‘Half a Person’: how The Smiths perfectly captured aimless adolescence
Of course, as a teenager, it’s easy to feel like no one else has ever experienced the depths of struggle you endure—the weight of the world seemingly so heavy and devastatingly against you. When you stumble upon a song that articulates your emotions, it can feel like a lightning bolt, a defining moment in your life that stays with you forever. For many, The Smiths perfectly captured that teenage turmoil and few songs embody it better than ‘Half a Person’, their 1980s anthem of adolescent angst.
Morrissey’s lyrics, even just from the title, give you an instant snapshot as to the insecurities of our naïve antagonist – the process of quote on quote ‘finding yourself’ can indeed leave you feeling like ‘half a person’, given how confusing trying to make sense of the world for the first time can be. The whole song is quintessential Smiths at their lyrical peak.
In the song, a 16-year-old checks into the Young Women’s Christian Association and makes various observations on the characters around them, both physically and in the mind. Firstly, there’s the woman who writes them a letter, saying: “In the days when you were hopelessly poor/ I just liked you more,” as well as the person whom the character has trailed for six years, hoping to spend “five seconds to spare” with. It’s all dizzyingly disorientating, but in a way only a lost teenager would understand.
But who exactly are all these people? There’s the narrator, for one – of a gender nobody knows, given that they arrive at the YWCA, but Morrissey had counteractively claimed that the song is autobiographical. So, then, the other characters must be in some way real figures from his life. However, it still begs the question of which person his 16-year-old self had been following around for such a significant chunk of time.
Above all, these thoughts will never receive concrete answers – maybe because there aren’t any, and maybe because they are the perfect metaphorical epitome of adolescent aimlessness. Put bluntly, being 16 can vie to the claim of being the worst time of your life – how do you navigate trying to act like an adult while not understanding any of what you’re meant to be doing, never mind the existential questions of your life’s purpose? The Smiths spoke to that pain and gained a legion of adoring fans in the process.
It’s nigh on impossible to romanticise this head spin, but nonetheless, it’s summed up fairly simply but beautifully in the lyric, “16, clumsy and shy/ That’s the story of my life,” because, as we all know, sometimes it felt as though the carnage of those years would never end.
Ultimately, despite all Morrissey’s personal misgivings, in 1987, he did have a knack for turning angst into discernible thoughts and poetic words. ‘Half a Person’ is just that—the product of fever dreams and yearning and not knowing who you are or what you’re doing. Aimlessness is the only appropriate description for it—but in doing so, The Smiths were able to hit the nail on the head.
