths is truly baffling. It stings to see someone so fuelled by bile and hatred today, when barely two decades before his behaviour became unignorable, he was responsible for some of the most empathetic and enriching music of the 1980s.
Cards on the table, I don’t even speak as someone with a particularly complicated relationship with his music. To me, his singing has been as pleasant to my ears as a dying cow’s bowel movements, and his lyrics aren’t much better. Art speaks for itself, however. Enough people I know have had their own lives enriched by the work of The Smiths that I can’t really act like a generation of indie rock fans are all wrong in the head, as much as I’d like that to be true.
Especially when they have songs in their back catalogue like ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, the side-one closing track of their second album, Meat Is Murder, that is utterly undeniable. A tender, devastating ode to the way that those suffering aren’t even allowed basic dignity from the people in their lives. The unwitting, ignorant bullies who feel that the emotional pain of others is a good reason to mock them and, as Moz puts it, “Kick them when they’re down.”
As the man’s solo career shows, any moment of genius in The Smiths wasn’t the work of Morrissey alone, though. Johnny Marr’s typically incredible guitar work is as warm and emotional as any of the singer’s wordsmithery, from the sweeping acoustic guitar that carries the song to the glistening, almost angelic electric guitar line the song closes with.
So, why do The Smiths love this song so much?
Ever since its release, everyone involved with the band has talked up ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ as one of their high points and arguably the best track from Meat Is Murder. In an interview with Uncut, Marr talked about writing the guitar line almost as if it were a work of divine inspiration, that he picked up a guitar and just let it flow through him. And listening to the record, it does have that effortless beauty to it.
In the interview, he said the song “just fell through the roof. It was one of those times when the feeling just falls down on you from the ceiling somewhere, and it almost plays itself”. In a separate interview with Record Collector, he called the song his favourite from their second album and remarked that, in particular, “I think Morrissey is incredible on that, the end is brilliant”.
My biases aside, it’s definitely a powerful, committed vocal, one that matches deeply felt lyrics, the likes of which made Morrissey such a hero to outsiders everywhere. With that in mind, it’s a little disappointing to read him talk about what inspired them. In an interview with Melody Maker, he remarked, “When I wrote the words for that, I was just so completely tired of all the same old journalistic questions… trying to drag me down and prove that I was a complete fake.”
Such a powerful song, one with such moving, meaningful lyrics that have comforted and supported people through the worst periods of their lives, as it turns out, was inspired by petulant music industry score-settling. Not the most disappointing thing about ‘Old Steve’ these days—far from it—but the signs that he wasn’t all that people saw him to be were there from the start.
