When I was sixteen years old I fell in love with a boy with a pompadour who made up for his complete lack of charm with the finest taste in music of anyone I had ever met. He made me epic, narrative mix tapes, bought me daffodils, and serenaded me with tracks from The Queen is Dead. We’d lie on our backs on the floor of his band poster-plastered bedroom, staring longingly at the ceiling and each other. We’d listen to rare, dismal quality Morrissey b-sides and live recordings. We’d discuss at length how the world didn’t understand us, our love, or his hair. We even considered celibacy (albeit briefly, thanks to the tyranny of teenage urges.) I stopped eating meat and started writing poetry. In that miserable teenage haven the stage was set for the beginning of my “Morrissey phase,” something that many of us experience and most of us get over when the world gets a little shinier and less overdramatic. But unlike the vegetarianism, poetry, and the pompadoured boy, Mozzer was something I simply never got over.
Morrissey has been with me for fifteen years now, never once knocked from his position at the top of my musical favourites list. I’ve queued him and The Smiths up on trains and planes, put him on endless repeat during break ups, and squeezed him into many a wooing mixtape. I’ve transposed myself and my paramours into his songs — I’ve been Unlovable, a Girl Afraid, wished enemies an Unhappy Birthday, and Changed My Plea to Guilty. I’ve met someone at the Cemetry Gates, wondered How Soon Is Now, and claimed that to pretend to be happy could only be idiocy. I’ve told someone that dying by their side would be a heavenly way to die. And yes, although it pains me to admit it, I’ve worn black on the outside because black was how I felt on the inside.
While being a hardcore fan has its own special brand of stigma (read: crazy), I’ve managed to lose any personal shame associated with my manic love for the Moz. Perhaps I’ve been clinging to and celebrating my tear-jerking love of him for more than half my life because the moping swagger of the celibate romantic represents an obsessive yearning all but lost for me as I got older. I mean, is there anything comparable to the screaming desire a girl has for a pop singer? Beyond that, Morrissey allows me to be temporarily and irrationally miserable in a life that begs for our stone-faced stability and professionalism. As the world forced me to grow up with its day jobs and mortgages and reasonable responses to heartache (read: not crazy), Morrissey alone turns me into a tear-jerked teenager lying on the floor of a boy’s bedroom. On his fiftieth birthday I feel compelled to thank him for that gift feeling understood, if only for a moment.
Happy Birthday Morrissey. Tonight I’m going to find a boy with a pompadour and we can lie on our backs, listen to some rare B-sides, and talk about how the world doesn’t understand us.
More: The Walrus picks its favourite Morrissey and Smiths tracks.
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