Thinking with Music: There is a [queer] light that never goes out

Claire Birkenshaw

“But don’t forget the songs that made you cry
And the songs that saved your life” (Marr and Morrissey, 1985)

As his 2023 Glastonbury ‘songs of The Smiths’ set with Stockport band, Blossoms, drew to conclusion with the playing of arguably one of The Smiths’ “best ever songs” (Marr, 2016, p.224), There is a Light That Never Goes Out (Marr and Morrissey, 1986b), singer Rick Astley looped triumphantly his microphone above his head as if marking the circumference of a giant imaginary crown that should be placed on his head following this crowd conquering performance (BBC Music, 2023). It is an exuberant display of performative peacocking pageantry, and jubilant majesty; a potent reminder of music’s ability to move the listener in ways seemingly beyond their control. Watching from home, via the BBC’s Glastonbury broadcast, I sat mesmerised, motionless, and emotionally moved by the spectacle of an enthralled congregation of thousands being carried rapturously along with words and music described as “perfect” by the song’s co-writer, guitarist Johnny Marr (Marr, 2016, p.233). Given the reaction of the crowd, there is no doubt that the song has indeed become the “universally loved” anthem Marr imagined it would be when recorded in 1986 (ibid., p.250). Unquestionably, the song has achieved anthem status. Perplexingly though, the song is not recognised as a queer anthem (see Rolling Stone, 2023): in my view, it should be.

Like other forms of ‘cultural capital’, such as film, music, as Laughey (2006, p.1, original emphasis) reminds us, is “very often a product of its time – a reflection of the here and now.” While music is listened to across the lifespan, Laughey argues music has a “special relationship” with youth (ibid.). Not only is this due to the fact that music is “delivered and sold” (ibid.) to youth audiences, it is also because music is “one of the most readily available tools” (Saarikallio, 2019, p.89) used in identity formation to help youth navigate the terrains of life as they work out who they are. As such, music is considered by Saarikallio to be “the playground and kingdom of young people” (ibid., p.92). This may explain why listening to music can act as a powerful “recaller of memories” (Laughey, 2006, p.1, original emphasis), particularly those formed during youth. However, for queer youth music may serve as a reminder of exclusion. This is because the doxa, “taken-for-granted” (Bourdieu, [1977] 2005, p.166), of cultural capital production, such as music, is heteronormatively dominant, which ensures the “radical censorship” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.257) of queer romance through its lyrical absence. In effect, music for queer youth results in the experience of ‘symbolic violence’, or “affective violence” (Threadgold, 2020, p.11), because, as Morrissey expresses pointedly in the song Panic (Marr and Morrissey, 1986a), it “says nothing to [them] about [their queer] life.” However, to address this ‘radical censorship’ of songs about queer romance, queer youth become “imaginative and dynamic readers of popular culture” (Lipton, 2008, p.163) through their “queer reading practices” (ibid.) which seeks to “decode text against the mainstream, heterosexual grain” (ibid., p.168), as exampled by scholar Paul Baker’s recollection of growing up in Britain in the 1980s in his book, Outrageous! The Story of Section 28 and Britain’s Battle for LGBT Education (2022).  

Growing up queer, argues Lipton (2008), is isolating. Not only are queer youth “isolated from their heterosexual peers” (ibid., p.163), they are also disconnected from each other, particularly in the sharing of queer meanings decoded from musical cultural capital. Furthermore, this sense of queer isolation and disconnection can be purposefully intended by government and media, as demonstrated in Britain under the “authoritarian populist formation” (Smith, 1994, p.29) of Thatcherism during the 1980s which used the ‘moral panic’ of “dangerous queerness” (ibid., p.32) to establish “a strong consensus in favour of homophobic policies across the electorate” (ibid., p.31). This anti-queer milieu formed the context for bands, such as The Smiths, to react against, thus shaping their musical output and imagery. As Marr recollects, “When I was writing songs [before The Smiths], I decided I wanted my songs to be feminine” (OxfordUnion, 2019); due in part to the influence of smart female role models on his youth; and second, to upend the doxa of music industry’s sexism. This musical philosophy of Marr’s harmonised perfectly with Morrissey’s superb ability to write lyrics that were observational, humorous, and “wonderfully vague” (The Smiths Archive, 2022) with the forming of The Smiths in 1982. During a short and incredibly productive period (1982-1987), The Smiths produced a raft of sexually ambiguous songs that not only pushed back against Thatcher’s ‘morality’ project but also offered an array of ‘life-saving’ lines for queer youth to detect, decode, and “bend interpretation” (Lipton, 2008, p.168) with a hope that at some point in the future, when queer youth are “dancing and laughing, and finally living” (Marr and Morrissey, 1985) they will think kindly of The Smiths’ songs that sang to them, that saved them like a rubber ring thrown to someone drowning. However, there is a Smiths’ song that seems to act as a rubber ring more than any other: There is a Light That Never Goes Out. In my view this song captures fully the “climate of moral distaste” (Weeks, 2018, p.323) undergirding anti-queer prejudice and discrimination affecting queer youth’s lives during the 1980s.  

Composed in 1986, at the height of “the press-led hysteria about the ‘gay plague’” (Weeks, 2018, p.323), There is a Light That Never Goes Out relays the song’s protagonist longing for the rites of youth romance enjoyed and taken-for-granted by their heterosexual peers: collected in a car and taken on a life affirming romantic date. The song portrays the dream of release from the deadening daily demands of domestic dreariness in the hope they, and their date, will find a place “Where there’s music, and there’s people, and they are young and alive” to counteract the sickening dread brought on by having to fight against the familial imposition of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (McCann and Monaghan, 2020, p.66) on their emerging sense of a queer self. As the protagonist heartachingly recognises, they no longer experience familial love at home, and are made to feel unwelcome. In effect, their sense of being has been rejected and pushed away by the very people who are trusted to love them unconditionally. Their experience of familial denunciation is so profound it informs all other forms of social interaction, including intimacy: the “strange fear” of rejection. Furthermore, the song alludes to the experience of a ‘queer temporality’ (Halberstam, 2008), which differs to the optimistic ‘heteronormative temporality’ (McCann and Monaghan, 2020, p.215), in the sense that trying to imagine a positive queer future in a country riddled with rampant homophobia feels hopeless: the date is imagined to be the pinnacle of their short existence, that if something tragic were to happen, like being hit by a “double-decker bus”, then to die by the side of someone who reciprocated their love, rather than alone like the victims of AIDS, would be “heavenly” indeed.

As the song approaches its conclusion, the protagonist repeats the line “There is a light and it never goes out”, as if to reaffirm the song’s message to reassure the listener. For me, this line can be read in two interacting ways: on one hand, the light represents inextinguishable and defiant queerness, much to the chagrin of the homophobes; on the other, the light represents songs with hidden queer meanings that sing directly to queer youth in their bedrooms to remind them they are not alone and that these songs will always be there for them, just like There is a Light That Never Goes Out.

Britain in the 1980s was a hostile country for queer youth to grow up in. It was an era of prejudice, discrimination, silence and violence. Its effects continue to influence the lives of those affected. For some, Smiths’ songs were the life-saving cultural capital rubber rings that helped keep them afloat in the deluge of homophobia. Of all the rubber rings The Smiths crafted for queer youth, There is a Light That Never Goes Out has stood the test of time and is “universally loved.” It is now time to recognise it as queer cultural capital, and the queer anthem it undoubtedly is.

References

Baker, P. (2022) Outrageous! The Story of Section 28 and Britain’s Battle for LGBT Education. London: Reakton Books Ltd.

BBC Music (2023) Rick Astley with Blossoms: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (Glastonbury 2023) [Online video]. 24 June. Available from:< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ0rEnp8kmw> [Accessed 28 December 2023].

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Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant L. J. D. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Halberstam, J. (2008) What’s that smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives. In: Driver, S. ed. Queer Youth Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 27-50.

Laughey, D. (2006) Music and Youth Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Lipton, M. (2008) Queer readings of Popular Culture: Searching [to] Out the Subtext. In: Driver, S. ed. Queer Youth Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 163-180.

Marr. J. (2016) Set the Boy Free: The Autobiography. London: Century. 

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McCann, H. and Monaghan, W. (2020) Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures. London: Red Globe Press.

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Rolling Stone (2023) The 50 Most Inspirational LGBTQ Songs of All Time. Rolling Stone [Online]. 28 June. Available from:< https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-inspirational-lgbtq-anthems-pride-songs-1234773829/callum-scott-1234775101/> [Accessed 27 December 2023].

Saarikallio, S. (2019) Music as a resource for agency and empowerment in identity construction. In: McFerran, K., Derrington, P. and Saarikallio, S.  eds. Handbook of Music, Adolescents, and Wellbeing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.89-98.

Smith, A. M. (1994) New Right discourse on race and sexuality: Britain, 1968-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

The Smiths Archive (2022) The Smiths: The South Bank Show, ITV, UK -18 October 1987 [Online video]. 2 March. Available from:< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFQd6ZHcKwM> [Accessed 29 June 2023].

Threadgold, S. (2020) Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Weeks, J. (2018) Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. 4^th ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

Suggested citation:

Birkenshaw, C. (2023) Thinking with Music: There is a [Queer] Light That Never Goes Out. Altered States of Academia, 28 December [Online blog]. Available from:<https://alteredstatesofacademia.blog/2023/12/28/thinking-with-music-there-is-a-queer-light-that-never-goes-out/> [Accessed ?].