The pod people have taken over USSMariner.com

No, make that the i-pod people!

So, take heart, fellow baseball nerds who could care less about this thread – you’re welcome here too.

I was never a huge Smiths fan, but I understood some of the people that were. If you were out in the 80s, or trying to come out, Morrissey was something of a role model (and certainly a better one than the Village People or Boy George). He was a mope, sure, but a witty one {Trudging slowly over wet sand / Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen? C’mon!) And did there live any teenage guy, gay or straight, shy or geeky or just not one of the beautiful people, who couldn’t listen to “How Soon is Now” without relating, at least little bit? A song which, not incidentally, also had a killer riff, one of the most distinctive in the last quarter century. That was all Marr, but he was the impressionistic Jimmy Paige to Morrissey’s glum Robert Plant. The band was what it was because of both of them. (And no, I’m not saying the Smiths are anything close to the same league as Led Zep on any scale, just that sometimes the sum is more than the parts.)

As to the legacy, well, who can really say? Would Radiohead’s “Creep” exist in quite the same way if The Smiths had never existed? Morrissey made a career out of sounding depressed and lamenting his imperfections; in a decade dominated by Miami Vice pastels and candy print spandex, of flocks of haircuts and hair metal, of “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” he was the guy sitting in the corner, missing out on the party, complaining about nothing in particular, and going home alone. So when all of that pop culture got kicked to the curb in 90s, by a genre wrapped in flannel and its own peculiar self-absorbed but cacophonous melancholy, can we hear the faintest echo of what went before? Now, I don’t want to overstate that — I was there, some of those Bands Who Could Be Your Life were people I hung out with at the time, and I know they weren’t sitting around listening obsessively to “Suedehead” and “Meat is Murder.” But they got where he was coming from, some more than others, and it wasn’t a place where you partied all the time. Morrissey (along with Ian Curtis and a few others) made it safe (again) for guys to sing about their own failings and failures in songs that weren’t blues or country. For somebody like Cobain, that may have mattered. (It’s probably worth mentioning that Charles Cross, in “Heavier than Heaven,” says that when Nirvana was pissed off because they were told to perform “Smells Like Team Spirit” for Top of the Pops Cobain decided to sing it “in a slowed-down, almost Vegas-like lounge version; he was attempting, he later claimed, to sound like Morrissey.”)

Chilton post-Replacements? You mean Chilton post-Big Star or…? I think you’re confused.

I’m not a huge Smiths fan but I feel compelled to add to the posts above that da Smithz had a real gift for melody. I don’t know how you “measure these things” either, of course. But their perverse sensibility and nuance of mood are expressed melodically in a way most pop bands — especially most white-boy-w/-guitar-bands — don’t bother with. Most of the time the harmony determines the melody, and to my ear in the Smiths canon melody is determining the harmony. This characteristic is not intrinsically “good,” but it is interesting, or anyway unusual.

Me too. The pod people have taken over USSMariner.com and turned everyone into musical aesthetes.

Neil Young – Without Rings
The Clash – Straight to Hell
Lou Reed – Endless Cycle
Husker Du – Too Far Down
Johny Cash – Sea of Heartbreak
Wilco – I am Trying to Break Your Heart (for Felix starts)
Leonard Choen – I was Never Any Good (for Cairo at bats)
Dimmer – I Believe You are a Star (for Bloomquist at bats)
David Kilgour – I am Going to Get Better (for Silva starts)
Johny Cash – I Hung My head (for Sexson at bats)