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.