Song Lyric of the Day (Morrissey and Johnny Marr, on the Necessity to ‘Save Your Life’)

“Oh, save your life

 Because you've only got one.”— Morrissey and Johnny Marr, “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” from The Smiths’ UK album Hatful of Hollow (1984)

I seem to have missed out on a whole stratum of rock music after about 1982. Whether it was because, having just graduated from college, I was spending more time than previously on establishing myself, or because my favorite local radio station, WNEW-FM, was gradually moving away from its free-form format, I missed out on many of the newer bands rising to prominence during this time, including The Smiths.

This particular lyric came to my attention courtesy of actress Julia Stiles, who is quite a fan of Morrissey. Just this afternoon, on a local public radio station, WNYC-FM, she cited the lyric above as among her favorite by the British singer-songwriter.

I was immediately intrigued by these lines; they seemed to offer a kind of blunt, tough-love wake-up call, tinged with existentialism (the thought that you’d better make the most of your life, because this is all you’ll get). But as I looked further into the tune, I wondered if that was really all to it.

A Rolling Stone magazine article pointed to one principal influence on Morrissey: the playwright Shelagh Delaney, whose influential late-Fifties comedy-drama, A Taste of Honey, dealt with a smart but lower-class teen left pregnant by a visiting African-American sailor. (The late, lamented Off-Broadway troupe, the Pearl Theatre Co., mounted a production last year that I reviewed here.)

Viewed in this context, Morrissey’s lyric now seems focused more tightly not on the choice to go on that every human being must make, but the decision of the play’s young heroine, Jo, on what to do with her unborn child. In the song, she may be coached to abort the baby. Is the voice in these lines simply any older person, urging Jo to free herself from a yoke that will prove burdensome if she hopes to break the cycle of poverty? Or is the voice an older male with self-interest here, who would not under any circumstances want to accept the responsibility of a child, whether his or not?

In a sense, this song reflects back on the play that inspired it. The two, after all, are alike in their ambiguous, ambivalent consideration of a very complicated situation in which all too many people still find themselves these days. (Upon Delaney's death in November 2011, Morrissey wrote this brief but eloquent tribute to the writer for evoking a world of "sagging roofs, rag and bone men, walk-up flats, derelict sites, rear-entrance buses, and life in tight circumstances.")