Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before

One testament to my affection for the Smiths is the fact that I desperately wanted to hate them. My girlfriend in high school sung their praises, but we weren’t totally in sync in the music department. I was turned off by what I saw as the pretentiousness of Morrissey, the over-the-top anglophilia, and the preening gay porn stars on their record covers. Once I gave a dubbed cassette of The Queen Is Dead a good listen at the insistence of my sister in the eleventh grade, I could no longer deny their brilliance. Not just their brilliance, but my attraction to their ability to give voice to the teenage alienation that I was feeling.

I especially remember that cassette getting heavy rotation on our cross-country move to New Mexico in my mom’s mini-van.

IMHO, The Smiths have certainly the most perfect catalog of any British band, and possibly any band globally. Although their dissolution gets short shrift in Morrissey’s biography, on a good day, I want to believe it happened at just the right time so that we never saw their powers decline.

In the video for “Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before,” Morrissey and a crew of style-alikes bike around his working-class hometown of Manchester. Never shy about self-promotion, Morssissey has his gang wearing the band’s t-shirts.

The Smiths - Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before (YouTube)