This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Smith’s seminal chart-topping album, “Meat is Murder,” which came out on Valentine’s Day in 1985. On the title track the famously vegetarian Morrisey bemoans the slaughtering of “beautiful creatures,” the fanciful frying of flesh, the joyful carving of calves and the festive slicing of holiday meat-treats. As for that farmstand bacon the Butcher had for breakfast on Sunday that “smelled just as good as it looked? “Kitchen aromas aren’t very homely /It’s not “comforting”, cheery or kind /It’s sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder.”
But 1985 was a long time ago — back in the day of feed lots and slaughterhouses. Back when the average consumer thought of meat as something that arrived on the earth ground or cubed and wrapped in plastic. The original Times (UK) review of the album called “Meat is Murder” the Smiths’ “most disturbing song to date” and “enough to make anyone think twice as they survey the freezer cabinet in [the chain supermarket] Sainsbury’s.” But now we are educated, aware and compassionate. Are we still killers? Everywhere (okay, mainly in New York and San Francisco and possibly a few pockets in LA where they don’t drink human blood for fun) conscientious carnivores are answering Morrisey’s rhetorical question: “Do you know how animals die?” with a proud and resounding, “Yes We Do! (And we think this makes it okay to eat them!)”
Would Morrisey feel any different if he knew the Butcher’s bacon had been purchased from the local farmer market and carved off the ass of a free range, grass fed, heritage swine from less than 100 miles away?
Not likely. Because he is not one of those faux vegetarians who, in the organic locavore whole-animal-utilization craze have found all the rationalization they need to dust off their steak knives. Or go wrist-deep in a gallon of pigs blood as the case may be. Morrissey would likely tell all those spareitarians, flexitarians and weekend tree huggers that anyway you choose to slice that happy heifer, it’s still murder.
Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, told the Times Online that it was this song (and not apparently Morrisey’s constant nagging) that finally pushed him into the herbivorism. “All Morrissey’s ‘You shouldn’t be eating that’ just washed over me, but the lyrics of the song just got to me. I’ve been a vegetarian ever since and so is my wife.” (Because, before the song, what? He thought that meat grew on trees?)
But even those who were so swayed by Morrissey’s bellowing “MURDER” have to chuckle a little bit at the heifer angst. Because we can all laugh at ourselves. Especially if we are Morrissey