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

~ Joe Pernice (Author)
Key Phrases: The Smiths, Saint Longinus, Kid One (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An essential purchase for any fan of good new rock-write in general. " -- Bandoppler Magazine

"Continuum… knew what they were doing." -- Austin American-Statesman

"However autobiographical this story might be, it’s never predictable or less than heartfelt." -- Newsday

"It is beautifully written." -- The Times (London)

"The story never reaches a true resolution, but that’s part of the pleasure of it…" -- The Colombia Spectator

A page-scorcher, especially when you see Pernice’s own experiences practically oozing from the text. -- Filter Magazine, December 2003

Dead-on depiction of how it feels when music articulates your pain with an elegance you could never hope to muster. -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 2003

Miller makes a convincing case...with deep research and song-by-song analysis. -- Rolling Stone, November 13, 2003

Product Description

This title is one of many in a series of books which focus on epic albums of our time. Here, Joe Pernice looks at The Smith's album "Meat is Murder".

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Product Details

• Paperback: 102 pages
• Publisher: Continuum; Widescreen Ver edition (October 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082641494X
• ISBN-13: 978-0826414946
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 4.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #527,077 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Thirty Three and a Third Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hard to describe, but a great little book, October 2, 2003

By	Johnny D. Goode (Athens, Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Same old suit since 1962, March 15, 2004

By	M. Fantino (San Francisco, California USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The World is Full of Crashing Bores..., August 7, 2006

By	You Tell Raphael (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

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?