THE SMITHS: THROUGH BEING COOL
Annie Lennox, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson—if 1983’s music had any message at all, it was: “Be beautiful, be hip, be cool—be like me.” New music has inevitably led up to the same indulgences as old music. Well, that was last year. You can forget that now.
THE SMITHS: THROUGH BEING COOL
Features
by
Merle Ginsberg
Annie Lennox, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson—if 1983’s music had any message at all, it was: “Be beautiful, be hip, be cool—be like me.” New music has inevitably led up to the same indulgences as old music.
Well, that was last year. You can forget that now. It’s history. How personally involved could you get in that music, anyway? Wasn’t it really Annie, Simon and Michael’s make-up and moves that intrigued you? Sounds like creeping ’70s-ism to me. I repeat—last year (if not last decade).
Well, you can relax—the Smiths are about to make the world safe for emotions again. Their message, not unlike. Dylan’s or Joplin’s in their time, is “You don’t have to be cool anymore. In fact, the cooler you are, the less interesting you are.”
“We’re so uncool—we’re the fucking coolest,” is what Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr says on that subject. “In fact, we alienate potential record buyers by not dressing up. We want people to understand what we are; we refuse to alienate the good people who want something real—who are into music for the right reasons.”