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"Happy twenty-fifth anniversary to The Queen Is Dead, released on June 16, 1986. Everybody agrees this is the Smiths&amp;apos; best album, except, bizarrely, the Smiths, all four of whom seem to prefer Strangeways, Here We Come. Morrissey has always been insistent on this point. &amp;quot;The Queen Is Dead is not our masterpiece,&amp;quot; he said in 1995. &amp;quot;I should know. I was there. I supplied the sandwiches.&amp;quot;&amp;#xA0;\r\nTasty as those sandwiches must have been, he&amp;apos;s wrong. The Queen Is Dead is not merely the Smiths&amp;apos; best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock &amp;amp; roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail. The songs get more surprising over time, with musical and lyrical and vocal riddles that don&amp;apos;t fade the way you expect them to. In fact, the Internet was invented just to figure out all the hidden meanings on this album. (Which means the Internet is a failure, because nobody has explained &amp;quot;Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others.&amp;quot;)\r\nEvery time you listen, another song smacks you in the face and demands to be your favorite, but today, that song happens to be &amp;quot;Cemetry Gates.&amp;quot; Two friendless fools decide to spend a dreaded sunny day at the cemetery because nobody else will put up with them, and they make a pretty cool afternoon of it despite themselves, even though they just have a bard-off quoting Keats and Yeats and Wilde. And Richard III . And Ann Sheridan in The Man Who Came to Dinner. And the rummest pun in lyrical history &amp;#x2013; &amp;quot;we gravely read the stones.&amp;quot; Anything at all, just to keep the conversation going and build a shared language for a few minutes.\r\nAnd those guitars. Johnny Marr&amp;apos;s guitar and Morrissey&amp;apos;s voice goad each other to heights that neither could have reached alone. Morrissey always claimed that his lyrics were just a response to the sadness already there in Marr&amp;apos;s melodies. But for all the melancholia, it&amp;apos;s the wit and verve that sets The Queen Is Dead apart &amp;#x2013; the brash guitar of the title track, the moans at the end of &amp;quot;Bigmouth Strikes Again,&amp;quot; the strings in &amp;quot;There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.&amp;quot; None of the other Smiths records sound much like it, and neither do records by anyone else.\r\nIt&amp;apos;s also an album no solo artist could have made &amp;#x2013; as Marr once said about &amp;quot;Bigmouth Strikes Again,&amp;quot; it was &amp;quot;one of those moments where listening to it afterwards I thought, &amp;apos;This is why I&amp;apos;m in a band.&amp;apos;&amp;quot; Brilliant though both songwriters remain (Morrissey just debuted three new songs on the BBC) it&amp;apos;s that sense of a shared language, a shared moment, that makes The Queen Is Dead perfect.\r\nAlso, the Queen? Still alive! Way to hang in there, Your Very Lowness. It&amp;apos;s tempting to think she&amp;apos;s stayed on the throne merely to spite Smiths fans &amp;#x2013; which in itself would be a fitting tribute.\r\nRelated: The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (The Queen Is Dead, No. 216)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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