No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.7 - "Still Ill" (The Smiths)

I can't think of another Smiths song which begins so deliberately ugly. Marr's slashing. palm-muted collisions scrape the brain like the sound of a machine refusing to start. Once he swoops into a more standard Smiths riff (which is to say, an astonishingly good one) Morrissey contributes his own unpleasantness with a dead-eyed skewering of Little England assholes:

I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving
England is mine, it owes me a living
But ask me why and I'll spit in your eye
Ask me why, and I'll spit in your eye

It's a swipe that gets both more powerful and more baffling as time goes on. How did Morrissey go from so effortlessly nailing the sour entitlement of the EDLs recruitment pool to acting as their unofficial spokesperson? Who is ill here, and how?

It just wasn't like the old days any more
No, it wasn't like those days
Am I still ill?

"Still Ill" is a fever dream, a burning hallucination of things that don't exist, and never did. The tragedy here - the central mistake that warps and twists and burns and kills, the excuse grabbed for when waving England flags in immigrants' faces and pushing dogshit through their letterboxes - is that the patient believes it is the country that's sick. That one day they'll wake to find their fictitious, quasi-fascistic Britain (emphasise fascistic, rather than quasi-) has recovered its senses, and returned to what it was.

We might never know when Morrissey's chronic case of nationalism first became symptomatic. I'm not sure that's a question spending all that much time on, actually. All we can say is that he's still ill, and the fever he's helping spread shows no sign of breaking.

Back before it became impossible to miss what Morrissey had revealed himself as, though, this song meant something very different to me.

Under the iron bridge we kissed
And though I ended up with sore lips
It just wasn't like the old days anymore
No it wasn't like those days
Am I still ill?

It's been twenty-five years since I was first prescribed medication to aid my mental health. I've tried at least three different drugs, over at least four lengthy periods - most recently, an eight-year stint on citalopram, a state of affairs I'm hoping will last indefinitely, absent any actual sign of recovery.

It's not a perfect solution. The meds take away some of my sadness, and most of the white-hot unrelenting anger that used to give me jaw-ache from clenching my teeth so hard. But there are side-effects. Whether the limitations are pharmaceutical or neurological, it's not just the negative emotions that end up damped. The lows are more shallow, but the highs are flattened out. On my best days I can be aware my immediate situation is a pleasant one, as though I'm reading about a favourite fictional character being happy, and am feeling pleased for them. On the worst days, happy situations just make me sad.

(Though so does fear, in fairness, which can make watching horror films with me a rather odd experience.)

This can't possibly not have a knock-on effect regarding relationships. Without the drugs, love becomes anger, and lust becomes misery. With them, it often feels like something happening to someone else. I need you to understand that it isn't I'm incapable of love. It's that he way my mind expresses love would be unrecognisable to my younger self. "It just wasn't like the old days anymore", as the man said, irrespective of the number of kisses exchanged in the shadow of cold, dripping architecture.

Maybe this is simply part of growing old. It's hard to tell - I've got nothing to compare my interiority to. The closest I can come, for some reason, is music, which from time to time stirs up sensations in my head that I can recognise as essentially me.

As emotional stimulants go, an mp4 file is more fast-release than a swig of alcohol, and more reliable than literally anything else. Self-medication through music isn't entirely risk-free, though. Knowing you'll feel something is distinct from knowing what precisely you'll feel. There's a sense in which I'm playing (Russian) roulette with emotions I've lost the knack to processing. Sometimes "Still Ill" makes me feel understood. Other times, it makes me feel unsalvageable. Am I still ill? Fucking hell, yes, as it turns out. Still.

Morrissey can't seem to stop getting worse, and I can't seem to start getting any better. A song released before Morrissey was a joke and before I was a schoolboy continues to gather new layers over time. Like scar tissue. Like rust beneath an iron bridge. You can see what was originally there, but you can't get to it.

I'm too scared to check whether Brexit might result in disruptions to my med schedule.

Are these people still ill? Oh no.

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B-side:

(The live version on Rank is even better than the studio recording, which of course makes me hate Morrissey all the more.)