The Smiths' Meat Is Murder (33 1/3 Series)

Joe Pernice's Disappointing Novella About the Classic Smiths Album

May 17, 2009

The Thirty Three and a Third series of books each give an in depth dissection of a classic album. Pernice's addition is an unsatisfactory work of fiction.

In the intro to The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder (Continuum, ISBN: 082641494X, 2003), Scud Mountain Boys/Pernice Brothers frontman Joe Pernice claims that his entry into the Thirty-Three and a Third series is a “black sheep.” He goes on to prove it by putting forth an aimlessly wandering novella based around the influence of Meat Is Murder on a high school boy in the 80s as opposed to a retrospective of the album, as the other books in the series do.

Pernice's book isn’t just a black sheep. It's hard to love even though the reader should, as a mother of the black sheep. Surely the only people who would read this book are fans of either The Smiths, Pernice, or both. Despite the fact that all the parts are there for a good book, it all comes out a little sideways.

In Need of a Better Edit

The book isn’t poorly written, but it certainly feels unfinished in the sense that it's only a first or second draft. There's so much that needs to be cut that the first 2/5ths of the book is almost unnecessary and the latter 2/5ths sort of goes nowhere. The whole book is a build to something that never starts.

Really, the paragraph on the back of the book (in which the narrator’s buddy Ray tosses him a cassette and says he's going to kill himself, a joke that the reader doesn’t know is a joke until the paragraph is read in context) is the best. It's dreary and miserable, neither a beginning nor an end, but something fuzzy and in between. It's just like the album in question.

That paragraph, like so many of Pernice's great single lines and flashes of brilliance, gets lost in the shuffle. Oddly enough, Pernice's lyrics from the Scud Mountain Boys album Massachusetts are of the haunting and self-deprecatingly clever type that one should expect from Morrissey (though, admittedly, not nearly as clever, haunting, or self-deprecating, but who is?).

His knack for turning phrases works wonderfully on that album. It doesn't transfer to the page very well, though, and Pernice takes what could probably be an album worth of great lines and ruins them with about ninety extra pages of somewhat sufficient, mostly unnecessary prose.

Only a Tangential Connection to Meat Is Murder

Unless there’s a deeply entwined symbolism hidden somewhere in the text, the references to Meat Is Murder are pretty much just that: references. The songs on the album, with the exception of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore,” weren’t embedded into the story at all. And even "That Joke . . ." is delivered on a platter, with Pernice's point smacking the reader upside the head. Where there should have been a longing for human love and the complacency towards life and the overall misery of the Smiths, there were only surface attributions to the main female character, Allison.

Nostalgia That Doesn’t Hold Up

Of course, this is supposed to be a light read. It'll be great for nostalgia purposes for anyone who was filtering through month old NME magazines and adjusting radio antennas in 1985. There are worse ways to kill two hours, but the story doesn’t hold up outside of the phrase, "Yeah man, I remember being a sad, upper middle-class, Catholic, white kid from New England when Meat Is Murder came out."

The copyright of the article The Smiths' Meat Is Murder (33 1/3 Series) in American Fiction is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish The Smiths' Meat Is Murder (33 1/3 Series) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.