That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

It might be dishonest, or maybe just incomplete, to write about the Smiths in anything other than the first person. Music fans who care about the band all have stories of how they discovered them, and most have the same story—the one of adolescent alienation and hapless longing—that Smiths’ songs already contain. My version goes like this: sixteen, clumsy, and shy (actually, I may have been closer to thirteen), and above all deeply and decadently sad, I took a trip to the shopping mall that was a half-hour drive away from my small and small-minded hometown. I walked out with a CD copy of Louder Than Bombs in my backpack, and listened to it for the first time through headphones in the back of my mother’s car while she drove me home. That night I lay in awe on my bedroom floor and replayed the album’s twenty-four songs again, and then again.