If there was nothing unusual about the levels of devotion the Smiths inspired in me – countless young men and women all across the world, then as now, treated the band as a lifeline or lighthouse – what in retrospect seems odd is the conviction I had as a teenager that they were uniquely Asian. There had been Asians in British pop music before them, not least Bid of the Monochrome Set and Freddie Mercury (aka the Gujarati Farrokh Bulsara), but for me no one had ever come as close as Morrissey, the child of Irish Catholics, to expressing a poetics of second-generation migration.
These days it’s hard to open a paper without some slightly whipped-up controversy about Morrissey being a racist, but back in the mid-1980s his lyrics and persona mapped out a structure of feeling that spoke to my own floundering selfhood. He sang about shame and unlovability: I had bloodied myself as a 12-year-old using a kitchen knife to scrape away what I saw as the tainting brownness of my skin – a browness that made me only half a person, half the Englishman I wanted to be. He sang about loneliness and isolation: I was rarely invited to the homes of schoolfriends, and certainly never invited them to my mine, for fear that they would snigger at the photographs of turbaned relatives that lined its walls. He sang about weakness: the mantra from my parents was that we were vulnerable because of our religion and had to act as meekly as possible so as not to become targets for thugs and bully boys.
Many of my cousins who lived in Southall and Coventry, places with larger Asian communities, sometimes felt the same emotions. Like me they weren’t into bhangra, so they turned instead to reggae or hip hop, barricade music they associated with street toughness and self-respecting masculinity. Perhaps because I was growing up in a whiter corner of England, or perhaps just for aesthetic reasons, I was drawn to music that was less about collective pride than about individual abjection, music that created theatrical extroversion out of bedroom-bound introversion. I instinctively preferred weakness to strength, treble to bass …
Sukhdev Sandhu | Morrissey and me: how an ordinary Asian fell in love with the Smiths | Music | The Guardian via millionsmillions
I grew up in a much different context, but feel so much of this, like this. I wish I had never heard about Morrissey’s racist rants. I really did love the Smiths.
