(I wrote this a few years ago, and I'm posting it here at the request of a few people who wanted to read it. A word of warning though, it's a long read.)
Minneapolis. Manchester. Two cold, grey, northern, working-class cities, half a world away from each other, separated by a common language...
I have always understood what it means to be Northern. I am intimately acquainted with the cold, the lowly angle of the sunlight in the southern sky in winter, the long daylight hours in summer, and the sheer remoteness, whether real or imagined. As a child growing up in northern Washington State, the vast expanse of the Canadian tundra was a mere stones-throw away from our farm.
We actually received Canadian television stations via "rabbit-ears" better than those coming from Seattle to the south. The same thing applied to radio. I can remember in 1980 hearing early British post-punk and new-wave bands broadcasting from stations in Vancouver, BC a good 2-3 months before the Seattle stations caught on and lamely proclaimed "the latest thing from England!"
I was tuned into one of these Vancouver stations in early 1984, sitting in the front seat of my dad's avocado green Dodge Dart in the parking lot of Thrifty Foods, when I heard a song lyric that would change my world forever:
"I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving,
England is mine - it owes me a living."
The music was urgent and bouyant, new and yet somehow familiar, but it was the tone and the delivery of the singer that grabbed me. He wasn't a great singer as such, but I knew immediately that he was an important singer. I remember almost blushing at the nerve: Who did this person think he was? And just who was he that England, or anyone else for that matter, owed him anything?
He was, of course, Morrissey, and his band was The Smiths, and over the course of the next four years they did everything in their power to answer that question for me.
Growing up in Stanwood, WA meant cultured society (not to mention the nearest decent record store) lay either to the north or to the south. Finding records by The Smiths meant, more often than not, an hour-plus drive into Seattle.
Fortunately for me, there was Nick Tanner. One year my senior, he was an accomplished musician and had played in several bands, a fact that always impressed me. He also had a huge record collection and a car. In a very real sense, it was Nick who first opened up the world to me. He had everything by The Smiths and made incredible mix tapes of all their albums and even their rarest b-sides and BBC sessions for me.
Often on Friday nights I would tell my parents I was going to the movies and I would ride with Nick into Seattle, dancing until dawn at ultra-cool underage clubs like The Monastery or Skoochies or City Beat. I would blissfully creep into the house at first light, reeking of clove cigarettes with "Master And Servant" by Depeche Mode still ringing in my head. My devoutly Christian parents despised him.
It was also through Nick that I was introduced to the music of another artist whose affect and long-lasting influence on me was as equally profound and immediate as Morrissey's. That artist was Prince.
At first glance, the obvious incongruity of these two artists would seem to preclude the existence of any form of common ground, let alone similarity. But for me, in those dreary days of the early 1980's, life simply could not have existed without either of them.
Yin cannot exist without Yang.
I, like many others of my generation, first became aware of Prince in the period of time before he became the scourge of Tipper Gore. "Controversy" had happened, "1999" was here, and "Purple Rain" was but a soft-and-wet dream. It was in this climate that The Purple One dropped the dance-floor equivalent of an f-bomb. It's name was "Erotic City".
"We can funk until the dawn,
Making love til cherry's gone.
Erotic City can't u see,
Thoughts of pretty u and me."
Clearly the lines had been drawn.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, I'm always amazed at just how incredibly sexless the early 1980's were. The hedonistic excesses of the 1970's were behind us, and there, in its wake, waiting in the wings, was Ronald Reagan, crack addiction and AIDS. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, nothing was sexy anymore. Fashion and music both became equally cold, clinical, asymmetrical, and plastic. The mood had quickly changed, and the party was definitely over. We were operating in hostile territory.
And yet, here they were, in the midst of all this, in all their resplendent glory:
Morrissey & Prince. The Damp One and The Wet One.
Where Morrissey abstained, Prince indulged. A lot. And while on the surface it appears that they couldn't have been any more different from each other, their underlying plea remained one in the same: Reject what is in front of you, reclaim your own sense of power and be who you are without shame or apology. Granted, this wasn't particularly anything new, as the punk movement had loudly proclaimed this kind of battle cry years before. But no one had ever proclaimed it quite like this.
"I'm spellbound but a woman divides,
And the hills are alive with celibate cries.
But you know where you came from,
You know where you're going,
And you know where you belong.
You said I was ill and you were not wrong."
Never before had there been a pop star who so shamelessly and defiantly foisted his own sexlessness onto the public. There simply was no precedent, and people laughed openly at the very idea of Morrissey. His avowed celibacy was viewed as yet another tired gimmick by the masses, and to be fair, looking back, I can certainly see their point of view. But it was the sheer power of his presence that made it so much more than that for me.
The pendulum from which Prince tea-bagged, however, swung far and away to the opposite end of this spectrum. While Morrissey indifferently denounced sex, Prince was hellbent on it. It oozed from his pores. He was sex incarnate. He was the little purple satyr in high heels doing scissor-kicks whilst writhing on satin sheets.
"My sister never made love to anyone else but me,
She's the reason for my, uh, sexuality.
She showed me where it's supposed to go,
A blow job doesn't mean blow.
Incest is everything it's said to be."
At a time when sex was seen as dangerous and ugly, if not downright deadly, Prince spun delicately obscene pirouettes on the tip of this very issue, gloriously wrapping himself in every aspect of sex and sexuality. He came here to fuck, and he didn't give a fuck.
"Am I black or white?
Am I straight or gay?"
Controversy indeed. This was the man who, at a diminutive 5'2", famously paraded on stage in support of the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1981, dressed in bikini briefs and thigh-high stiletto boots in front of tens of thousands of people. Of course, he was booed off the stage almost immediately and pelted with anything people could throw at him. Perhaps the world wasn't quite ready for this.
Oh, but I was. Not only was I ready for it, I needed it. The problem for me was that, as a result, I found myself walking that tightrope of duality where most other people seemed to fall to one side or the other. I had a pompadour and I wore parachute pants. Contradictory, yes, but to me it made perfect sense.
All flowery notions of image and artifice aside, Morrissey and Prince were also both Northern, as I was. Reared in the same type of dank working-class environs where the only future available to you was that which you could make for yourself, if at all. The government didn't care about you, unemployment was rampant, and the consistently foul weather precluded any delusions of California dreaming.
All you could do was sit in your bedroom and craft your art, honing your manifesto to razor-sharpness and waiting for that moment when you could finally unleash it onto the world. Prince hermetically and obsessively composed music in the basement of the house where he lived with his childhood friend and future bandmate Andre Cymone and his family. Morrissey shut himself away in a darkened bedroom and scribbled reams of prose, dreaming always of the one he couldn't have.
They came from broken homes, irrevocably damaged by the trauma of divorce. It is no wonder then, that their subsequent world view that reflected in their work was that of complete and utter insularity: I have no one but me.
However, these bleak prospects were seemingly offset by the fact that they both came of age in cities with flourishing independent music scenes. Here, at last, was their chance, perhaps their only chance. Just as Seattle would be for me a decade later, Minneapolis and Manchester each became centers of the music world for a time, and both Morrissey and Prince each held court as their respective hometown rulers, all the while remaining completely untouchable islands unto themselves. They gave themselves freely to the world, but you still couldn't have them.
Another key factor for me was the fact that they both were (and still are) staunch vegetarians in a world where the burger was king. Prince may have been inspired by his own uniquely bizarre spiritual aspirations, but for Morrissey, it was far more basic than that.
He called it murder.
As a child of a farmer, I saw this daily. We raised cattle for beef and pigs for pork, and I had firsthand knowledge of the cruel ways in which these animals were treated, and ultimately slaughtered. And when The Smiths released their album "Meat Is Murder" in 1985, it was as if Morrissey had reached through the ether and pleaded to my very soul.
I remember vividly to this day the first time I heard the title track, with its haunting opening sound effects of terrified cows over the buzz of a meat saw. This was a sound I would hear lying in bed at night, emanating from our barn in back of our house, and here it was coming through my speakers into my room from someone who lived thousands of miles away and knew nothing about me. The message was clear and horrifically personal.
"Heifer whines could be human cries."
Of course, as with most of their proclamations, people simply laughed at them. They just didn't get it, but I did. And I still do. It seemed at the time that all everyone else wanted to do was to forget about the real world and dance with ridiculous abandon to Madonna and Duran Duran. That's all well and good, and absurd escapism has its place, surely, but when death and destruction are all around you, it seems silly to be found rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It was as clear to me then as it is today.
Prince showed me how things should have been. Morrissey showed me how things were.
Fast forward to the 21st Century: Morrissey, Prince and I all now live in California.
We don't take tea together, and we have never, to my knowledge, crossed paths at the beach. Morrissey is no longer celibate, Prince no longer makes love til cherry's gone, and my receding hairline long ago concluded my ability to produce a respectable pompadour. And I no longer wear parachute pants.
What we have retained after all these years, however, having long ago left behind the cold, dark homes that bore us, is that unifying thread that tied us together from the start. As Morrissey once famously quipped, "When you're Northern, you're Northern forever."
From his lofty perch atop the sun-drenched Hollywood Hills in a mansion built by Clark Gable, I can still see Morrissey curled up in his bedroom, the curtains drawn, scribbling away ferociously, railing against everyone and everything he sees as unjust and hateful. While across town, sequestered away in his palatial Los Angeles spread, I am quite confident that at this very moment, Prince is holed up in his basement, crafting his next magnum opus all by himself.
And here I remain, stretched out and waiting, lying in awe on the bedroom floor at the fact that I, now middle-aged, still find solace as I commune with my fellow lonely Northern souls. And that's all this tremulous heart requires.
