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MORRISSEY - Paint A Vulgar Picture (1997)
Something appropos for Record Store Day, non?
One of the ironic frontrunners for musicianly self-mythologizing - right up there with The Who’s oft-quoted “hope I die before I get old” trope - Mozzer’s exhaustive checklist of music industry plaints first appeared as The Smiths’ career crumbled apart in the summer of 1987.
And, as we all know now, after a few years’ worth of generous solo releases and freshly exhumed Smiths ephemera (a few collectible B-sides on last-gasp singles, and 1988’s live Rank LP), everyone concerned began cynically bleeding nerdy acolytes dry with one unsuitable reissue after another. A thousand years later, there still hasn’t been an official remastering program, and it wasn’t until a late-2010 bootleg bonanza that fans were able to get excited about mouldy oldies again.
Hard-won cynicism aside, “Paint A Vulgar Picture” is a good song with a typically original lyrical conceit, and whenever I think of another boardroom-initiated, major label industry concept, these are the verses rattling ‘round me ‘ead.
Ladies and gentlemen, even at his most artless, our greatest modern poet:
Re-issue! Re-package! Re-package!
Re-evaluate the songs
Double-pack with a photograph
Extra Track (and a tacky badge)
and
Best of! Most of!
Satiate the need
Slip them into different sleeves!
Buy both, and feel deceived
The version linked above is from Morrissey’s 1997 Maladjusted tour.
I can take or leave Record Store Day. I pay full price for about 160 full-length albums a year, so one day’s worth of hack promotion and limp fist-shaking does as much for me as Earth Hour. If you feel guilty about the way you go about your acquisition of music, just as you may about your energy consumption, do something about it all year long.
