TS: "born to run" v. "everyday is like sunday"

Oh, and because the live performance of "Born To Run" on the 2000 tour was the best thing I've ever seen anywhere any time ever.

similarities: both the NJ shore and the type of british seaside place Moz is singing about are shabby, blue-collar places that have seen better days. moz sings about what sounds like a nuclear holocaust striking the town; asbury park nowadays looks like it was hit by a nuclear bomb (which is why new jerseyans call it "newark/camden-by-the-sea"). both songs play with pre-conceptions folks have about shore towns and what folks do in such places, and aim to invoke memories of same in their listeners. both are almost-stereotypical distillations of their images (Bruce: earnest, passionate blue-collar guy with a thing for cars and a habit of describing cars in florid poetry. Morrissey: as one contemporary review had it re "edils," "it's the sort of vacation one imagines Morrissey having," with his own lyrical floridness). both reflect, modernize and re-situate their somewhat out-of-fashion musical obsessions in contexts in line with both their personas and contemporary music (bruce's love of spector-esque over-the-top production and duane eddy-esque twang, tarted up into a seventies pop radio treat. morrissey's love of orchestrated early-sixties british pop with shimmering late-eighties guitar). both simultaneously universal and inpenetrable to those "not in the know" already re the artists' personality cults and the geography. and neither seems too thrilled to be stuck in their respective seaside towns.

Cross reference: "Atlantic City" for that same earnest, passionate, blue collar thing. Never a big fan of Springsteen, growing up in England, however, and being familiar with the Southports, Blackpools, Rhyl's, and Skegnesses of the world, I could relate. "Born to Run" was perhaps a little too bombastic, so I preferred "Atlantic City".

"Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen"

We have all accepted this as quite normal, for about 30 years.

But ... when were the clothes stolen? On a past occasion now being recalled?

Or just now?

In which case, this is not so much dreary routine as a crisis. The character being addressed in the second person (which I take to be a general "interpellated subject position" for the listener or even the singer here, more than a specific other character) is going to be naked, or rather, just wearing swimming trunks (?), for the rest of the song (unless the rest of the song takes place temporally earlier - fairly unlikely).

They're both love songs too.
― Tom (Groke), Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Tom Ewing, a great pop critic, said this with sage authority 17 years ago, but provided no evidence for it, perhaps because it's not true.

xp I always interpreted this as the character returning from skinny dipping to find their clothes done, it’s definitely dejected, hence “trudging”. Each step is slow and drags, grey skin under grey sky with nothing to break the line, etc.

they've been stolen by immigrants

Gyac, I agree, this is plausible, but as I say - it creates a crisis for the character, doesn't it? It's not just "by 'eck, it's a grey day on this promenade, better have tea and etch a quick postcard", but "I'm in a town [perhaps far from where I live] where my clothes have been stolen and I have no one to turn to". A nightmare scenario!

Noodle Vague OTM (but yes, I did always hear it as that the character's clothes are gone upon their return from swimming - it never occurred to me that this might have happened on a previous occasion). Anyway, "Born to Run" is way better, no contest, but I do often respond to stressful situations by thinking to myself "come Armageddon! Come Armageddon! Come!" xp

Is the point not about this place being the sort of soulless hellhole that drags everyone down with it, so like it’s not a crisis per se, it’s just yet another heap of shit to add to the towering slagheap?

"Were" is past tense though. You wouldnt get to the bench and say "oh no my clothes were stolen!"

Wait, that's exactly how I would say it. "My clothes are stolen"? Is that British usage or something?

I agree with Ledge about the tense.

An underlying question is: does the character live in the town?

That would make the despair more relevant - if you found it awful and also couldn't easily leave.

But the song also has a certain connotation of the 'British seaside holiday', as though the character has specially *travelled to* the town. Which is certainly supported by the postcard detail.

In the former scenario, the character could at least go home for a change of clothes, assuming the thieves hadn't also taken their keys. (Why did they take clothes but not money?) In the latter, the character could conceivably do that by going back to their hotel, unless they are only here on a day trip.

I broadly agree with Gyac about overall implication, but I don't think that losing your clothes would be easy to cope with.

If I wrote a song in which, in the first line, the character's clothes were stolen, presumably leaving them half-naked, then I wouldn't leave the implications of that unaddressed for the whole rest of the song.

"My clothes have been stolen!" - ok "oi some fucker's gone and nicked my clothes" obv.

xp to sund4r.

Oh, that's interesting. I think most North Americans would say "my clothes were stolen" in that situation. "My clothes have been stolen" might be something I would write (especially if I were writing a 19th century period piece) but not say.

One could go with the Ledge reading and say: this is a resort the character visits again and again, and the beach comes with a memory of their clothes once having been stolen there.

BTW the video of this song, an absolute classic of post-Smiths aesthetics, depicts a vegetarian teenage girl living, frustratedly, in a seaside town (not, for instance, a young man visiting one).

"stolen" fits with the tense the narrator's using. Jokes about his politics aside I think we can say that Moz was never so carefully precise that he'd consider the wider implications of the scene, it's surely just a bleak joke about the kind of place the song describes. Have never thought that the character described is definitely visiting the place, tehy might well live there.

The postcard writer has to be visiting but the narrator could be a local telling them they don't belong there.

There are some specific towns near me that this song effortlessly evokes btw

could be a local resident doing some ironic postcard writing.

I also wonder about the cheap tray.

"the clothes were stolen" = the singer himself stole the clothes earlier and wore them to the beach

when he returns to the beach -- such is the glum aspect of this benighted place -- there they are. yet they remain "stolen", his only in a sense he feels glumly unable to claim

doubly glum

When I lived in a miserable English seaside town I'd write postcards to friends who'd managed to move away, the lucky dogs. In so far as I ever thought about this lyric, that was what I thought was going on.

In fact reading back its important I think to remember that Morrissey is very rarely observing anything as a writer beyond other texts: movies,TV, Betjeman in this cas. His details are rarely sharp or precise

"win yourself a cheap tray? I dunno, seaside stalls have tat for prizes sometimes

But does he use the subjunctive mood when writing the postcard?

I think it's worth noting that Springsteen played "Everyday is Like Sunday" on his radio show over the summer, I assume largely as a literal-minded joke.

I'm guessing he played the recording but I'm sort of hoping "played" means he covered it.

in his stolen clothes

"the clothes were stolen" = the singer himself stole the clothes earlier and wore them to the beach

when he returns to the beach -- such is the glum aspect of this benighted place -- there they are. yet they remain "stolen", his only in a sense he feels glumly unable to claim

― mark s, Monday, November 30, 2020

The perversity, along with the eloquence, of this is tremendous and inspiring.

Also OTM

Tim, I have often written postcards to people from home. I agree it's highly possible. There is no Internet in this song after all. It's before even the days of Sarah Records posting fanzines and notes to people. It's very much a postal era vision.

Still, taking it on balance, postcards to most people still do convey 'wish you were here' from a holiday destination, which tends to make me think that is the idea here, rather than Tim's quite plausible idea.

sund4r, I do think that "How I dearly wish I was not here" is what he (or even she) actually writes on the postcard.

I've never known, still don't know, what "greased tea" is.

It would be quite Morrisseyesque to write a song complaining about somewhere you didn't have to be, I guess.

TIL that British people write (or wrote) postcards from their places of residence. It sounds like a lovely custom.

"Greased tea" = cheap diner tea made in a cup that was so poorly rinsed that it still feels a bit oily, I thought.

That's a good answer, Sund4r, to an otherwise difficult question.

"Were" is past tense though. You wouldnt get to the bench and say "oh no my clothes were stolen!"

I've never known, still don't know, what "greased tea" is.

I just assumed, given it's Morrissey, he meant "tea made for you by an Italian"

While we're talking grammar, can I note that "through" always bothered me a little in "at night, we ride through mansions of glory on suicide machines"?: to my ears, that sounds like he's crashing through the walls of the mansions on his bike. My logical mind always wants it to be something like "near" or "among" or "'round", although "through" probably rolls off the tongue best.

"Ride past" would work too. I do really love those opening lines otherwise!

xpost

There's definitely something odd about either the tense or the POV in that first line. It seems to imply some foreknowledge that your clothes have been stolen; even as you're trudging back to the bench, you're identifying it in your mind as "the bench where your clothes were stolen."

Yeah, I think my brain sometimes replaces "through" with "to," although I actually like "through." There's something dreamlike about it, suggestive of castles in the air - like, mansions you can ride through are by definition not real.

Lily Dale: re bench, yes, I quite agree, hence my sense that it's referring to a past occasion, during multiple visits to this resort.

I agree with you about the Boss lyric also, it works as fantastical.

Ah, interesting. I thought the point was that the mansions are oppressively real but maybe their very unattainability makes them seem a bit surreal and dreamlike.

I took it that the "streets of a runaway American dream" are the oppressive workday reality; the night transforms them briefly into mansions of glory.

xpost to the pinefox: It's odd, though - the bench line - because most people would throw in a "once" or something to time-stamp it. Cf John Prine: "In a laundromat not too far from the Alamo/ Sits the girl who stole my records very long ago." The absence of a time marker gives it the impression of existing in two time-frames at once.

Oh, I see. I thought he was contrasting his workaday reality with the luxurious lives of the people who employ him to sweat it out on the streets but I acknowledge that it might not be socialist realism.

xp

Yeah, I guess it depends on whether you see it as literal, in the "Mansion on the Hill" sense of riding around past houses they can't afford, or drawing on religious symbolism - "in my Father's house are many mansions" - to create a sense of infinite richness and possibility at night that does not exist during the day.

I think the latter. Mansions of glory as a transfiguration of the real. That's a good reading.