The Record
On its release Southpaw Grammar was an eyebrow raiser with fans and critics alike. Following the success of Vauxhall and I, often considered to be Morrissey's finest solo moment, this was a change in direction.
The nature of the album is certainly different from past Morrissey releases. Musically, the inclusion of two tracks which surpass the ten-minute mark, the near two-and-a-half-minute drum solo courtesy of Spencer Cobrin which opens the track "The Operation" and the sampling of a Shostakovich1 symphony have led some to dub this album as "Morrissey's flirtation with prog-rock". Some critics were impressed by this apparent attempt at progression, while others dismissed the longer tracks as mere self-indulgence. By this album Morrissey had been writing with Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer for almost as long as he had been writing with Johnny Marr by the time of the Smiths' demise. The catchy pop numbers are by no means gone, as proven by the two singles "Dagenham Dave" and "The Boy Racer". There are no ballads on this album.
According to Morrissey himself, the title refers to 'the school of hard knocks', that is, boxing (a southpaw being slang for a boxing left-hander and grammar a reference to British grammar schools). Some have taken this a step further and believe Southpaw Grammar to be a concept album about boxing, or just the violence prevalent in modern society in general.
Another reference to boxing is the original cover photo, a photo of boxer Kenny Lane taken from the April 1963 issue of boxing magazine The Ring.
The lyrics are different from those found in Vauxhall and I, though it could be argued the protagonist's quotation in "Reader Meets Author", "no-one ever sees me when I cry", is auto-biographical, which follows in a similar path to the one left by Vauxhall and I.
Opening track "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" is noteworthy as it is possibly the antithesis of the ideas he put forward in the Smiths song, "The Headmaster Ritual", from their album Meat Is Murder. The theory here is that Morrissey goes from berating the over-zealous administration of discipline, as he saw it, to berating the lack of it. Whether this would be pure hypocrisy or simply a shrewd re-evaluation in light of the abolition of corporal punishment is a moot point.
The critical reception to Southpaw Grammar was mixed. Some fans still regard this as his most exciting work and a brave departure from past success with Vauxhall and I. Q listed it as one of the Top 50 albums of 1995. Some critics gave it bad reviews, but it would be wrong to say there was total condemnation. Indeed, some hailed it as Morrissey's most real, intense and ambitious work yet, others lambasted it as over-orchestrated. The NME were especially damning of their one-time hero, claiming the album was 'a loud mess to sell to America.' It must be borne in mind also that many reviewers commented upon the idiosyncratically English nature of the lyrics, even by Morrissey's standards, so there is no real consensus on which market this album was aimed at.
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Famous quotes containing the word record:
“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this—as in other ways—they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
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—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)