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Originally Posted by Screen13
Yes, I said "Said".
The mix of Morrissey's words and singing with Johnny Marr's knack for creating great music and a good ear for production to match those words (plus the help of John Porter for the first album and "How Soon Is Now?" and Stephen Street for Strangeways...), had a strong effect overall. Maybe the lyrics were not all that special to some, but they were usually well written and performed with conviction and matched with sharp music. Personal, political (especially the Meat Is Murder era), or even about the record industry, a lot of the lyrics were clever and everything together connected very well with most of the listeners.
The Cure have a lot of great songs, but apart from some moments of their albums up to and including The Top (The "Oh So Psychedelic" era), a lot of the lyrics are fluff in my opinion. I know about the Camus reference in "Killing an Arab" (his 1942 story The Stranger) and about The Hanging Garden and Wailing Wall as referencing historical landmarks (and of course Hanging Garden was also a for a film and a book), but their early use of imagery was not very effective in the long run, as if they just chose something that sounded like a cool title and took it from there. The thing that makes it good is actually the music itself, but even if on casual listening it's fine, it does not fully create anything too out-there, hard hitting, or unique when one listens more to the details. It's not surprising to me that after going into lighter worlds that they reviled themselves as a great Pop band in different clothing. The first five albums and the early singles sides are still solid in retrospect, but after that it's best in small doses.
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I see. Sorry about the tone of my post. I had been awake for way too many hours when I wrote it.
Anyway, I don't have a very cogent argument to make but, all things considered, I personally love the early 'dark' Cure stuff and the later 'pop' stuff (up through Disintegration) a lot more than I love The Smiths, which I do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by joy_circumcision
This, in my opinion, is the genius of Morrissey: his embellishment of simple emotion when it works best. Though, I will say he has his share of cheeky, if not quite transcendent, poeticism when he calls to mind Oscar Wilde on such tracks as "Handsome Devil."
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I agree that Morrissey is a good, subtle writer and I see what you mean. The reason I quoted that line is that it doesn't strike me as more emotional than things that Robert Smith wrote. At least not to the point of "destroying" The Cure in the songwriting department, as that poster stated.