Nobody Loves Us #6: Black-Eyed Susan

Well hello once again, Moz fans!

It's a bit of a time crunch here at the Nobody Loves Us Countdown, but I promise I will get to all 20 songs before Monday's show down at The Orpheum.  Be sure to stay tuned to the Twin Cities blog Newest Industry where I'll post a playlist of all 20 songs in order over the weekend.

Now, however, the countdown marches...er... downward?  Sure, downward.

If you haven't been following along, here's how the list looks so far:

20. One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell
19. Driving Your Girlfriend Home
18. Munich Air Disaster 1958
17. Seasick, Yet Still Docked
16. I Don't Mind If You Forget Me
15. Sister I'm A Poet
14. On The Streets I Ran
13. There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends
12. Why Don't You Find Out For Yourself?
11. Come Back To Camden
10. Disappointed
09. I've Changed My Plea To Guilty
08. Break Up The Family
07. We'll Let You Know

And so here we are at #6:

#6. Black-Eyed Susan (Morrissey/Whyte)



B-Side from the Sunny single

Key Lyrics: "Black-eyed Susan, please remember... We were the first. We were the first."

A true lost classic from Morrissey's wilderness years, "Black-Eyed Susan" finds Morrissey at his most charismatically loathing, drawing a sketch of a woman with "heavy rings on bitten fingers..."

Oddly, or maybe expectedly, Morrissey's concern with his own legacy was reaching a feverish pitch in 1995.  With the success of Vauxhall & I well in the rearview and Southpaw Grammar failing to gain much traction, it's understandable that Mozzer would find himself simultaneously looking both to the sides and to the past.

Both "Black-Eyed Susan" and "Heir Apparent" (another b-side of the same era) ring as the distant echoes of the young man who was all-too-keenly aware of his fanbase in "Rubber Ring."  While their was a certain romanticism to the Morrissey of the late '80's.  "Don't forget the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life..." was all the the singer was asking of his fans.  He knew they'd outgrow the emotions that he never could.

Well, the passing of times and all of its sickening crimes left middle-aged Morrissey in quite a different state.  The titular character of "Black-Eyed Susan" (the "black-eyed referring to makeup rather than a punch up) seems to be a young Smiths fan grown up into her own stardom (and, according to Mozzer, took many cues from his own career to get there).  What we really find with "Black-Eyed Susan" is the portrait of a man mired in his own persecution complex, a complex that would find it's logical, if cliched, end point with tracks like, "You Know I Couldn't Last" and "All You Need Is Me" a decade later.

Over a poppy, enjoyable Alain Whyte tune Mozzer lays bare the traits that he knows all too well.  He sees his celibacy-controversy-baiting self ("What don't you believe in? 'No is always easier than yes!'"), the soapbox assuredness ("You must insist: You are a born again atheist..."), hell, even the blouse-and-flower sporting, fashion-eschewing spotlight monger ("Oh, heavy rings on bitten fingers...") before finally admonishing the starlet's talents entirely with the line, "Oh... Black-Eyed Susan, rest and do nothing, 'cause it's the only thing that you do quite well..."

However, taking into account the bizarre musical excursion of the third verse, it remains tough to tell if Morrissey is genuinely mocking the latest NME craze or if he's merely pointing out what seems obvious only to him.  One last jealousy-laden knife makes his sincerity clear: "Black-Eyed Susan, please remember: We were the first, we were the first..."

Nobody Loves Us #7: We'll Let You Know

Oh, hello.

As you can see, I'm trying to make up lost time this week that way the countdown still wraps up on Friday.  I'm planning a post for Sunday over at Newest Industry that has a downloadable version of this list.  So, onward and upward.

What is the Nobody Loves Us Countdown, you ask?  Well, I'm counting down my 20 favorite Morrissey Non-Singles each day up until his show on October 29th down at The Orpheum.  So far the list looks like this:

20. One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell
19. Driving Your Girlfriend Home
18. Munich Air Disaster 1958
17. Seasick, Yet Still Docked
16. I Don't Mind If You Forget Me
15. Sister I'm A Poet
14. On The Streets I Ran
13. There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends
12. Why Don't You Find Out For Yourself?
11. Come Back To Camden
10. Disappointed
09. I've Changed My Plea To Guilty
08. Break Up The Family

And so here we are at #7.

#7. We'll Let You Know (Morrissey/Whyte)



From the album Your Arsenal

Key Lyrics: "We may seem cold, we may even be the most depressing people you have ever known, at heart, what's left, we sadly know... we are the last truly British people you will ever know..."

As I alluded to back in the "Seasick, Yet Still Docked" post, Your Arsenal is quite clearly Morrissey's "political" album.  Much has been made of the far-right-baiting song "The National Front Disco" and the skinhead imagery Mozzer was prone to using back in the early 90's, but neither of those really tells the whole story.  "We'll Let You Know" is really the centerpiece of both Your Arsenal and his political views of his native England.

"How sad are we?  And how sad have we been? We'll let you know." opens the song as a claim of confusion.  Certainly impassioned confusion, but confusion nonetheless.

Framing a nationalistic song based on sympathy for football hooligans is no easy task.  In and of themselves, football hooligans are the epitome of confusion.  The celebratory violence in which they live shares a clear connection with Morrissey (even if Mozzer's violence is typically more emotional than physical).  When one considers the lineage that can be drawn from Mozzer's Irish roots all the way through the last gasp of "truly  British people" and the lineage that connects grandfather to fathers to sons in the football world.  Both are representative of a rougher, more passionate, some would say more "xenophobic" times.

At the heart of the song, Morrissey is not calling for violence, but rather lamenting the creeping globalization of the early 90's.  As we've seen throughout his career (from "Still Ill" to "Come Back To Camden"), England truly is Morrissey's one true love.  "We'll Let You Know" is not an epitaph as much as a reminder of the fact that the England of yesteryear is quickly falling by the wayside.  Oddly, Morrissey essentially proved his love of the old England by leaving and never returning once the effects of globalization reduced England's "personality" to just another European country.  Admirable, in it's way.

Alain Whyte and Mick Ronson manage to build a superb backdrop for such a sentiment.  Beginning with a romantic and nostalgic acoustic strum, the song takes a gradual, yet poignant left turn in the middle as the sound of stomping crowd and young "lads" come to conquer the strumming.  Succumbing to the noise the band raises their volume (but in a compellingly polite, English way) as Morrissey lays bare his claim of being "the last truly British people you will ever know."  The track concludes with the faint echo of a military flute, an allusion to the idea that the England of Morrissey's youth is now as far bygone as its days as a colony-creating, world superpower.