Blindspotting: The Smiths, "The Queen Is Dead"

The Legacy: There's nothing wrong with a little friction between creative partners. In fact, being shackled to people who have the power to tell you no — and who can also be trusted to tell you when your ideas are crap — typically leads to superior material. For proof, just listen to any of the countless disappointing albums that have arrived after the removal of various ostensible obstacles (pain-in-the-ass label execs, stubborn bandmates, et cetera). The artist in question usually feels like they've finally been freed to do their best work, but the rest of us know better; without a little sand in the oyster, you're never going to get pearls.

The Smiths are a great example of this principle in action, while also representing something of a minor miracle in terms of great art surfacing from the depths of a wildly toxic environment. Other bands are certainly more notorious for their infighting, and others still have tussled with public detractors more memorably, but the members of this band seemed to fight with everyone, all the time — and they're still sniping at each other today, even though they broke up nearly 40 years ago. How they managed to eke out four studio albums will forever remain a mystery.

By the time they started working on their third LP, 1986's The Queen Is Dead, they were so pissed at their label that the record's release was delayed by more than six months. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that their frontman, singer Morrissey, was and remains pathologically incapable of keeping himself from infuriating everyone within the sound of his voice; in the months leading up to Queen's release, he made headlines for shitting on Band Aid, quipping that the famine-relief single inflicted musical torture equivalent to the starving of an entire nation.

This bitter brew somehow produced an album that built on the Smiths' momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. The Queen Is Dead peaked at No. 59 and went gold in the States while soaring to No. 2 in Britain — a bit of a comedown from Meat Is Murder's chart-topping success, but still a sign of a young act blossoming. Singles "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" and "Bigmouth Strikes Again" didn't do shit here, but they were both Top 30 overseas. From the outside, it looked like the Smiths were poised to rule the world, but that was just a mirage — mere months later, leading up to the release of their fourth and final LP, they imploded, never to reunite.

First Impressions: I can state with confidence that this album would have had nothing to offer me in 1986, but I can also acknowledge that my decades-long antipathy toward the Smiths had nearly zero to do with their actual music, and was instead nearly 100 percent guilt by association. Throughout my adolescence, these guys were perennial favorites with the same kids who liked to wear a lot of black, were frequently larded in Cure-inspired makeup, and were deeply serious about things that seemed at least faintly silly to me. And then there's Morrissey, whose entire deal might as well be the answer to the never-asked question "What if Chet Baker had been born a couple of decades later and was an even bigger asshole?"

I don't know if The Queen Is Dead held any major surprises for me at this late date — I'm familiar enough with the band's general vibe that I probably wouldn't have picked one of their records for this column, if not for the fact that the 19-year-old is currently delving into their catalog, and recently announced that "I Know It's Over" is his favorite Smiths song — but this is another example of Blindspotting doing its job, because I enjoyed the record a lot more than I expected to, and certainly a hell of a lot more than I would have had I listened to it upon its initial release.

The members of the Smiths contained multitudes during the period when they were bickering with the world and one another while also making hit records, and their music is just as complex. Not that these songs are necessarily difficult to understand or play, but there's a lot going on — they continue to have a reputation for being melodramatic, mopey fucks, but there's also a lot of humor here. I mean, just looking at the track listing tips you off to a certain amount of goofing going on — no truly serious band would come up with song titles like "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" or "Vicar in a Tutu" or "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" — but if you lean in and listen, you'll hear a lot of winking and elbow nudges. "Cemetry Gates" is Morrissey's (arguably annoyingly clever) rejoinder to critics who accused him of being prone to plagiarism, and the honestly lovely "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" is a love song with one eye toward comically cartoonish ways to die. And then there's "Bigmouth Strikes Again," whose protagonist says the dumbest shit and then laments, "Now I know how Joan of Arc felt" — a line I know I would have taken at face value in '86 rather than seeing it as the joke it's obviously meant to be.

All that being said, this is still not the type of thing I'd listen to purely for pleasure. These are well-written songs, but I would also argue that there are good reasons that my 19-year-old is into the Smiths right now, and a lot of them probably have to do with the fact that this is the type of melancholy, melodramatic music that's meant to appeal to younger ears. I don't know if I'm really all that mad at myself for dismissing this band while they were still together, or waiting this long to listen to one of their records start to finish. While I was absolutely guilty of indulging in adolescent over-the-topness in my listening, it generally involved overwhelmingly bombastic shit like "I Go to Extremes" or, I dunno, Winger's "Miles Away." This is absolutely not to say that either of those songs are anywhere near better than any given track on The Queen Is Dead; it is merely to say that the heart wants what it wants, and I know enough about what mine wanted in the late '80s and early '90s to know I have never been a member of the Smiths' target demographic.

Hidden Gems: According to Spotify, "Vicar in a Tutu" has received the fewest plays of any song on this album, which mildly perplexes me; I think it's far more entertaining than its nearest competitor, the aggravatingly lugubrious "Never Had No One Ever." There's no such thing as a hidden gem on an album like this, but for the sake of filling out a paragraph, let's go with "Vicar."