Twenty years ago, arguably the most influencial British band since the Beatles released their debut single on the UK's independent Rough Trade label. The Smiths' "Hand in Glove" was described by singer/lyricist Stephen Morrissey as "the most important record in the world," and was summarily hailed by members of the music press as "debut record of the year." It is unimaginable that a pop song could matter so much in the U.S. in 2003, America's popular music machine gravitates toward synthetic beats and the construction of pop stars indistinguishable from exotic dancers. Lyrics are buried in the mix or undercut with vocoder effects, processes that essentially divorce both the singer and the listener from the lyrics content.

Such an enterprise would be impossible with the music of The Smiths, too serious by half for production gimmickry. The aforementioned single, for example, is a song about two lovers watching the death throes of English socialism "hidden by rags," waiting for "the Good Life out there somewhere" that was never to come. To put The Smiths' initial lament into perspective, it was recorded at the same time mindless fluff like "Wham Rap [Enjoy What You Do]" dominated the charts. The band challenged convention in the best possible way -- by creating an unimpeachable alternative to the decay around them and by making literally reactionary music that they thought more closely adhered to the values of historical England than that of their contemporaries.

The Smiths' music, after all, came a few years after the self-conscious nihilism of punk rock gave way to the New Wave's frilly irrelevance. In the pop music of the early '80s, the Manchester, UK band heard music as one-dimensional as anything Orwell described the proles listening to and responded with one of the most resonant debut albums in English history (appropriately enough, the LP was released in 1984). At the time, New Musical Express said that when lyricist Morrissey "claims to be 'a country mile behind the world' you believe him, largely because his view of the city is one visibly strained through early '60's films of late '50's novels -- a notion of reality three times removed."

Keeping in mind that that quote was taken from a sympathetic reviewer, it is easy to sense the difficulty the UK music press had grasping the band's concerns. But Morrissey knew exactly what he was writing about and why it was being written. His comments to the English style magazine The Face in 1985 regarding "Suffer Little Children," a song about England's famed "Moors Murders," sound as if they could have been lifted from a discussion of Elizabeth Smart's recent plight:

"I happened to live on the streets where, close by, some of the victims had been picked up. Within that community, news of the crimes totally dominated all attempts at conversation. It was like the worst thing that had ever happened...ungraspably evil...almost absurd really. I remember it at times like I was living in a soap opera..."

There is a very real consciousness of an almost unbridgeable gap between reality and perception at the heart of Morrissey's lyrics for the Smiths. That gap imbues those lyrics with poignance, humanity, and an essential conservatism. When his pop contemporaries came together to craft grandstanding, fatuous bilge like "Feed The World [Do They Know It's Christmas?]" and "We Are The World," Morrissey and The Smiths stood defiantly alone, crafting songs whose concerns extended far beyond those of charity-record slogans. Early B-side "Jeane," typical of so many Smiths songs, painted a picture of lovers spent by the squalor in which they live:

"[T]here's ice in the sink where we bathe/How can you call this a home/when you know it's a grave?"

Other songs, like 1986's "The Queen Is Dead," express horror at tabloid spectacles like "nine-year-old toughs pushing drugs," by way of arguing that England, like the Queen, no longer existed in a meaningful way. The evidence of social collapse in the United States has been documented across the political spectrum, just as it had been in England in the 1980s. Yet, unlike in England, our pop music offers no meaningful critique of such a phenomenon. Some argue that the music that charts stateside has triggered the deterioration in our social fabric, a position that is never meaningfully refuted. After all, what else can such music do?

When Christina Aguilera boxes in a sports bra on a Top-10 music video or when two barely legal Russian girls French kiss in another video to sell what is otherwise a thoroughly generic and compromised product, it is easy to imagine that there is an inverse relationship between smut and paucity of content. Furthermore, with pop music debauched in such a manner, it is impossible to imagine radio programmers catering to a mindset that is conservative in the historical sense, a mindset that demands meaning in its music. With that in mind, it is arguable that the seemingly parochial, defiantly English sounds of The Smiths' back catalogue are more relevant to American conservatives than anything they could now hear in the increasingly homogenized wasteland of commercial radio.