The sheer formality
of it, and the ease with which that formality gets presented, is itself
charming & impressive enough. And what does our Mozz sing about
over the song’s strolling verses, climbing bridges, and quite
slowly-resolving choruses? Spoiled brats, that’s what. And in
the first person, if you please, because Morrissey has never been
much on writing in any person other than the first. That he uses the
first plural here is either uncharacteristically democratic or appallingly
egocentric: he may well be using the royal “we” when he
says, at the song’s conclusion
make us our favorite jam
nobody loves us
useless and shiftless and job-less
but we’re all yours
--this after some thirty-plus lines of a narrator whose singular abiding
interest is how he’ll be feted when he’s at home in his
native environs. “Sing us our favorite song: nobody loves us,”
he says, voice soaring, hitting the vibrato that he used to only reach
for back in the early days of the Smiths. “All in all, imagine
this: nobody loves us.” And, in the song’s most telling
line for the reader who’d try to parse the whole thing and force
a little distance between the impossibly intimate Voice of Mozz and
the love-him/hate-him voice of his narrator, this: “Call us home,
make our tea: nobody loves us.” |