Wednesday, November 5, 2014

The Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

I'm currently listening to a compilation album of the Smiths titled The World Won't Listen.  I've listened to a lot of these songs on other Smiths albums this year, but it wasn't until now that I realized the weird conditional phrases in "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out."  Specifically:
And if a double-decker bus crashes into us
To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us
To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine
Because of the structure, grammatically, dying "by your side" is only "a pleasure," a "privilege," and "a heavenly way to die" if the method of that death is a collision with a "double-decker bus" or "ten-ton truck."

That might be splitting grammatical hairs, but I think it's an important distinction that indicates something about the singer/speaker's outlook: dying is positive only if it occurs in the manner that he's described.

Additionally, until I transcribed the lyrics, I hadn't really noticed how parallel those lines are.  "And if a double-decker bus crashes into us" parallels with "And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us."  And "To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die" with "To die by your side, the pleasure, the privilege is mine."  But there's even parallelism in the alliterative hyphenated adjectives: "double-decker" and "ten-ton."