A Review of Viva Hate by Morrissey

Did you know I was a published reviewer? Online of course, not in print. But I like this piece, and I'm deleting my Myspace so I thought it could live here. I also tag all of you to take your best loved album, or most hated, and review it. Its good.

"1987 was a black year for most 15 year olds of an Indie persuasion. 

 Record of the year was Stevie Winwoods Higher Love, Brosettes had hijacked our beloved doc martens and vintage levis, and Johnny Marr left The Smiths, signalling the end of an era of perfect British pop. Morrissey's speedy retort to that was Viva Hate (originally Education In Reverse), with Durutti Column's Vini Reilly providing a musical platform for Steven's invective. 

And he spews. 

Squawling guitars and a brash drum beat drop you into the bemused paranoid ramblings of Alsation Lover, Morrisseys' ironical comical lexicon delivering the wonderful "with yer tent flaps open wide". 

This flows quite strangely into a funeral roll for Malcolm McFee in Little Man, What Now, who gets as much a mention as he deserves, one minute and forty eight seconds. 

Then Everyday is like Sunday, the anthem of a displaced generation, anyone who ever had to trudge around with the enemy on holiday, even if it was 2 weeks in disneyland, it is the teenagers job to smirk and belittle. And so it goes on, unleashing the spite of every betrayal or dashed hope upon an already defeated listener, disguised in soothing and familiar melodies, Suedehead providing a welcome return to the jangly hi-tone pop of former glories. 

 Ordinary Boys, not ironically enough chosen as a moniker for 'him wot married Chantelle"'s band sucks you into the misery and also affirms those who find themselves eternal misfits. 

In 1988, I thought this man and his musical melancholy was what I was about, I bought into it with the very fibre of my being, and it still reminds me of a time when I had nothing more on my mind than the meaning of life, the cruelty of parents and if ugly ducklings could turn into swans. 

I'm so glad to grow older,to move away from those darker years"