| Among these is “Nobody
Loves Us,” a song which I love with all my heart and soul, and
whose presence on My Early Burglary Years is itself reason
enough for those of you who still doubt Morrissey to go ahead and
start here. (This is heresy, by the way, and I know it, but why not?
If you learn to like it, you’ll end up getting all the Smiths
albums eventually anyway; I can’t imagine anybody but the most
willing of potential converts, though, getting cozy with Meat is
Murder in this day and age, at least not without some preliminary
warm-ups: which is what I’m suggesting, after all.) “Nobody
Loves Us” is a b-side of the “Dagenham Dave” single,
whose a-side is taken from the uneven 1995 solo album Southpaw
Grammar. (Plenty of people would say that even “uneven”
is unjustly generous to that particular record, but the LPTJ
webmonster lies squarely in the Southpaw Grammar Defenders’
camp, so we’ll just let it be.) If you’re already a Morrissey
fan who knows this song, then you know what my problem is right now:
this is the only song I feel like talking about, but what is there
to say about it? Like the best English songs, it’s hermetic;
you can’t peel any one part of it away, you can’t break
it down to its constituent parts, you can’t isolate the moment
at which the whole thing comes together. All you can do is listen
as Morrissey watches one of his typically ace crew of sidemen rip
through an angry weasel in a gunnysack of a pop song. |