"How tiresome", you say, "Why do you insist on splitting hairs?"
It's unlike you to misconstrue my meaning, Worm - I did not say "how tiresome" it is to do anything, much less split hairs. I often love splitting hairs, it sometimes leads one down an unexpectedly interesting path. Nor did I phrase it as a question, nor was my comment directed solely at you. I used the word "pedantic" to address the point I was about to make in a somewhat (I thought) lighthearted manner. Perhaps a
or a
would have helped here.
If a band survives as a brand, retaining its position on top of the mountain, its demise can neither be total nor, I would further argue, all that messy in a negative sense.
I do believe that a band's demise can be painful and complete for the people involved, without being detrimental to that band's place in history. John Lennon reacted to all the hullabaloo over The Beatles breakup by pointing out that they were just a rock band, nothing terribly important at all. To John it was well over, and he was relieved to move on. Ditto George, Paul and (I suppose) Ringo. In the minds of the Beatles, their demise was total.
Ditto The Smiths. To this day Morrissey takes pains to point out that The Smiths are a relic from an impossibly long time ago, and he is not the person he was then. He's definitively moved on, even though most of us have not. That demise was total, too; to the members of a band it is like a death or a divorce - a breaking point in life which marks the start of something new. To the rest of us it is an entirely different matter.
You likened their death to a carcass. Well, as you know, nothing's better in the middle of a forest than a dead animal's carcass. The messier the corpse, the more life it breeds. Out of The Beatles' carcass came four (okay, three) individuals who made a lot of good post-Beatles music-- not as good as the original band, but often very good-- while The Beatles' back catalog continued to sell like gangbusters, and continues to do so today. Out of death, life.
Yes, this is so; we all feed on those (metaphorical) carcasses every day - it's a beautiful thing, and it's part of the transcendent nature of art, and of the artist. There's no need to drag meat into this.
Which is how I view the The Smiths: not the full stop of a car crash, as with Milli Vanilli (or Lynyrd Skynyrd), but the transition of matter from one form to another that takes place in and around a dead animal's carcass (ironic imagery, in the case of The Smiths). The great bands don't die. They survive as monuments even as their constituent souls undergo metempsychosis into different beings.
Yes, great bands continue to survive as monuments, or ghosts, or echoes, or layers in a cultural palimpsest. They are frozen in time like (I can't help myself here) those figures on Keat's urn:
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
It's a wondrous form of immortality - not for the artist as a person, but for that part of the artist that is expressed in their art.
Which begs the reassessment of what we should expect from our great bands, and how we should define success. The Beatles are more successful as a dead band than survivors like the Rolling Stones, just as The Smiths are more successful as ghosts than (say) Echo & The Bunnymen as grizzled veterans. This we can call the Obi-Wan Kenobi rule.
Yes, how does one define success? From a musician's point of view I imagine success is a living thing - taking joy in what you do in the moment. If I may paraphrase David Lynch (amongst so many others): the pleasure in in the process, not in the results. If you are not happy with what you are doing, then quit.
The Beatles continue to inspire, being crystallized in time, uncorruptible; The Stones are zombies who show up at stadiums to drag their collective carcass around just a few more times before allowing it to disintegrate completely. If the Stones are happy, then I can't fault them.
Poor Echo and The Bunnymen, time has not been too kind.
I kinda forgot what Obi-Wan Kenobi did - you must be referring to the way he sacrificed himself as a man, so that he could live on as a motivational speaker. I would agree with that, I suppose.
Johnny was right: four albums were enough.
I'm sure that J. Marr has made his peace with The Smiths. They probably had another great album in them, had the stars lined up just right, but they seldom do. We're all very lucky to have what we have.