"The Smiths were only around for five years in the mid-eighties, but to this day the sentiment their music evokes is strong."

From 2016:

Meat Is Murder: Morrissey at The Palace, 09/20/2016.

Check out the set list, and join me in appreciating a man who genuinely merits the description of icon. It was money very well spent for us.

From 2013:

Johnny Marr.

The Smiths and anti-Thatcherism are so closely intertwined that even this Hoosier hick knows about it. On the other hand, I imagine few of today's know-nothing Republicans remember Maggie, anyway. They were too busy drooling over the staged blather of a trained actor, Ronnie Raygun.

And also from 2013,the video:

Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths (The Culture Show on BBC2; May, 2013)

It's 30 years since Manchester four-piece The Smiths changed the face of British pop with their debut single Hand In Glove. In this half-hour Culture Show special, fellow Mancunian and lifelong fan Tim Samuels sets out to find out why The Smiths have such a special place in the hearts of a generation of Brits. The Smiths were only around for five years in the mid-eighties, but to this day the sentiment their music evokes is strong. Samuels pays visits to a variety of dedicated fans including fashion designer Wayne Hemingway, poet Simon Armitage, Labour MP Kerry McCarthy and Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher to analyse the look, the lyrics, the issues and the riffs that made The Smiths Britain's first, and arguably best ever, indie rock band.

Meat Is Murder: Morrissey at The Palace, 09/20/2016.

I'm gobsmacked at the recognition that it's been 12 years since the only other time I've seen Morrissey perform, also in Louisville, and also at The Palace.

How could this be?

Highly influential, Morrissey is widely credited as being a seminal figure in the emergence of indie rock and Britpop. He has been acclaimed as one of the greatest lyricists in British history, with his lyrics having become the subject of academic study. He has courted controversy with his forthright opinions – endorsing vegetarianism and animal rights, condemning royalty and prominent politicians, and questioning issues of British national and cultural identity.

Last night's show was brilliant, and short of lapsing into a formal review, I'll note only that very few of Morrissey's musical generation (he's 57) seem to have put as much thought into the dynamics of pure performance. Rock and vaudeville are joined, with huge dollops of agitprop courtesy of the video screen. To say the results are unique is to be guilty of understatement.

Check out the set list, and join me in appreciating a man who genuinely merits the description of icon. It was money very well spent for us.

Roger's Year in Music 2014: World Peace Is None of Your Business, by Morrissey.

Morrissey pops up quite often hereabouts.

Morrissey croons my Thanksgiving message.

Nine Morrissey albums, all in a row.

Listening to Morrissey with red wine -- again. Now for the Mozz book.

In my estimation, the new album is good, not great, and when you're a "lifer" of a fan, that's perfectly acceptable. For those with a greater interest in objectivity, there's Ben Ratliff's review at the New York Times: Revisiting His Arsenal of Misanthropy.

It wasn’t surprising that “Autobiography,” when published first in Britain, sold very well: His fans are passionate lifers, their consciousness changed by early exposure to his, just as his was changed by early exposure to Patti Smith’s and Oscar Wilde’s. It also wasn’t surprising that the book contained some powerful writing. That is because Morrissey, now 55, is a writer before anything else, and of a particular kind. His major achievement has been a strong and complicated authorial voice: self-effacing and hyper-stylized, large souled and petty, fixated both on bottom-line winning and the temporal long game of literature, in which ancient minds can speak to the future, and vice versa.

Morrissey croons my Thanksgiving message.

Actually, it isn't even necessary to "let me in" as a member or anything gauche like that, but otherwise ... I've dedicated my career in polemics to the proposition that the squeaky wheel gets the grease -- and if it doesn't, it squeaks EVEN LOUDER.

The more you ignore me, the closer and louder I get.

Nine Morrissey albums, all in a row.

A great personal favorite.

Morrissey, whose autobiography was released in 2013, has a gift for being in the news.

Morrissey: 'Eating animals is just the same as paedophilia, rape and murder', by Mikey Smith at the Daily Mirror

"I see no difference between eating animals and paedophilia," he told True-To-You.net. "They are both rape, violence, murder. If I'm introduced to anyone who eats beings, I walk away."

Over the weekend, while the rest of you were wasting time with football and milk- and bread-fueled fear of the white death, I listened to all nine Morrissey solo albums comprising original material. I wasn't sure it could be done without drinking, but happily, it has.

1988 Viva Hate
1991 Kill Uncle
1992 Your Arsenal
1994 Vauxhall and I
1995 Southpaw Grammar
1997 Maladjusted
2004 You Are the Quarry
2006 Ringleader of the Tormentors
2009 Years of Refusal

This odyssey finds my opinions unchanged. Viva Hate and Your Arsenal remain my favorites, with You Are the Quarry and Vauxhall and I close behind. Surely Morrissey ranks as one of the finer lyricists in rock history. Unfortunately, I'll never be able to meet him.

I eat meat. Well, we can't have it all.

Listening to Morrissey with red wine -- again. Now for the Mozz book.

When I posted this photo on Facebook a couple weeks back and suggested that Nadia had ignored my warnings and insisted on listening to Morrissey while drinking red wine, it got rave reviews.

It's been a good year for aging Smiths fans. First, an excellent solo album by Johnny Marr. Now, a Mozz autobiography in time for the holidaze.

Autobiography by Morrissey – review, by Terry Eagleton (Guardian)

The celebrated literary critic judges Mozzer's book to be superb: he is so devastatingly articulate he could win the Booker

... Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is.

The question now has an answer.

Previously at NAC: The 8th One Southern Indiana Kingpin for a Week is right here.

... She's tanned, rested and ready, and Margaret Thatcher is stepping away from retirement to lend some stiff upper lip to 1Si's ongoing advocacy of taxing Indiana's workers to get to their jobs, via bridge tolls and unnecessary, obsolete-before-being-built ORBP infrastructure. It's called One Southern Indiana Right to Pay to Work (except union dues, of course), and the exurban enrichment society is counting on Maggie to keep them damned pergessives quiet ... well, for a week at least.