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.
