Customer Reviews

The Smiths' Meat Is Murder (Thirty Three and a Third series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First off, let's state the obvious: This is not a work of music criticism. If you want to know about what The Smiths were doing when they recorded MIM, who was in the studio when, what Andy Rourke was drinking etc, then you need to look elsewhere. If on the other hand, you want to know (or be reminded of) what it was like to be a teenager when this extraordinary band were at the height of their powers, then this is a darn good place to start.

Pernice (and his publishers) claim that this book is a work of fiction. But, like the best fiction, there's a whole lot of truth in here. It's the story of a few months in the life of a Boston based teenager - we never know his name - in 1985, the year MIM came out. And the story is full of humor, sadness, death, bitterness, poignancy, all of that intense adolescent stuff. For such a short book (its only just more than a hundred pages long), there are some incredibly vivid characters, and scenes that I can't get out of my head.

Naturally, I read this book while blasting MIM on my headphones. It takes about 2 hours to read. Please, please, if you buy this book, read it like that. The whole experience is like a portal to another time, an era that is probably best forgotten. Thank God The Smiths were there to help me get through it. And thanks to Mr Pernice for bringing it all back.

In the mid-1980's music collecting was a hard job. There was no internet, of course, and the radio couldn't be depended on and music television was lame. If you weren't into Billy Ocean or Billy Joel then you had no environment to lean on. Smiths fans in the U.S. all had this in common, we all had to search high and low for an obscure release here and there, and then quickly network with like-minded friends and swap. Joe Pernice captures and chronicles the plight and obsession we all made part of our lives back then. This book is highly entertaining for it's rich and accurate nostalgia for those days, which, in hindsight, were just better. I grew up on the west coast at the same time Joe Pernice was on the east coast and it's uncanny how similar his and my experiences with this band were. It leads me to believe that there was a universal, or at least national, desperation. Smiths-fans from Europe may not understand completely how rare The Smiths and bands like them were to us back then, and how hard (and in the end, sweet) it was to acquire one album or the next. I still count my 45RPM of Sandie Shaw with The Smiths as one of my most prized possessions. And I like how Mr. Pernice picked Meat Is Murder to focus on, perhaps because he was at the right age to attribute so many memories to it (though, he calls this little book a work of fiction - I don't believe him!). I recommend this book to Smiths fans who want to relive how exciting it was to be their fan back then, and I guarantee you will have Meat Is Murder on the turntable for as long as it takes you to read it, as well as it swimming through your head endlessly.

Although I agree with other reviewers who comment that the connection between this book and The Smiths' album is as thin as smoke, I was prepared to enjoy a well-written story just the same. Unfortunately, I finished this wisp of a memoir wishing I had purchased the Thirty-Three and a Third title about Love's "Forever Changes" instead. Although I appreciated Joe Pernice's occasionally clever metaphors, these were too few and far between, leaving us instead with the musings of the book's exasperated protagonist, a teenage male infatuated with girls, alcohol, and new wave music. Of course, even as ordinary a topic as that can inspire brilliant and funny writing. But it didn't here. At least not for me, as I found Pernice's protagonist niether interesting nor sympathetic. Worse, the book's exaggeration-as-a-primary-comedy-device (however accurate to the speech patterns of perhaps many, many average seventeen year-olds) is as unfunny as that Dave Barry essay. (You know, the one he's recycled for the past decade and a half about how computers are complex and children are expensive and men like watching sports and drinking beer?) The world is already full of crashing bores as it is. So why not save your time and money and listen to The Smiths' "Meat Is Murder" while reading John Kennedy Toole's deliciously dark "A Confederacy of Dunces" instead?

Let me preface this by saying I love the 33 & 1/3 series. I also love how every author tackles the subject matter in a different format. However, I do expect certain points from each volume, as befits its intended purpose - like, say, an actual discussion of the album, the making of said album, and a review of the cultural influences and impacts it may have birthed.

Unfortunately, we get none in this edition. Avoid unless you enjoy treacly kiddie b.s. love stories that read like a worse Stephen King "Stand By Me". Ridiculous waste of time all around.

The author claims this is a work of fiction, but that's just because I didn't grant permission for him to use my life in his story. Actually, we've never met, but reading this book, I felt like it was 1985 all over again.

My favorite quote was:

"We figured any teenage kid living through those Reagan years who said The Smiths were too miserable for them was either a liar, an imbecile, or so thoroughly [messed] up, they had no idea just how miserable they were."

Yeah. That's just how it was.

It's a short book, as are the others in the series. If you were a fan of The Smiths in the 80's, grab a copy of this gem.

Anyone who has ever found a connection with another person though music will appreciate this one: "Meat is Murder was the giant shaded area of intersection in our Venn diagram." Poor Joe. Poor Morrisey.

What is wrong with you people, this was a well written little FICTION tale of one boy's growing up with THE SMITHS. I thought it was fantastic. I laughed, I cried, I put THE SMITHS on. I really enjoyed it. He says in the opening that this is FICTION, so understand it for what it is. It is a fun little story, the black sheep of the 33 1/3 family, and a great read. I'm on to read more 33 1/3 books. Love this series.

I've been reading the Thirty-Three-and-a-Third series of books, which are like extended liner notes to albums for people who don't think the originals had enough liner notes to begin with. So far, the series has been hit and miss. Didn't care must for Dusty in Memphis, but the book about Love's Forever Changes and the Kink's The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society really helped me have an appreciation for those two albums.

Unfortunately, Joe Pernice's book on The Smiths' album, Meat is Murder, is a miss...as far as helping you understand or appreciate the album more. For one thing, as he writes in an author's note underneath the acknowledgements, "If you think of the 33 1/3 series of books as a kind of extended family...then my book is the black sheep: it's fiction." It's more than likely fiction of the "write about what you know" type, too, as it purports to be a memoir of Pernice (or the narrator, if you will) and his discovery of the album. I generally despise this kind of memoir, fictional or not, as I read enough of the white-suburban-my-childhood-really-sucked genre when I was going to graduate school in creative writing. Sorry, but if you want to read about a horrible childhood, read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes; privileged white kids who think Morrissey speaks to them because he feels their pain just sound whiny.

But halfway through the story (which, although is presented as a standalone book here, is more of a novella or novelette), I started to kind of like the narrator, asthma and all. I didn't necessarily sympathize with him, but I did start to cheer for him and hope that he was going to be able to achieve the little victories: be able to ask the girl for a date, form the band, survive another school day. And just when I thought the book was going get somewhere, it ended. Which is another problem with the stories I read in graduate school: no sense of completion.

So I don't recommend this book for Smiths fans or would-be learners regarding their album, and I hesitate to suggest it on its own as fiction either. Thankfully it was short.

All of the amazon reviews are divided. And age really matters here. As stated before if you want a Smiths historical overview or even a review of this record, look elsewhere. I've read several 33.3 entries, and some are well done, so I could just dacapo... listen- Joe Pernice (who has a great band) wrote this (semi?) autobiographical account of what is was like to be in the US and to be really touched by a band that was untouchable for the most part. I save up every penny, i may have stolen some and then i got a job at a record store to get every Smiths release within days that it was released in the UK. I had never (and really have never since) obsessed and worshiped a singer, a guitarist and a band before... hell, i was 15... anyway... The Smiths changed my life and they also changed Joe Pernice's and if you enjoy reading and enjoy thinking about what you are reading... then you will enjoy his account. I do have to add that I was coming out during this time and I actually had a role model and a band to say that that was fine and that I was smarter than most around me and if they balked, well... see me in a couple of years and we'll see who's joke isn't funny any more. Thanks, Joe: your time hasn't passed. well done!

A couple of the other reviewers suggest we look elsewhere for bits about the making of the album, what Andy Rourke was drinking, etc. But that's why we looked here. That's what 33.3 is about.

Joe Pernice is a good writer, and the story isn't half bad (though how many teen angst stories do we really need?). It's just not about MIM. And that's what it is supposed to be about.

The worst part is, the album deserves a nonfiction account dedicated to it, and now there won't be one.

Black sheep is right. In the little intro to this book, Joe Pernice claims that his entry into the 33 1/3 series is just that, and he goes on to prove it by putting forth -- as opposed to a retrospective surrounding a certain album -- a novella loosely based around the influence of the Smiths's Meat Is Murder in a young dude's life. I don't think he knew just how accurate that assessment was. Pernice's book doesn't just stick out, but it's hard to love even though we should, as the (follow me here) mother of the black sheep. We all love the Smiths, right? That's why we bought the book. Or we love Pernice and his music (Scud Mountain Boys/Pernice Bros). Essentially, we've birthed this story. We wanted it. And it came out a little sideways, didn't it?

It's not poorly written, but it certainly feels unfinished in the sense that it's only a first or second draft. There's so much that needs to be cut that I'd say the first 2/5ths of the book are almost unnecessary and the latter 2/5ths sort of go nowhere. I spent the whole book waiting for the story to start, too. Then it ended and I didn't really think it ended right or at the right time. Really, the paragraph on the back of the book (in which his buddy Ray tosses him a cassette and says he's going to kill himself, a joke that we don't know is a joke until we read the paragraph in context) is the best. It's dreary and miserable, neither a beginning nor an end, but something fuzzy and in between. It's just like the album in question.

However, the paragraph, like so many of Pernice's great single lines and flashes of brilliance, gets lost in the shuffle. Pernice's lyrics from the Scud Mountain Boys album Massachusetts are of the haunting and self-deprecatingly clever type that we'd expect from Morrissey (though, admittedly, not nearly as clever, haunting, or self-deprecating . . . but who is?), and they work wonderfully on that album. It doesn't transfer to the page very well, though, and Pernice takes what could probably be an album worth of great lines strung together and ruins them with about 90 extra pages of mostly sufficient, completely unnecessary prose.

Unless I missed some deeply entwined symbolism, the references to Meat Is Murder are pretty much just that: references. Oddly enough, Meat Is Murder is one of only two Smiths albums I'm not overly familiar with (Strangeways Here We Come is the other), though I really know about half the songs on each just from various compilations (I guess I've just spent more time with The Smiths and The Queen Is Dead). I didn't think those songs, with the exception of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore", were embedded into the story at all. And even "That Joke . . ." is delivered to us on a platter, with Pernice's point smacking us upside the head. I wanted the longing for human love and the complacency towards life and the overall misery of the Smiths, and I just didn't think it was there in a unique way worthy of having the Smiths's name attached to it, aside from surface attributions to the main female character, Allison.

Of course, this is supposed to be a light read, I'm guessing. And it'll be great for nostalgia purposes (I was born in '85, not filtering through month old NMEs and f***ing around with radio antennas in '85). So go ahead, read it. Just don't expect it to be literature that holds up outside of the phrase "Yeah man, I remember being a sad, upper middle-class, Catholic, white kid from New England when Meat Is Murder came out."