Your thoughts Morrissey's lyrics in "Rubber Ring"

that's my favorite part...geez this song catapults me right back to 10th grade...

To me the most important thing about this song was that it seemed Morrissey was contemplating (prophetically) a day in his future when his 15 minutes of fame were over - it was him wondering if all these people who now claimed to love him would still love him later when they were older, when he was older. It was him warning, ominously "please don't forget me, because these songs were there for you". Well, not so long ago it seemed most people HAD forgotten Morrissey. Or at the very least he was not adored in the public eye on the scale he once was.

I too had lost interest in him until You Are The Quarry and I consider it a welcome, almost miraculous thing that he has once again tasted success - and for this I'm very happy for him. He proved these Rubber Ring lyrics wrong! Who'd have thought!

Incidentally I always thought he was just singing "la dee day la dee day..." rather than "rubber ring".

It's interesting to hear people contemplating what he might have meant by "rubber ring", though. I'd honestly not ever given it the slightest thought!

agreed. what i'd really like is for people who haven't heard this in years to go back and really listen again. to my 33 year old ears, it really struck me how gorgeously realistic the sentiment is from the perspective of both fan and performer.

my favorite line has to be "yes you're older now and you're a clever swine, but they were the only ones who ever stood by you."

i.e. as a TRANSMISSION FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE !

Yes, but the interesting thing about it is (and I am 34, btw) I KNEW it at the time that he was reflecting upon what the future would be, I knew what he was asking of me, but it had no meaning, then. So it makes it that much more interesting as something to consider now. How many times in our lives do we have a sense, IN THE MOMENT, of how the present will appear to us in retrospect? I mean, I can point to two particularly happy times in my life and in only one of them did I have an intuitive sense that it would appear to me in the future to be "some of the best years of my life". It's a rare thing. Not impossible, but rare. It's something to be cherished when that kind of inspiration is present, and I think for Morrissey, it was there. It's like Nick Drake's song "Fruit Tree". Who could read those lyrics and say he really had no idea at all that he would become famous after his death? Who can REALLY say that? I don't think anyone could. Personally I'm happy just that he had the notion, even if he didn't really recognize what it was.

but for me the real goosebumps come when I imagine this song being played 50 or more years from now:

Yeah, but 50 years? We'd be really lucky if that were the case. Not saying it couldn't happen, but...lucky. I'm not ready to think about that yet, frankly.

The song is an example of everything that is brilliant about the Smiths: the beautiful concision of Morrissey's lyrics, so understanding of his audience, married to such a perfect tune: that funky bass/guitar is everything he has lacked since Viva Hate, really: the rhythm section is tight as hell. AND, in typical Smiths/Moz fashion it was released as a b-side

I've always seen it in similar terms - the rubber ring being the lifebelt - something you chuck people when they've gone overboard.

The sample at the end "You are sleeping / You do not want to believe..." comes from an obscure EP (trust ole Mozzer to collect such things) that originally came with a book titled "Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead". The voice belongs to Nadia Fowler, who was translating into English an alleged Electronic Voice Phenomenon. I heard the whole thing when fellow Smiffsspotter Simon Goddard played all these wonderful source clips and alternate outtakes at the Smiffs symposium.

As for my personal thoughts about this song, I'll add that when I first heard this song back in the 80s I thought it wonderfully prescient and sad. The sadness has become even more crushing with age -- the awareness of the inevitability of growing out of the fierce emotions of adolescence AND the impotence to stem this waning passion.

I used to be comforted by "hear my voice and think of me kindly" partly because it foretold that someday I would be happy and laughing. But now this song makes me more sad than happy.

It gave me a weird feeling to recall that earlier in 2004, I had discussed my flagging mania for Morrissey with an uberfan who keeps fairly quiet behind the scenes, and I used "Rubber Ring" to illustrate my despair at being unable to do anything about the future despite knowing it and the alarm of realising that the future is here now. How did we end up middle-aged and jaded so fast? And then a couple weeks later Morrissey went and sang "Rubber Ring" at the concert we flew thousands of miles from opposite ends of the globe to attend (despite our declining passion).

Maybe songs on these subjects are always being written, and I don't notice. But I've always associated these three.

I dunno but these lines always throw me a bit. So accusatory "you're a clever swine" it's almost an attack on the listener...

Me being me, I never really paid major attention to the lyric until, oh, about six years or so after I first heard it -- and the Smiths were never a teen angst band for me, they and El Moz were part and parcel of a lot of different things I got into in college. So for me it's an interesting observational song but one actually divorced from the actual music in my not-really-lonely-at-all adolescence -- including bands I still dearly love like New Order, the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche as well as those I truly have left behind. Actually one thing the song possesses which the 'you' apparently does not but which I did at the time and still do was savage, self-aware humor. So again, the song is an impressionistic sentiment rather than a 'ah, story of my life, that' feeling.