Meat is Murder
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Meat is Murder

by Joe Pernice

A time of suicides, gymnasium humiliations, smoking for beginners, asthma attacks, and incendiary teenage infatuations.

Infatuations with a girl (Allison), with a band (The Smiths) and with an album, Meat is Murder, that was so raw, so vivid and so melodic that you could cling to it like a lifeboat in a storm.

Excerpt One morning as I was jogging my way past the bronze plaque commemorating the deaths of one student and one motorcyclist, my necktie flapping like a windsock, Ray floored the brake pedal of his Dodge as he closed in on me.

Fifty mile an hour traffic came to a screeching, nearly murderous halt behind him.

In the gutter, sugared with sand put down during the winter s last snow, I saw written in red felt ink on masking tape stuck to a smoky-clear cassette: Smiths: Meat.

  • Series: 33⅓
  • Category: Music
  • Rating: 3.42
  • Pages: 102
  • Publish Date: September 1st 2003 by Continuum International Publishing Group
  • Isbn10: 082641494X
  • Isbn13: 9780826414946

What People Think about "Meat is Murder"

It's honestly been such a long time since I've listened to them that my mind is only conjuring up old playlists made for an ex-boyfriend and then the feelings are more about that than the music. You know when you want to find someone else who has your words for you. Okay, this story is the feeling of forgetting the music because it makes you think about the track list of the songs written in the hand of someone you once longed for. Your ears become borrowed on theirs instead of words given to you like in the music you wanted. I wanted to remember what that looked like and not in the yeah, you know how it is kind of way. Pernice takes too damned long to get to the what you have to lose and more time on the hey, remember that girl who loved The Smiths. If I loved The Smiths would I be just like her? Okay, Pernice's was more about sex than about the wanting to be them feeling. For me Morrissey's sex is also about wanting to be that person. I want to know how it is for everyone. I love Morrissey because I feel normal listening to hi. It's like Pernice didn't get it why anyone would even love Morrissey (it's because he has something to lose in the happened in other's lives part and he is so open anyway!) when he made his teenage boy a generic you-know-how-it-is who doesn't lay on the bedroom floor of the gay teen who doesn't fit in in high school or the girl who is in danger of being a real life Jane Austen's Persuasion and not listening to her own heart because the bible belt community of the town she lives in gets their we know what is best for you hooks into her heart and throws the fish out of water corpse to breathe without air on the land. I can't believe a story like that. You're going to poke someone's EYE out." You're doing it wrong! It's his chord changes and musical know how and starting a band and you never get past "I got into music to get girls" interview. Morrissey would look at the mom who didn't get it and the kid in school and it'd never be remember in the 1980s when it was high school and it was just like that and then it ends and everyone is such good friends. I don't know I kind of liked it towards the end when he started acknowledging that there was something about his friends to notice. It was kind of too little to be like the Morrissey nothing to lose, though. He even had some rather poetic lines in there that just made me wish I liked the story more than I did. But I don't want to be one of those people that knows chord changes and that was a good line when the heart strings were ripped out and turned into something you could keep in your bedroom. If you want some girl to see something in you because you like THIS VOICE then what the hell, right? So what was it in Meat is Murder that made him want it bad? I wanted someone who wasn't afraid to speak up and say this makes me feel something and it's my heart. I wish the story was about listening to this voice and seeing something in Allison and those other kids (dead or alive. I wonder what Pernice's other stories would look like. I want to say I love Morrissey and The Smiths because he liked you and he never told you how much he did and he meant to. I want to say it all and their lives and happening in mine and I never told you. I never wanted anything more in my life than to have friends and be welcome and this story could have been about that sad feeling when you see it happening to others and don't know if it'll happen in yours. The kids left him and he avoids thinking about them and then he dies himself and never sees what Morrissey had been saying all along. I didn't get that hope to get away from book sense clicking place I wanted because I see it happening in mine like this kid. How do I say what I want to say about The Smiths?

The thing with this book is, its like 100 pages, and you really wont be disappointed. If you grew up in the 00's like you would seriously even listen to my suggestion.

Portrays a very vivid picture of what being a Smiths fan in 80s suburban America meant.

For one thing, as he writes in an author's note underneath the acknowledgements, "If you think of the 33 1/3 series of books as a kind of extended family...then my book is the black sheep: it's fiction." It's more than likely fiction of the "write about what you know" type, too, as it purports to be a memoir of Pernice (or the narrator, if you will) and his discovery of the album. I generally despise this kind of memoir, fictional or not, as I read enough of the white-suburban-my-childhood-really-sucked genre when I was going to graduate school in creative writing.

and from my reading the book truly ends up being about "the joke" which is perhaps a metaphor for many other things.

Joe Pernice has completely thrown aside the notion of dissecting the songs, and instead written a hundred page piece of fiction inspired by Meat is Murder, the album that the book is ostensibly about. While Meat is Murder is a crucial album to the books main character and the soundtrack to his adolescence - the story doesnt depend on prior familiarity.

Still Peak White Guy Fuckery.