HOW SOON IS NOW?

”How Soon Is Now?” is the 6th track on The Smith’s second studio album “Meat Is Murder” released in February 1985. Originally, “How Soon Is Now?” was not included on the British and European issues of the album. This seems odd in hindsight, but at the time, Jeff Travis and Rough Trade thought that “How Soon Is Now?” wasn’t sufficiently representative of the band’s overall sound to warrant a place on the track list.

“How Soon Is Now?” is arguably The Smiths’ most enduring track, despite humble beginnings as a B side to “William, It Was Really Nothing”. The song we are tackling here was covered by a multitude of acts throughout the 90’s resulting in some truly deplorable grunge and garage iterations. In 1996 Love Spit Love’s version (lamentable, but the most passable of the decade) became the title track of choice for the teenage witchy coven trope[1] of the time. The teenage-supernatural-uncanny routine endures but due to licenses and other boring things, the song has lost its intimate connection with the wiccan theme. Throughout the 00’s many of the “How Soon is Now?” covers were performed by female artists – perhaps because of the female empowerment connotations bestowed onto the track by the witchy affiliation? This trend culminated in 2003, when Russian duo, t.A.T.u. released their version for a new generation. In addition to which there are folk versions, string quartet versions, and my cousins and I recorded a “How Soon is Now?” tango back in the day… The song’s popularity is on one hand peculiar, as it does not conform to the usual pop hit structure, however “How Soon is Now?’ does provide the drama that has proven irresistible to many pop enthusiasts. The juxtaposition of the happy frivolity of pop with sad heartbroken tragedy transcends the normal, everyday-pop-happy and exalts the pedestrian anxious sulk to the divine status of melancholy.

Apart from all of this, How Soon is Now? is a very good question, often misunderstood and dismissed as a childishly obstinate question by bad adults, “How Soon is Now?” in contrast to “Are We There Yet?” is not a stupid question and should be tackled in earnest – and so we shall. But first, let’s talk about the music.

Johnny Marr wrote “How Soon Is Now?” along with “William, It Was Really Nothing” and “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get what I Want” during four days in London’s Earl’s Court in June 1984. I don’t know about you, but the latter is my morning shower song… Needless to say, I still haven’t got everything I want, but do have an absolute abundance of what I don’t… But it’s not about me, it’s about Johnny Marr in 1984. After delving into descriptions of the circumstances that produced these three pieces of music, that have been anthemic to so many, the following recur; tremolo, swamp, red light bulbs, Can, twin reverb, harmonic lick, delay, harmonizer, weed, Bo Diddley, etc. For those of you who (like me) are not muso types, tremolo is the sonic equivalent of a strobe light, twin reverb is a type of amp, harmonic lick is a short instrumental phrase and a harmonizer is a guitar pedal. Growing up, I had a cassette tape – because I am very old – on it my dad had recorded some covers of blues musicians by very white bands, one of them was Bo Diddley’s “Mona” covered by The Rolling Stones.

A Bo Diddly Rhythm can reach the deepest parts of the self, and lo and behold, there it is in “How Soon Is Now?”, albeit licked, delayed, reverbed, toked, harmonized, twinned, and so on. It is corporeal, visceral, humpy rut music distanced by sonic technique and effect. I think that is perhaps why it speaks to teenage girls who wish they were witches so they could have some power? I mean what is witchery if not power shrouded in reverb, smoke, slight-of-hand, strobing and occult mystique? We will get back to the disenfranchised later…

The lyrics of “How Soon is Now?” are almost as much of a patchwork of influences as the music is. Obvious quotations borrow from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus. This shows how widely Morrissey was reading before the wheels so radically came off his credibility bus, and this patchwork of inspiration rivals and compliments broad and eclectic influences of Johnny Marr’s music.

The lyric that most directly relates to the title is:

When you say it's gonna happen "now"
When exactly do you mean?
See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone

And is almost a direct quote from Rosen’s text where she asks: “How immediately can we be gratified? How soon is now?” Peculiarly this part of the lyrics is not included in some radio edits and I think takes a vital plot twist away from the song’s intentions, because it alludes to a broken promise. A broken promise is a deception, a falsehood, a mirage…

There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry
And you want to die

As in, it is all there right in front of you, it is happening to everyone else, you can almost touch it, and yet it is out of reach. Having established that a promise of real love has been made, to our audience/protagonist – who is young outsider – we are left wondering who might have made such an imprudent promise and what now is, if it even exists at all.

The narratives of our popular culture, more often than not, hinge and pivot around the idea of serendipity of true love. The notion that we are incomplete without another’s devotion to us is insidious and ubiquitous – a curse for weirdos and outsiders. In youth we have spent most of our time developing a personality, a personality that needs testing out on those around us, and if it doesn’t gel with our immediate surroundings, we need to seek out people and places where it can be validated. This endeavour is very difficult for introverts, for whom new people and places are very intimidating, yet paradoxically it is young introverts who need validation the most. So how do you find a community when you are a socially anxious outsider? Not in any old club, that’s for sure, no matter what all those perky extroverts say. If you have spent the whole summer in your room immersed in Milan Kundera’s oeuvre, your “chat” is not going to attract a wide audience, you need to find the niche where the other weirdos skulk.

And even if you do find the local weirdo niche, they might not be your kind of weirdo, never mind house the one other weirdo that will really love you. The odds are not great and the promise is false and cruel. However, what the niche is more likely to provide is strength in numbers. There is a great line in The Craft where a bus driver urges the teenage witches to be careful of the weirdos out there and one of them replies: “We are the weirdos mister”. The girls transcend their individual disenfranchisement and find empowerment in the coven.

Anyone who waits, waits too long. We are told to not live in the past, nor the future, we should be present and live in the now. But what is now? And what exactly did they mean when they said it would happen now?

Newtonians would say that “now” can only exist the moment it was conceived and is therefore redundant before the word can be uttered; that the notion of “now” itself is subjective and the word therefore is meaningless. Some more recent studies have shown that humans share an idea of “now” which lasts up to approximately 10 seconds, or the three bars of “How Soon Is Now?” between each recurring guitar “cry”, you know the bit when the guitar sounds like it’s shouting, “oh no!”. Whether Newtonian or not, “now” moves along with us as a cursor between what has, and hasn’t, happened. Whether that cursor is constant a la Newton, or whether oscillates in approximately 10 second pulses, “now” is as nebulously unfathomable as the broken promise, the highly engineered track, the patchwork of sounds and lyrics, the non-conforming structure to the song, etc. It is a straightforward romantic trope filtered through a plethora of tricks and subterfuge staged in a hall of mirrors, everything at least twice removed from what it really is.

In summary it seems someone less shy, but altogether more vulgar, led us all to believe that true love would be found now. The promise is made by the culture we inhabit, it sets the bar for our expectations, whether we’re from a long line of nothing in particular, something in general or very illustrious. We all want to make an impact and be impacted upon, and when we say we want it now, what we actually mean is that we want it to have already happened. Say one of my desires is to be interviewed on Woman’s Hour, what I actually mean is that I want to have been interviewed on Woman’s Hour in the past; for it to have already happened. I want the Woman’s Hour interview to be a fact about me, I don’t want to sit nervous and clammy in a studio or do all the work that necessitates the greatness required to be interviewed on Woman’s Hour. Who wants to find someone who really loves them? No one. What they actually want to have already found someone who really loves them in the past, and who continues to love them.

In conclusion, it seems that pian, injustice, outsidierhood and being deceived is all part of growing up and being British.

So, how soon is now? Always. Forever. Never.

Originally posted Thursday, August 5, 2010 

[1] The 1996 film “The Craft” and the consequent TV series “Charmed” both used Love Spit Love’s cover version of How Soon is Now?