Quote:
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Originally Posted by Antagon
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"The extent to which [
The Smiths] were funny actually diminished their impact: it made Morrissey loveable, but it made the music easy to live with, deprived of its edge. Compare The Smiths with Throwing Muses. Both Morrissey and Kristin Hersh work with and within the flux of adolescence — the vacillation between agoraphobia and claustrophobia, possibility and constraint, the feeling that one's body, and the cultural meanings attributed to it, are a cage.
"Morrissey crystallizes that flux, turns it into couplets, quips, aphorisms, insights, a wisdom we can draw comfort from. Hersh reproduces that fraught flux, her voice
is flux. The Smiths are a synopsis of pain, a resolution — awkwardness and alienation ennobled, given poise. Hersh is the
presence of pain, of falling apart; her voice, the intolerable stress it inflicts on the words, is the sound of inconsolable wrestling with the insoluble. The difference is between commentary and embodying, identification and voyeurism. It’s the reason why The Smiths are more powerful as a pop institution, and why Throwing Muses are more powerful as art."
—From "The Smiths: A Eulogy" by Simon Reynolds,
Melody Maker, September 1987. Debatable, I know, but interesting nonetheless.
