5. The allure of laddism

Rusholme Ruffians-Joyriders

Despite their feminism, psychological androgyny, and hatred of "macho" maleness, Morrissey and Cocker retain a sense of inadequacy for not being "proper" men which they've painfully struggled with lyrically and in their personae (e.g. Morrissey's fascination with skinheads and Cocker's electroclash "Darren Spooner" persona). "Rusholme Ruffians" is perhaps Morrissey's best lyrical expression of his attraction-repulsion to "laddism," while "Joyriders" is perhaps the creepiest thing Cocker has ever written (which is saying a lot).

"Rusholme Ruffians" takes the perspective of a young boy experiencing the eroticized violence and excitement of a fair, and having his nascent awareness of sex and love corrupted by it:

And yet, miraculously, like a Henry James child, he seems to walk away with his innocence intact: "The night may come along / I might walk home alone / But my faith in love is still devout." Or is this ironic?

In "Joyriders" Cocker seems to be taking the piss out of his thug protagonists: "We're so thick we can't think / Can't think of anything but shit, sleep, and drink." Yet their hypnotically repeated solicitation, "Mister, we just want your car / Coz we're taking a girl to the reservoir / Oh, the papers say it's a tragedy / Did you wanna come and see?" is creepily seductive, and never answered. What are they going to do with the girl? Rape her? Drown her? Rape her and then drown her?

I'm also reminded of Morrissey's "We'll Let You Know," in which he seems to mock football hooligans ("We're all smiles / And honest, we swear, it's the turnstiles / That make us hostile"), yet can't (and probably doesn't want to) quite convince the listener that he doesn't on some level empathize with them. And also of possibly the creepiest thing Morrissey has ever written, "Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning," which tells the tale of a girl who drowns trying to get the attention of a lifeguard, causing Morrissey to coo menacingly, "Oooooh, hurray!"

The companion piece to "Lifeguard" is "Jack the Ripper": whereas in "Lifeguard" (as in "The More You Ignore Me") the protagonist tries to break, rape-like, into a consciousness that is closed to him or her to the point of unconsciousness, in "Jack the Ripper" he imagines a lover who is passive to the point of unconsciousness or even death ("You don't agree but you don't refuse"), permitting him, rape-like, to take this void as consent.

6. Oedipal politics

The Queen Is Dead-I Spy

In these politically charged epics from their "important albums," Morrissey and Cocker take on personae in order to get their revenge on the class system: Morrissey is a deranged regicide, breaking into Buckingham palace, but deciding once he gets there to go for a walk and have civil conversation with the queen instead; Cocker is a spy who "specializes in revenge," which he gets by sleeping with the wives of the rich.

Two things make the songs brilliant. First, for all the deadly seriousness of the subject matter and the feelings expressed, they're rich in self-deprecating humour. Second, they interweave the personal and the political: sexual fantasies (Oedipal, it would seem) are being projected onto the social situation.

7. Anthems

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out-Common People

On the surface, the bands' recognized anthems seem to have nothing in common. "There Is A Light..." tells the tale of a shy, misunderstood teenager who can't express his feelings for a friend, which he sublimates into a desire "to die by your side." "Common People" tells the tale of Cocker helping out a rich girl who wants to "do what common people do." Yet both songs are about a longing for experience that can't be satisfied. And ultimately in both cases it's sexual experience - although that itself is a metaphor for something else, for being one with life, real, whole.

For me what makes "Common People" a brilliant song isn't its political message, or even the most scathingly sarcastic lyrics since The Sex Pistols. It's the fact that once again Cocker blends the political and the personal (i.e. the sexual). If "I Spy" was Oedipal fantasy as class war, "Common People" is class war as smutty sexual fantasy, in which Cocker, the effete misfit aesthete, gets off on being considered "common," and fantasizes about a rich girl who's a whore beneath her pristine surface (like Hitchcock's Grace Kelly fixation).

8. Nostalgia

Back to the Old House-Disco 2000

Morrissey and Cocker both like to look back upon teenage years of unrequited love, although they approach the subject very differently. "Back to the Old House" is the most beautifully simple of Smiths songs, expressing universal ambivalence towards the past, which is both longed for and rejected, the lines "When you cycled by / There began all my dreams / The saddest thing / I've ever seen / And you never knew / How much I really liked you / Because I never even told you / Oh and I meant to" encapsulating a world of missed experience and regret. Cocker, on the other hand, tries to keep his aching regret over never marrying the "popular" Deborah, who is now married with a child while he remains alone, under control with the crass punchline: "What are you doing Sunday, baby? / Would you like to come and meet me, maybe? / You can even bring your baby." Yet "Disco 2000" remains charged with astonished regret for the way our lives turn out so differently than the way we imagined them when we were young, in part through our own fault.

Unlike Morrissey, when dealing with the disappointments of his adolescence Cocker frequently protects himself using crass humour, as in the classic "Babies," in which he recounts a tale of hiding in the wardrobe of the older girl next door to watch her have sex with her boyfriend, only to be discovered by her and have to "get it on," only to be discovered by her younger sister, causing him to protest to the latter (the addressee of the song): "I know you won't / Believe it's true / I only went with her / Coz she looked like you - my God!" But the beautifully innocent and romantic chorus goes, "I want to take you home / I want to give you children / You might be my girlfriend." Despite their twisted fantasies, Morrissey and Cocker both retain an innocent attitude to sex and romance - the innocence of the perpetual onlooker, but also of the person who is too immature (in Morrissey's sense in "Miserable Lie": "I'm just a country mile behind the world"), sensitive, and romantic in the first place to be sexually successful.

9. Transparent defences

What Difference Does It Make?-Do You Remember the First Time?

One tells the story of coming out to a friend for whom one has romantic feelings, the other alternates between the perspective of a female protagonist halfheartedly wishing her relationship with her dull lover was "straight" and a chorus in which Cocker addresses her as the woman to whom he lost his virginity. (It's quite like the verse-chorus alternation in "Underwear," except here it's possible to imagine a relationship between singer and protagonist that's part of the story rather than "meta-narrative".) But in both cases the singer declares his ongoing attachment, however mixed with scorn, for the person who has rejected him:

Again, Cocker protects himself with crassness, while Morrissey surrenders himself wholeheartedly, in the end, to masochistic idealization of the beloved. But Cocker's defences are meant to be transparent - as transparent as the brilliant line in "Razzmatazz," "I was lyin' when I asked you to stay." I'm reminded as well of the brilliant construction of "William, It Was Really Nothing" (another song with a casually nihilistic title), where a startlingly direct confession of feeling to another man ("Would you like to marry me? / If you like you can buy the ring") is self-protectively surrounded by the protest of the title, and followed immediately by the hilariously narcissistic "I don't dream about anyone / Except myself." Not unlike following an allusion to one's first time with someone with "I can't remember a worse time."

10. Psychological rape

The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get-This Is Hardcore

By the time he's reached his solo career, Morrissey's sexual and romantic frustration has taken some very twisted forms, as here and in "Jack the Ripper." The darkness of "The More You Ignore Me..." is hardly relieved by the "serious joke," "I've made up your mind." The song seems to tell the tale of stalking a love object, but infiltrating their mind rather than committing physical rape, although the former is almost worse: "I will be there in the bar / With my head on the bar / I am now a central part / Of your mind's landscape / Whether you like it or do not." And Morrissey, although self-deprecating, also insists on his irresistible power to win over his beloved by his power of will.

"This Is Hardcore" is perhaps the most brilliant lyric Cocker has ever written. It summarizes his principle lyrical obsession, the tragic discrepancy between fantasy and reality, which is best seen in the sexual act (cf. Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"). It's not really about pornography; it's about sex itself as pornography, sex itself as rape: "This is hardcore / There is no way back for you / This is hardcore / This is me on top of you / And I can't believe that it took me this long." The last line has numerous references: the obvious one, to coming; to being a late bloomer, sexually and artistically; and to making his dreams into reality - because of his own resistance to doing so, and because of the inherent difficulty of bridging that grap, which is a metaphor for the impossibility of bridging it. Cocker insists and insists, and tries to be as raw and crude as possible ("Come over here baby / Talk in the mike"), because he wants to close a gap that's impossible to close: there is no "hard core" to reality, and the more one insists on it, the more it recedes.

But at the core of this song is some of the most astonishing nihilism ever expressed in pop: "That goes in there / And that goes in there / And that goes in there / And that goes in there / And then it's over / Oh, what a hell of a show / But what I really want to know / Is what will you do for an encore? / Coz this is hardcore." Sexual obsession as the hell of compulsive repetition that never breaks through into a higher reality (continuing the theme of "Monday Morning"). Sex as horrifyingly thing-like, abstract, impersonal, mechanical. As if to see all, and see it enough times, might reveal the secret of life, put one in touch with ultimate truth. But the only ultimate truth is the unconsoling one that this is all there is - there's no encore, nothing beyond. And there's no hard core, just an abyss.

What makes Morrissey and Cocker stand out as lyricists against equally witty, articulate, and angry competitors like Elvis Costello and Eminem is, first, the ambivalence that's the subject and substance of so many of their songs, and, second, that they are profound psychologists of masculinity, precisely because they stand somewhat outside of it. (Eminem perhaps belongs to the latter category, but in spite of himself: he seems as incapable of honestly confronting his hysteria, sense of inadequacy, and gender confusion as lyrical topics as he is willing to put them on shocking display in a song like "Kim.") As personae, too, the Moz and the Jarve are feminist and sensitive without being (remotely) sexually neutered, and aggressive without being macho.

And, of course, there's their approach to sex as a topic in pop music. Morrissey doesn't get enough credit for his contributions to this subject (presumably because the celibacy pronouncement permanently distracted the media; conversely, Cocker's admission that he's gone years at a time celibate by choice hasn't made a dent in his pervy image) , but The Smiths and Hatful of Hollow are drenched in sweaty adolescent sex (or at least sweaty adolescent sexual fantasies) with more than a few hints of kink (from the leather seats of "This Charming Man" to "I just want to be tied to the back of your car" to "Slap me on the patio"). Is it only the British who understand that sexual fantasy is better when it's a little bit wrong, furtive, and desperate? The official word on sex in American popular music (laughably, considering American puritanism) is that it's the best thing ever, period, and what everyone aspires to all the time - and that's it. So that if Prince sings about a fetish for a raspberry beret or Britney begs her boyfriend to "Hit me baby one more time," the songs seem a lot more exciting than they really are. But I could write a whole piece on that cultural difference alone... instead of which I'll stop!

Click here to read an interview with Elise Moore, award-winning Canadian playwright.