Morrissey - 'Meat is Murder(ously Nuanced)'

It's not unusual to have a Smiths/Morrissey phase, and mine began fairly recently. While chewing on their second album, 1985's 'Meat Is Murder', I couldn't help but focus on the title track, which ends the record on a rather haunting note.

At first glance, and indeed listen, of course, it is unambivalent. 'Meat is Murder!!!' the quiffed one croons, and no doubt is left in regards to what goes into his freezer. But still... Something struck me about the lyrics that made me look at them in some detail, and I was surprised about what I found.


Because 'Meat Is Murder' is more than just about being vegetarian. It's a critique on vegetarianism's politics, in particular, the way it phrases its rhetoric. How else to explain a song with well-crafted lyrics like 'It's death for no reason, and death for no reason is MURDER' that then slides into painfully bad phrasing like this?

...And the calf that you carve with a smile
It is MURDER
And the turkey you festively slice
It is MURDER...

Or:

Kitchen aromas aren't very homely
It's not "comforting", cheery or kind
It's sizzling blood and the unholy stench
Of MURDER

If you're thinking about a furious 14 year old writing pained rhyming couplets on the inside back cover of their exercise book when the Geography teacher is looking the other way, you're heading in the right direction. The phrasing is trite, clumsy, po-faced and pious. It's impossible to hear lyrics like 'closer comes the screaming knife' (do knives scream?) and not need to stifle a giggle. It's the rhetoric of people who camp out in Parliament Square, plaster their shacks with pictures of bomb-dismembered Iraqi children, don't wash for a month and then wonder why no one pays them any attention.

And yet... It's impossible not to hear 'It's MURDER!' being blasted out with a cracking, almost halting voice and not be a little moved. Nor can you listen to the rest of the album and read the lyrics and not notice that the lameness of the title track stands uneasily with them. A good writer doesn't write badly without reason, and the gaucheness of 'Meat Is Murder' is no exception.

In other words, the song works on two levels. As an emotive attack on eating meat, it is still plain and unambiguous, if only because we know Morrissey's real views on the matter all too well. But it is also a satire, the narrative 'voice' in the lyrics being an unreliable one. (In the grand tradition of self-parodying songs like 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now.') Through the song, we hear the same overwrought, emotive but essentially juvenile language that animal rights protesters engage in today, with only passion in their favour.

And yet for all that, it remains so inarticulate and dunderheaded, cursed with the same fuzzy hyperbole that animates outfits like PETA and its celebrity supporters (like Morrissey himself), who speak with sincerity and stupidity in equal measure.

Like their peers in Parliament Square, the radicals of the animal rights movement dutifully man their little stalls in shopping centres every Saturday, and decorate them with gratuitous pictures of dissected animals and even more gratuitous literature, full of graphic descriptions of what really goes on in abbatoirs.

It is so repellent that it is self-defeating, and seems to display a sort of nausea about food and eating itself, fully realised by more media savvy but no less monomaniacal books like 'Skinny Bitch', which reads like a bulimic's primer.

With that in mind, the point the song makes is that while eating meat is bad (from the perspective of Morrissey at least), the argument is not one that can be won, at least with language that exposes it to ridicule. You're not meant to take the song seriously because it lacks the means to be taken seriously. Instead, we have clumsy, laughable lyrics. It is infantile. The song despairs as much over its own ineptness as the animals it mourns.

When taken in context with other songs on the album, like 'The Headmaster's Ritual' and 'Barbarism Begins At Home', both of which are steeped in horror and helplessness in equal measure, we can see 'Meat Is Murder' as another song about the death of hope among the young. It is the argument of youthful people who believe but will never be taken seriously.

Beyond the tragedy of death, the song is also about the tragedy of impotence, of being ignored and dismissed. Combine this with a genuine despair and horror that harks back to another closing track - 'Suffer Little Children' on the band's self-titled debut - and it's plain that 'Meat Is Murder' is working on many levels at once.

Was I moved? Yes. But did it make me stop eating burgers though? Err, no. As the song so wryly suggests, the power to move does not equate to the power to convince.