The ministers of loquacious melancholy

In High Fidelity, a book cherished by cultish and frequently depressed music lovers, narrator Rob Fleming posits the question: “Which came first, the music or the misery?” and muses further: “Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

Rob’s fix for melodic melancholy runs the gamut of rock history, but it centers squarely in American soul and Motown. But where these genres draw their pain through mostly musical means, this is nothing compared to more clever bands who have made albums chronicling their pain through woe-wrought lyrics cast over pop melodies that add pathos to the songs in a brew that never fails to crush the willing spirit. It occurs to me that Rob’s tastes may have never needed to cross the Atlantic.

In the 1980s, two U.K. bands perfected the art of writing eloquent songs of misery. One of these bands you’ve heard of, the other most likely has evaded your senses, but both provided the soundtrack for the sort of angst that defies any concise explanation. Though the Smiths predate the Wedding Present by years and their careers never overlapped, the heart-breaking legacy these bands together provide is one that could fuel an army of Robs, were he not too busy with his marginally melancholic Motown.

A quick glance at song titles from the two bands immediately grants an idea of their lyrical objectives. In 1984, The Smiths debuted the “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” 7-inch even before their self-titled debut, an album that featured such noteworthy sad track titles as “You’ve Got Everything Now,” “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” and “Still Ill.” As they slid into eventual global cult following (massive in Mexico, of all places) the Morrissey-fronted band continued to strike notes of not-so-subtle sadness: the rockabilly “I Want the One I Can’t Have” was on the next album, and on the next, The Queen Is Dead, “I Know It’s Over” was followed immediately by “Never Had No-One Ever” in one of the starkest one-two pathos punches in music. This course reached its zenith in 1987 with their final single, the five-minute “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” an epic replete with stings, wails and a two-minute intro of sparse piano under the sounds of an angry mob that stands as perhaps the saddest thing I have ever heard in my life. To be fair, this one made Rob’s list.

Where the Smiths were desperate, the Wedding Present was bitter, and their songs overwhelmingly address the deceitful nature of ex-girlfriends, sentiments surely in accord with those of Rob Fleming. Their first album bore not only “Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?” (subsequently released in French, for no reason), “Don’t Be So Hard” and “You Can’t Moan, Can You?” but also the jealous ex-lover classics “Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft” and “Give My Love to Kevin.” The latter is a truer exercise in pathetic bitterness than anything Rob might summon, as it insults new-guy Kevin’s job, threatens him, questions his ex’s mother’s opinion of him but still confesses at the song’s apex: “I just can’t bear to imagine you sharing a bed with him!” Their lyrics, more so than those of the Smiths, told more than a song’s title and frequently outlined rather complicated situations. Take the example of “Dalliance” from the Steve Albini-produced Seamonsters. Lyrics map out a simple story: Girl leaves boy for new guy, guy misses girl. But in the song’s raucous climax we find out that the actual subject is something much more specific:

Told him what he wants to hear

So you got another chance

But I was yours for seven years,

Is that what you call “a dalliance?”

Songwriter David Gedge’s obsession is something more complex: He is upset because he has heard her refer to their long-term relationship as a dalliance. Does anyone else sense a missing episode from Hornby’s novel?

A dalliance! Has so erudite a word ever been used in music? I don’t think I’m the first to have to explain the definition of the Weddoes’ song title, nor do I think I’m the first to notice how Morrissey subversively quips Catullus in the lyrics of “Frankly Mr. Shankly”—“I want to live and I want to love / I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of” is clear homage to Carmina 5’s famous “Vivamus atque amemus.” Both of these bands channeled their anguish through eloquence drenched in paranoid self-analysis, deprecating and depressing, and play as if written with poor Rob and his foibles in mind, proving that the misery, when well-expressed, is at least sometimes in the music.

—Staff writer Christopher A. Kukstis can be reached at kukstis@fas.harvard.edu.