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" And so, with little fanfare, begins this 54th revolution around an indifferent, dreaded sun for perhaps the man for our times: one Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey. One of the more naggingly persistent cultural figures bestriding a decades-long run of disposability, the doggedness of the Poet Laureate of Dissatisfaction and Woe probably shouldn&amp;#039;t be surprising. The one time and forever frontman of The Smiths has sung our contradictions, our contained multitudes, back to us for near thirty years now, and we do not like what we have seen reflected: our stymied lusts, our mercurial peccadillos, our heroic puniness, but we do not like it in such a way that its offing also pleases us. It&amp;#039;s appropriate that his last worthwhile effort, in 2009, was titled Years of Refusal. Decades, perhaps, may have been a more accurate description. While you&amp;#039;ll find all manner of reluctant celebration of this unhappiest of birthdays in the more musical-minded corners of the Internet today, many of them will focus on the songwriter&amp;#039;s greatest moments. This seems a misreading of the meaning of the man and his work. When I interviewed him a few months back, I tried to get him to admit to his own experience of necessarily pitiful and obvious humanity, but, forever imprisoned in the character of his own devising, he refused the bait. He was not just another human being, he protested. Beloved musicians, he said, never are, &amp;quot;however much you try to wish that they are.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Do you think Patti Smith recorded Horses whilst also working the cash register at Macy&amp;#039;s?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;Do you think the New York Dolls were otherwise destined to clean windows for a living? Do you think David Bowie yearned to sell vacuum cleaners, yet filled in the wrong job application by mistake? No. All of these people are very special, and it&amp;#039;s only a weightless sense of jealousy that makes you want to believe that they&amp;#039;re frauds.&amp;quot; Here we parted ways with our favorite singer, who like so many artists before him fails to understand, or at least fails to admit to, the essential truths of his own work. Whereas Morrissey makes us consider our own humanity by expressing his experiences of such, it seemed more appropriate today to celebrate not his triumphs, his great works, but rather his middling ones; the overlooked; the lesser-known; the songs that, instead of lifting us up together in our collective devotion to the songs themselves, rather remind us that it&amp;#039;s often the unexceptional moments that tell us who we, and, yes, even our great artists, actually are. And so: &amp;quot;One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell&amp;quot;      Morrissey has been Morrissey for longer than The Smiths were The Smiths, an irony that feels appropriate in its echoes of his recurring motifs of social banishment. And while The Smiths released an almost unprecedented string of perfect albums for a brief period of time, his best work has come from in his solo years. You won&amp;#039;t find many fans who&amp;#039;ll champion this fact, however \u2014 most clamoring for a The Smiths reunion in futility (appropriate, since this should never, ever happen). As this standout \u2014 perhaps his last great song (ever?) \u2014 from Years of Refusal reminds us, one day goodbye will, indeed, be farewell. While this track is typically delivered live in an exultant flourish of horns that elevate the specificity of the context, the theme here remains localized, small devastation: &amp;quot;You will never see the one you love again.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s everything to you, but it&amp;#039;s nothing to anyone else. This is the place where we all live. &amp;quot;You Have Killed Me&amp;quot;      Another example of the elevation, and the romanticization of the simple, the small, and the ordinary. From 2006, this references Pier Paolo Pasolini&amp;#039;s 1961 film Accattone, about the life of impoverished prostitutes in Rome. The cultural polymath Pasolini was notable for using civilians in acting roles, demystifying the role of the artist. The song also references Luchino Visconti, another neorealist Italian director. The musical delivery is one of beauty and grandeur, not to mention characteristic in its melodramatic overstatement, but the references here too remind us of the banality of the everyday. &amp;quot;Let Me Kiss You&amp;quot;      Like the above mentioned two, this 2004 single is another that will be familiar to devoted fans from his recent half-decade of touring, but remains largely unknown to the casual Morrissey or Smiths fan. It&amp;#039;s a shame, because it&amp;#039;s an intimate, insular expression of an anticipatory longing that nearly all of us can relate to. Although a slight three and a half minutes \u2014 without much of anything remarkable to speak of musically: a few odd shimmering chord swipes here, a nagging drum shuffle, and not a particularly solid vocal take for that matter \u2014 it&amp;#039;s nonetheless devastating as it captures one of the more inevitable outcomes of love, particularly of the aged variety. It&amp;#039;s the realization that the person you&amp;#039;re enamored with may not share your feelings, but, instead of turning away from you, they embrace you anyway, and you feel all the worse for it, because you register their giving way. &amp;quot;So you open your eyes, and you see someone you physically despise. Let me kiss you.&amp;quot; When all is said and done, it&amp;#039;s this feeling of dying alone, of not having someone who, if we can&amp;#039;t necessarily love them ourselves, at least they&amp;#039;ll hold up their end of the bargain, because the alternative to romantic acquiescence is dying alone. &amp;quot;Nobody Loves Us&amp;quot;      Like many of Morrissey&amp;#039;s incongruently happy-seeming songs, this B-side collected on 1998&amp;#039;s My Early Burglary Years celebrates the alienation and isolation at the heart of his fandom. It&amp;#039;s a love song to the fans, who in interviews he&amp;#039;s proclaimed himself different than, but in song he embraces. Here he adopts the fan&amp;#039;s persona: &amp;quot;Sing us our favorite song, nobody loves us. Born-again atheists, practicing troublemakers. Make us our favorite jam, nobody loves us. Useless and shiftless and jobless, but we&amp;#039;re all yours.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s the rare B-side that feels like it should have been a single \u2014 but that makes sense in a perverse, Mozzian outlook, doesn&amp;#039;t it: The best are overlooked, shuffled aside. He&amp;#039;s talking about the fans, but he may well have been talking about his own songs as well. No matter. &amp;quot;Nobody loves us,&amp;quot; he sings, &amp;quot;but we tend to please ourselves.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Ordinary Boys&amp;quot;      Never mind not making it into the larger Morrissey canon among fans, this 1998 song has been cast aside by Morrissey himself, being cut from the 2012 reissue of Viva Hate, on which it first appeared, which makes it the Morrissey of Morrissey songs. It&amp;#039;s a spectacularly baffling decision, given that it&amp;#039;s a beautiful vocal take, and that it sets up the entire thesis on which a PhD in Disaffected Studies on which the typical fans&amp;#039; obsession is usually argued. It&amp;#039;s a dagger through the heart of the mediocre for the alienated soul. &amp;quot;Ordinary boys, happy going nowhere, just around here in their rattling cars. Ordinary girls, never seeing further, than the cold, small streets that trap them.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sister I&amp;#039;m A Poet&amp;quot;      This testament to the wandering spirit is forever the overshadowed step-child to &amp;#039;98&amp;#039;s massive hit &amp;quot;Every Day Is Like Sunday&amp;quot; for which it first appeared as a B-side. But the lyrics here stand in contrast to the rather cookie-cutter rockabilly musical format. &amp;quot;Along this way outside the prison gates, I love the romance of crime,&amp;quot; he sings, in typically grandiloquent sweeping, cityscape detail style, before undercutting it. &amp;quot;And I wonder does anybody feel the same way I do, and is evil something you are, or something you do?&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s perhaps the most quintessentially Morrissey lyric of all time \u2014 which is to say, the most quintessentially human lyric. None of us ever really learn the answer, but we&amp;#039;ll go on asking. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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