Yeah. I came at it from the other end, in that I was too young to experience their heyday, so found them retrospectively as an adult, and similarly just didn’t get it. Another flavour of surface level deep first contact adolescent snuff, up there with goth, grunge and Jarvis Cocker in the pantheon of “fine entry level stuff to listen to, before you get into Leonard Cohen or Bowie, or any of the actual stuff”
I cant deny that he undoubtably meant a lot to people who heard his shit at the right time... but in the same way I came to realise that, despite my teenage preference for Oasis, Blur were actually the better band... I feel the previous generation should’ve come round by now to the realisation that Marr was the better Smith than Morrissey. There’s no shame in reassessing your formative nostalgia. We were all emotionally over-attached to something terrible at one time or another...
Also, as sensitive alternative 80s weirdos go, Robert Smith >>> Mozza