The Top 35 Or So Songs of the 80’s

#02: The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

The problem with list-making is that the list says more about the list-maker than anything else. This makes sense—it’s my interpretation of the decade after all. The reason why this is problematic is that we’ve been riding a streak of big fat gothy fatalism: the vicious cycle of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, the middle-class autopilot of “Once in a Lifetime”, the bolts from above of “Temptation” and the desperate deal with God of “Running Up That Hill”. At this point, a reader might understandably assume that I’m a stunted teenage mopester, and then there’s this song: the biggest, fattest, most fatalist anthem by the decade’s most frustrated romantic.

But there’s no fighting this song. It’s the spiritual successor to “This Charming Man”. Morrissey’s anxiety of meeting the charming man in his charming car have given way to desperate escapism, and the dopey self-doubt of “I would go out tonight” is now “take me out tonight”. Notwithstanding the song’s second-person addresses, “take me out” is a pretty passive attitude, and Moz wants to see lights and life. Perhaps the numbness is a pretense—it’s not the stimulus but the passenger-seat company that enlivens Morrissey. Marr’s lush, orchestral backdrop is appropriately cinematic for the passing cars and the fading candle of the coda, but Morrissey’s nuanced performance is central. For all the dread Moz has for home or anywhere outside the car, there’s a ringing trepidation to each “take me out tonight” that betrays his excited declarations about the pleasure and the privilege of a traffic fatality. I suppose the bottom line is that he’s just young and nervous and angsty and kind of stupid and proudly idealistic, but how many times have we attentively listened to the ending, waiting for the precise second when “there is a light and it never goes out” ceases to be audible, gasping to ourselves as the light finally extinguishes? Okay, so maybe I am a stunted teenager, but it’s awfully hard to escape the sentiments after hearing something as poignant and righteously emo as “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”.