Everyday Is Like Sunday-Morrissey
#365Songs: May 26th
Morrisey is not the person you’d want to survive an apocalypse alongside, a man devoid of the sort of humanity and compassion required to be a decent human being. But damn, he’s a hell of an artist, a lyricist who made millions of angsty, lonely fans feel seen. Perhaps he was always a Nazi Fascist prick, and we just didn’t become aware of it until his post-Smiths years. For a songwriter known for seeing and voicing the marginalized, he certainly doesn’t deliver on the role of ally. For the past few decades, he’s seemingly been on the wrong side of every issue — from Brexit and immigration to the MeToo movement.
Billy Bragg told the Guardian a few years ago, “It stinks. They were the greatest band of my generation, with the greatest guitar player and the greatest lyricist. I think Johnny Marr was a constraint on him… back then he had to fit into the idea of the Smiths. But now he’s betraying those fans, betraying his legacy and empowering the very people Smiths fans were brought into being to oppose. He’s become the Oswald Mosley of pop.”
Basically, he’s a racist prick with too much talent who, when his worst traits are restrained by superior humans, can make millions of us feel things he clearly can’t feel himself. The Smiths were profound, the runner-up to The Cure in their rivalry for best band of the ’80s. On one hand, it’s astounding the catalog they compiled in just over five years, and now that we’ve gotten to know Morrisey more it’s even more impressive they accomplished anything at all.
Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down
Armageddon, come Armageddon
Come, Armageddon, come
Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey
Producer Stephen Street sent The Smiths the melody for Everyday Is Like Sunday, but the band had already broken up. It soon showed up on Morrisey’s debut perfectly-titled solo album, Viva Hate. The song was inspired by Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, On the Beach, in which a group of random people wait around for a nuclear radiation cloud to float across the ocean and kill them all. Not the best way to die in a nuclear apocalypse, but also not the worst — as long as Morissey ain’t fucking there.
Hide on the promenade, etch a postcard
“How I dearly wish I was not here”
In the seaside town
That they forgot to bomb
Come, come, come, nuclear bomb
Everyday is like Sunday
I think about this a lot, when I’m walking onto a plane — memories of the show Lost, that scenario in which it absolutely matters who else is doomed alongside you. Who are you near when the world is ending, who’s got your back, who’s your nemesis, and who’s THAT FUCKING GUY? Well, in the music world, THAT FUCKING guy is absolutely Morrissey, and nobody needs him on the doomed plane, during the impending nuclear holocaust, or any of the other countless ways the world threatens to end.
Everyday is silent and grey
Trudging back over pebbles and sand
And a strange dust lands on your hands
And on your face
On your face
On your face
On your face
Everyday is like Sunday
“Win yourself a cheap tray”
Share some greased tea with me
Everyday is silent and grey
~
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