Git Down, Eeyore, Get Funky

172. SMITHS, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"
Produced by John Porter; written by Johnny Marr & Morrissey
Rough Trade 156 1984 Did not make pop charts

Not my favorite Smiths single, but almost certainly their epitome (and how cool is it, by the way, to come up with the title this early that sums up most of your work). The singly named Morrissey bitches and moans as Johnny Marr--whose very name echoes a phrase of French derision--jangles along in the background. Twelve years later, the Cardigans would actually chart with an almost direct instrumental ripoff of this single on "Lovefool," but the genius here, of course, is that that bouncy music is under these misanthropic words.

If the increasing trend toward self-conscious "loser" singles during the 1980s and 1990s allowed slackers to indulge and feel superior at one and the same time, Brit pop like this allowed alienated would-be intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to do the same thing: yes that's exactly how it is--but I'm not that whiny, just clever.

Moreover, "Caligula would have blushed" as a throwaway is genius, particularly the way Morrissey's voice goes all trilly and such when he sings it.

When We All Had Secret Identities

63. SMITHS, "How Soon Is Now?"
Produced by Dale Buffin Griffin, John Porter, Roger Pusey, and the Smiths; written by the Smiths (Johnny Marr & Morrissey)
Sire 0-20284 1985 Did not make pop charts

For at least a decade, this song was the transatlantic anthem of disaffected white geek adolescence.

Then Love Spit Love remade it for the witch-chic film The Craft. That was okay, after a fashion, since the film was about four girls whose off-center power was unrecognized in their conformist high school. Plus Fairuza Balk (so tragically unnoticed for her precociously freaky turn as a pre-goth Dorothy Gale in Walter Murch's Return to Oz) actually looks like someone who's spent a lot of time listening to Smiths records.

Two years later, Aaron Spelling glommed onto the remake and used it for the main titles of Charmed, a TV series that was not about outcast witches but more about what Charlie's Angels would have been like if Bree, Jill, and Kelly had been able to teleport and see the future as well as handle a piece. Culturally, that particular appropriation finally kicked the song over the line from generalized longing to easy wish fulfillment. It had originally been a song about feeling as if you have power; it now became a song about actually having powers.

I'm pretty certain there are still a lot of teenagers out there who feel the way that the narrator of this song feels. (It's not a cliche, it's a truism, and there is nothing realer when you're living through it.) I hope they've found their own song to distill that feeling for them--but I hope that, like this song, it doesn't distill it too patly.