Is It Really So Strange? (Morrissey Fan Documentary)
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C Sound: C Extras: D Main Program: A
What was
the last record to change your life? How
old were you when it happened? Most likely you were a teenager, possibly pimply
and just out of middle school, spending all your time and money at the mall,
daydreaming about girls and/or boys too beautiful and too frightfully wonderful
for you to ever have courage enough to strike up a conversation with, or, so
much less likely, to gather in the fleeting bits of your fast evaporating
bravery to ask out on a date. So instead
of sock hops and malt shops, or whatever the de rigueur teenage courtship
ritual of your day, you spent those long nights in your bedroom with The Record
staring at the album artwork, working your fingers over the record grooves as
though it were a Braille for the broken hearted, listening, listening,
listening to songs that laid your heart bare, shone your dreams, fears, and
secret fantasies on a giant screen for all the world to see while you stood to
the side pointing and jumping up and down, shouting, “Now do you see? Do you
understand? This is my life, my heart! Please will you please just love me?”
I was probably around 13 when U2’s
“Boy” went excavating its way through my being; 16 when Bob Dylan’s “Bringing
It All Back Home” broke my brain with its surrealist Americana; 18 when The
Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” took my heart to school for an advanced course in
young love and older heartbreak. There
were more I could add here but won’t for the sake of something approaching
brevity.
Or maybe
the last record to come smashing into your life and rearrange all of the
mental/emotional furniture arrived while you were in your twenties and had been
through not only marathons of teenage longing and all that angsty
nobody-understands-me stuff but also a real relationship or two that simply,
even though you tried your best, did not work out. At the time you were installing the newest
edition to your private museum of missed chances and lost loves when a song
came on the radio or it came seeping out of your annoying roommate’s bedroom
who you had no choice but to share an apartment with as all your best friends
were living with their significant others, and the song just laid you low. You ran out immediately, bought the record,
ran back home, threw the album on, cracked a beer, lit a joint, and disappeared
oh so gratefully into the sound.
I guess I was in my early twenties
when Sinatra’s “Wee Small Hours of the Morning” seemed to contain everything I
would need for the following decade and quite possibly the rest of my natural
life; my mid-20s when Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” re-contextualized my entire
world and insisted I rethink past assumptions.
Again there were more records, always more records that meant everything
to me.
If you’ve
made it to your thirties and beyond then this singular sort of event probably
doesn’t happen so much to you anymore if at all. Our capacity for a record, particularly a
rock’ n’ roll record, to take our heart and turn it inside out, to become our
best friend, to be recognized as our own private internal monologue
externalized is greatly diminished with each passing year. The world insists we build our own ingenious
personal defenses and shields; as long as you are in this living thing then you
will build ever-stronger walls to keep the world out. This is not to say it doesn’t still happen
from time to time, the magic of record snaking through some tiny chink in your
armor.
I’m in my
thirties and my generation is certainly heir to the prolonged adolescence
brought into being by the baby boomers so I’ll admit right here that I believe
the Shangri-las recording of “Train from Kansas City” to be working its
necromantic musical mojo on me right now, doing its invasive open-heart
surgery, and recasting a once important relationship in my life in its own
terms of 1960s teenage beat-queen operatics.
William
E. Jones’s documentary Is It Really So
Strange? while purporting to be about the passionate Morrissey fandom that
sprung up in southern California during the six year period that Morrissey was
between record contracts, and therefore artistically silent and at the same
time physically present as he was residing right outside of Los Angeles, is at
its core about the very thing I’ve been rambling on about – The records that
change our lives.
Morrissey’s
records, especially those he made while in The Smiths, arguably are albums
designed specifically for the task of burrowing into the confused, adolescent
consciousness and bonding with the listener at such a level that the record
becomes as necessary for continuing one’s day-to-day living as the blood
feverishly pumping saltily through said listener’s confusedly anxious heart.
I’ve
mentioned this before on FulvueDrive-In but I’ll reiterate it here that The
Smith’s “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” did just this sort
of thing to me when I first encountered it as a teenager.
Jones
films a series of interviews with Moz acolytes and allows the interviewees the
space and respect to discuss, sometimes in painfully intimate detail, how they
arrived at such a place where this one man’s songs, a man from an entirely
alien culture in most respects, connected with their souls so totally. Men and women, straight and gay, Anglo and
Latino, old and young all speak very intelligently and reflectively about
themselves and the music they love.
Jones’s technique is very simple – point the camera and let the people
have their say. Sometimes he’ll
interject a question or two but he is never ironic about the enterprise,
there’s nary a smirk anywhere to be found in the film.
Is It Really So Strange? is an eloquent statement about the
power of pop music and its ability to reach those people in a culture who are
often most marginalized and in its way give those people a voice or at the very
least tell them “You are not alone.” And
recognizing that we are not in fact alone in this oft-times harsh uncaring
world is truly a life-changing event in everybody’s life.
- Kristofer Collins
Kristofer
Collins is an editor at The New Yinzer and owner of Desolation Row CDs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can contact him through our staff list or
at:
desolationrowcds@hotmail.com
