Let\u2019s pick up the mallet and the chisel right now, and carve this in white marble right at the very top: THE SMITHS ARE THE GREATEST ROCK & ROLL BAND WHO EVER LIVED.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve said it before, and I\u2019ll keep saying it until the day the breath leaves my body. It\u2019s a core belief which has not been shaken by three decades of subsequent events: if it\u2019s survived \u2018Alma Matters\u2019, \u2018Roy\u2019s Keen\u2019 and \u2018Dagenham Dave\u2019 \u2013 not to mention what we\u2019ll diplomatically call Morrissey\u2019s bracingly traditional statements on matters of ethnicity and immigration in later years \u2013 it will survive anything.<\/p>\n
When it\u2019s challenged by others, they often take a literalist tack, questioning whether The Smiths even were a rock & roll band. That one\u2019s easy: they were, in that they were a band who often played rock & roll. (For evidence, listen to \u2018Shakespeare\u2019s Sister\u2019, listen to \u2018Rusholme Ruffians\u2019, listen to \u2018Nowhere Fast\u2019.) But that isn\u2019t what I mean.<\/p>\n
By the early 1980s, alternative rock bands were all but indistinguishable from the decadent dinosaurs they were supposed to have overthrown. \u2018Rock & roll\u2019, as a rebel stance, was a busted flush. All leather trousers ripped at the knees, but not a single new idea rattling pea-like around inside its spiky-haired cranium. The music press\u2019 indie darlings were just as corrupted as the worst 1970s monsters: groupie-fuckers and drug-takers. Reading articles about, say, Ian McCulloch or Julian Cope dropping acid and listening to Syd Barrett records was utterly unrelatable for a smalltown kid who had barely drunk a can of Woodpecker but craved an escape route from the repressive Thatcherite orthodoxies suffocating Britain. (And, when you heard the half-arsed, back-of-an-envelope lyrics those artists invariably produced, their mindset didn\u2019t even feel like a destination worth striving to reach.)<\/p>\n
Put simply, all bands were sluts. The Smiths were \u2013 or, crucially, they were as far as anyone knew \u2013 PURE. Their point-blank rejection of traditional rock & roll concepts of masculinity (the rampaging rapist-and-pillager, the survivalist hunter-gatherer), their rejection of acquisitive Eighties values (the imperative to SUCCEED), their rejection of sex itself (at least in interviews where the \u2018c\u2019 word \u2013 celibacy \u2013 was invoked, if not in their lyrics, which were often nakedly lustful), all amounted to an incredibly attractive form of dual rebellion. The Smiths were the ultimate heretics: refusing society\u2019s norms while also refusing to conform to well-trodden rebel cliches. Being the least rock & roll band in the world, paradoxically, made them the most.<\/p>\n
As I wrote in Melody Maker almost a decade later, \u201cAt this moment, The Smiths were the most important band in the world. The Smiths played truant from the Pop Party, and thrived on the dual glamour of self-denial (celibacy, vegetarianism, temperance) and the occasional teasing flash of self-objectification (the hand through the quiff, the nipple bared through sequins). This was Male Lib: liberation from the prevailing Americanised idea of thrusting, healthy, socially-competent masculinity. The Smiths brought adolescence back into fashion: fetishised failure, romanticised weakness.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Smiths weren\u2019t the first band to matter to me, in that impossibly intense way that bands do matter when you\u2019re young. Dexys Midnight Runners had validated my solitude. Culture Club had offered me a different way of being a man. The Style Council had sharpened and radicalised my politics. But as the second half of my teens approached, the stakes were raised: rather than imagining what sort of person I might become or what sort of life I might live, it was time to actually live it. Rehearsals were over. <\/p>\n
There was a vacancy for a band to guide me through. I didn\u2019t fall head-over-heels with The Smiths straight away. Their introductory interview in Smash Hits had somehow rubbed me up the wrong way, and my initial reaction upon seeing them on Top Of The Pops for the first time was half loathing, half confusion. But for them to be able to provoke such a visceral reaction meant that they had something. Suddenly, in the summer of 1984, it clicked, and I got it. Taking my week\u2019s wages from selling seafood to holidaymakers at Barry Island Butlin\u2019s, I walked into the hallowed Spillers Records in Cardiff and bought every Smiths record released to date: their self-titled debut LP, which had come out in February, the singles \u2018Hand In Glove\u2019, \u2018This Charming Man\u2019, \u2018What Difference Does It Make\u2019, \u2018Heaven Knows I\u2019m Miserable Now\u2019, and their brand new one, \u2018William, It Was Really Nothing\u2019. Most importantly of all, I bought a ticket to the gig The Smiths were playing in Cardiff University Students\u2019 Union on 25th September, my seventeenth birthday.<\/p>\n
Despite the ravages of time and alcohol on my memory, that concert still comes to me in vivid flashes. Arriving at Cathays Station, carrying no flowers because I couldn\u2019t afford any, but stealing some from the plant pots on the platform. The venue\u2019s floor a centimetre deep in spilled lager, and seeing petals floating on top. The Smiths raging into \u2018William, It Was Really Nothing\u2019, and some Neanderthal hurling a can of Heineken which arced through the air and caught Morrissey full on the forehead, a spurt of foam dousing his hair as it struck. The singer reacting not by flouncing off, but by defiantly slicking the beer through his quiff and carrying on with the first verse. It was love.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d started writing about music for the local paper, and proclaimed The Smiths to be more important than The Beatles (an exhilarating act of sacred cow slaughtering, a taste for which has never left me), prompting furious readers\u2019 letters. I shopped for vintage clothes at Jacob\u2019s Market and got a flat-top to copy The Smiths\u2019 neo-Fifties look, and developed fascinations with Morrissey\u2019s own obsessions (James Dean, Oscar Wilde). I turned vegetarian, which was not easy in Eighties South Wales. I hung on Morrissey\u2019s every word, and believed he was communicating via a direct hotline to my soul. I was that Smiths fan: the one who thinks only he understands Morrissey, and that only Morrissey understands him.<\/p>\n
At teenage house parties, my Smiths fandom justified my own social ineptitude, allowing me to pretend that it was deliberate. Rather than peel myself off the wall and participate, I considered myself superior to the well-adjusted kids who paired off in darkened corners to snog to the sound of \u2018We Don\u2019t Need Another Hero\u2019 by Tina Turner or \u2018Careless Whisper\u2019 by George Michael. Walking home alone under the orange sodium street lights, I would feel somehow righteous about my failure, because The Smiths had made chasteness and abstinence into virtues (to this day, the worst crime pop culture has inflicted upon my entire generation, or at least a subset of it).<\/p>\n
In the sixth form common room, I hogged the ghetto blaster, and converted several friends to the cause. And it really was a cause: Us, The Smiths fans, against Them, the U2\/Queen\/Dire Straits fans. By the time of their second (and greatest, but we\u2019ll come to that shortly) studio album Meat Is Murder, there were enough of us to travel mob-handed by coach to Chippenham Golddiggers for my second (and, though I didn\u2019t know it at the time, final) Smiths gig. At one point I stood completely still in the middle of the moshpit, staring up at him in frozen awe while a maelstrom of bodies whirled around me, which was a suitably unusual sight to cause Morrissey to tilt his head and raise a bushy eyebrow at me with a puzzled \u201cAre you alright?\u201d expression. I wasn\u2019t alright. I was alright.<\/p>\n
The Smiths, then, were my band. But The Queen Is Dead was not my album. Literally (I couldn\u2019t afford it, so I had to borrow someone else\u2019s and home-tape it), but also in the sense that those U2 \/ Queen \/ Dire Straits lads had finally caught up, and grudgingly accepted that although that Morrissey bloke was \u201ca bit of a poof\u201d, Johnny Marr was \u201ca really good guitarist\u201d. It was The Smiths\u2019 moment of mainstream acceptance. And if there\u2019s one thing The Smiths should never have been, it was acceptable.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a whole book, blog or radio series to be written about the phenomenon of the album directly before the iconic, canonical one being a better record (see also His \u2018N\u2019 Hers vs Different Class, for example). The way in which TQID has become a fixture in Top 100s of Greatest Albums Of All Time (indeed, in 2013 NME named it THE greatest album ever made) is reminiscent of Martin Scorsese belatedly winning an Oscar for The Departed when Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas went unrewarded. If there\u2019s one factor which rendered The Queen Is Dead palatable, besides time (The Smiths had now been around long enough for doubters, heel-draggers and johnny-come-latelies to climb aboard), it\u2019s the very thing that weakens its claim to greatness: a sense of humour.<\/p>\n
When the media mocked The Smiths for their miserablism (Radio 1\u2019s Steve Wright In The Afternoon, for example, ran regular woe-is-me pisstake parodies), the fan\u2019s instinctive reaction was to leap to their defence, mentally assembling a stack of evidence of Morrissey\u2019s dark wit and droll wordplay. But in retrospect, that was the wrong response. Which only became clear to me a year after they split when Simon Reynolds, a year after they\u2019d split, wrote the following passage in a Morrissey feature in Melody Maker:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy were The Smiths important? Because of their misery. Never forget it. Around Meat Is Murder the critics suddenly discovered Morrissey\u2019s humour: George Formby was trundled out as a reference point. If you ask me, The Smiths could have afforded to be more humourless. The Smiths\u2019 finest moments \u2013 \u2018Hand In Glove\u2019, \u2018How Soon Is Now\u2019, \u2018Still Ill\u2019, \u2018I Know It\u2019s Over\u2019 \u2013 were moments of reproachful, avenging misery, naked desperation, unbearable reverence \u2013 free of the \u2018saving grace\u2019 of quips and camp self-consciousness. If there was laughter it was black, scornful, scathing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reynolds was absolutely right. The Smiths\u2019 unrepentant seriousness was their greatest strength. The Smiths who once began a song with the couplet \u201cIn a river the colour of lead \/ Immerse the baby\u2019s head\u201d were the band worth rallying behind, not The Smiths who would eventually release the dismal \u2018Girlfriend In A Coma\u2019 as a single or include the equally atrocious \u2018Unhappy Birthday\u2019 on their final album. Morrissey\u2019s penchant for feeble comedy is the primary reason that The Queen Is Dead cannot truly stand as a great album, given that no fewer than three of its ten tracks are throwaway novelty ditties. But when did this tendency begin? Surprisingly early, is the answer. The arch, reflexive, self-mocking \u2018Heaven Knows I\u2019m Miserable Now\u2019 was already tipping a nod and a wink to the fanbase that he was aware of his own media perception.<\/p>\n
The band\u2019s first two albums were mercifully devoid of that stuff. Debut album The Smiths, despite its flat production, and the flawless Meat Is Murder, the band\u2019s true masterpiece, are both measurably more satisfying as records. Each contains moments of mordant, biting wit, but they\u2019re always there to drive the point home, never just to raise cheap titters.<\/p>\n
But this regrettable strand would continue through songs like \u2018Ask\u2019, with its \u201cbuck-toothed girl from Luxembourg\u201d. Through \u2018Is It Really So Strange?\u2019, with the line \u201cI lost my bag in Newport Pagnell\u201d predicated on the Victoria Wood-like assumption that the words \u2018Newport Pagnell\u2019 are somehow inherently hilarious. And through the Carry On campery of \u201cDo you have a vacancy for a back-scrubber?\u201d in \u2018Half A Person\u2019. And who\u2019s responsible? We fucking are. Ultimately it\u2019s our own fault for encouraging him, for praising the approval-whore every time he did it. It\u2019s why a good 80% of his solo catalogue is unlistenable: surrounded by yes-men, without anyone to rein him in, and with a slavishly adoring audience unwilling to hear any criticisms (still less to make any of their own), his pitiful LOL-seeking and his endless self-regarding in-jokes have multiplied unchecked. And it\u2019s why The Queen Is Dead is such an aggravatingly inconsistent listening experience.<\/p>\n
The making of the album, at Jacob Studios in Farnham, was by all accounts a troubled time. It had been delayed by unforeseen factors which included bassist Andy Rourke\u2019s heroin addiction and a legal dispute with the band\u2019s label Rough Trade.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, it starts phenomenally well. \u2018The Queen Is Dead\u2019, well over six minutes long (though the original unedited take was seven or eight), carries the sense of a State Of The Nation address, but it evokes William Blake\u2019s nation of dark satanic mills rather than some Wordsworthian daffodil idyll. A snatch of Cicely Courtneidge\u2019s recording of First World War music hall number \u2018Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty\u2019 from Bryan Forbes\u2019 1962 film The L-Shaped Room conjures a reverie of nostalgic patriotism before a squeal of feedback from Johnny Marr\u2019s guitar and Mike Joyce\u2019s you\u2019re-gonna-get-your-fucking-head-kicked-in drums, sampled, looped and pushed high in the mix by Stephen Street, pummel us screaming into the dystopian present.<\/p>\n
The name of the album \u2013 actually taken from Hubert Selby Jr\u2019s much-banned novel Last Exit To Brooklyn, where it is used in the effeminate homosexual sense, but employed with deliberate ambiguity here \u2013 had already incurred the wrath of The Sun, who branded Morrissey a sicko. (He originally considered Margaret On The Guillotine, but ended up saving that for a track on his first solo album.) And that was before anyone had heard him advocating regicide in the first verse of the title track: \u201cHer Very Lowness with her head in a sling \/ I\u2019m truly sorry but it sounds like a wonderful thing\u2026\u201d A staunch Republican who had already expressed a wish to \u201cdrop my trousers to the Queen\u201d on the previous album\u2019s \u2018Nowhere Fast\u2019, he was raising his game by daydreaming of having her executed.<\/p>\n
Morrissey\u2019s lyric is scattershot, unfocussed and rambling, but burning with rage as he contemplates vignettes of contemporary life such as \u201csome nine-year-old tough who peddles drugs, I swear to god, I swear I never even knew what drugs were!\u201d (his voice breaking into an adolescent yodel on the word \u2018were\u2019). But the dominant narrative consists of imagined conversations with the monarch, echoing the recent break-in to Buckingham Palace by Michael Fagin, and with her heir, cajoling him to publicly out himself as a transvestite. Meanwhile, Marr channels the more fucked-up end of the Sixties (MC5, VU), his wah-wah guitars conjuring the psychedelia not of flowers and trees but of black smoke and city grime (and matched perfectly by Derek Jarman\u2019s accompanying film). \u201cLife is very long when you\u2019re lonely\u201d, Morrissey repeats as Rourke\u2019s bass comes to the fore in its closing conflagrations. It was the heaviest, most physical piece of music The Smiths \u2013 often wrongly derided as effete weaklings \u2013 had recorded (\u2018How Soon Is Now\u2019 included), and one which, even with 30 years\u2019 familiarity, still has the power to stun you in your tracks.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve taken this album out of its gatefold sleeve, depicting Alain Delon\u2019s death scene in L\u2019Insoumis, and listened to it six times in a row in the writing of this piece, and each time, I laugh aghast with horror at what comes next. Following \u2018The Queen Is Dead\u2019 with \u2018Frankly Mr Shankly\u2019 is like releasing Citizen Kane on a double bill with Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. \u2018Frankly Mr Shankly\u2019, with its jocular rum-ti-tum melody and oompah bassline, is so outlandishly appalling that it deserves to be the subject of a public enquiry. The lyric depicts a quasi-Billy Liar scenario in which Morrissey dreams of quitting an unfulfilling job to pursue fame and fortune, with Leonard Rossiter\u2019s Mr Shadrack replaced by the eponymous Mr Shankly (supposedly a dig at Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis), and the backing track sounds like the Play School house band rather the work of Britain\u2019s finest. It\u2019s The Smiths\u2019 worst-ever song.<\/p>\n
Imagine a counterfactual universe in which \u2018The Queen Is Dead\u2019 was followed directly by \u2018I Know It\u2019s Over\u2019. You\u2019d be reeling from an overload of greatness. An elegiac epic in waltz time, it begins with the word \u201cOh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head\u201d, a line which is repeated in ever greater ecstasies of desperation as the song ends, defying the misery-mockers to scoff at this. The life-or-death vocal performance is a reminder that, like Bowie on \u2018Wild Is The Wind\u2019 or \u201cHeroes\u201d, Morrissey\u2019s abilities as a singer are unjustly overshadowed by other aspects of his persona. (On a more minor level, there\u2019s also something pleasingly defiant about the flat Northern vowel sound with which he pronounces the word \u2018guts\u2019.) The song\u2019s key moment, however, is the mid section in which, via the medium of a second-person interlocutor, he asks \u201cIf you\u2019re so funny\u201d, and clever, and entertaining, and good-looking, \u201cthen why are you on your own tonight?\u201d It\u2019s directed at himself, but it was an icy dagger down the spine of the listener, who suddenly felt a lot less smart, smug and superior on those long, orange-lit walks home.<\/p>\n
If you were reeling already from that, then you\u2019d be floored by what came next. \u2018Never Had No-One Ever\u2019, again in waltz time, is one of Morrissey\u2019s bluntest and best expressions of alienation, beginning with the direct \u201cWhen you walk without ease on these streets where you were raised\u2026\u201d (Tellingly, the run-out grooves on Side 1 and Side 2 of the vinyl carry the inscriptions, respectively, \u2018Fear Of Manchester\u2019 and \u2018Them Was Rotten Days\u2019.) As a stand-alone track it\u2019s inferior to \u2018I Know It\u2019s Over\u2019, but continues its mood magnificently.<\/p>\n
For the closing track of Side 1, Marr switches to \u2018This Charming Man\u2019 mode with the breezy, high-pollen-count pulchritude of \u2018Cemetry Gates\u2019 (sic). The lyric, a petulant retort to critics who have accused him of plagiarism, has its levity levels set just the right side of tolerable. It\u2019s notable that he pronounces \u2018plagiarise\u2019 with a hard \u2018g\u2019 \u2013 a tell-tale mark of the authentic working class autodidact is someone who knows fancy words, but doesn\u2019t necessarily know how to say them.<\/p>\n
The sleeve of The Queen Is Dead bore a pink and green sticker, reading \u2018INCLUDES THE SINGLES BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN AND THE BOY WITH THE THORN IN HIS SIDE\u2019. And this is another reason why, to the devoted fan who lived through all this in real-time (as opposed to the casual punter, or born-too-late catcher-upper), TQID felt like a mild let-down: we already owned two of the songs.<\/p>\n
Of course, taken on its own merits, \u2018Bigmouth\u2019 is a fine way to start Side 2 of any record. Johnny Marr said it was The Smiths\u2019 \u2018Jumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u2019, and he\u2019s not wrong: it has that same drama and attack (although a debt to Nile Rodgers of Chic is also apparent in the middle eight). And Morrissey\u2019s lyric of melodramatised remorse is strong enough to survive his own attempt to scupper it with those look-at-me lines about Joan Of Arc\u2019s Walkman \/ hearing aid starting to melt.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Boy With The Thorn In His Side\u2019 is one of The Smiths\u2019 lightest, most flyaway moments, but a real beauty of a pop song with an irresistibly infectious easy charm. The boy of its title is, once again, a third person who is actually a poorly disguised first person: it is Morrissey himself who, despite his hatefulness, harbours \u201ca murderous desire for love\u201d. A feeling of social exclusion is a common thread throughout Morrissey\u2019s lyrics, but on this occasion he keenly wishes to be involved: \u201cAnd when you want to live, how do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to know?\u201d<\/p>\n
Things were going so well, with just that \u2018Shankly\u2019 monstrosity to skip over, when another howler heaves into view. An otherwise perfectly acceptable, if somewhat slight, rockabilly number \u2018Vicar In A Tutu\u2019 is, as the title makes plain, a flimsy tale of clergical cross-dressing in which Morrissey expects the listener to chuckle indulgently to the alliteration \u2018monkish monsignor\u2019 and the rhyming of \u2018canister\u2019 with \u2018banister\u2019.<\/p>\n
The album redeems itself with one of The Smiths\u2019 deathless moments of transcendent genius. After a strummed three-chord intro from Marr (and anyone who claims they always knew it was lifted from The Rolling Stones\u2019 cover of Marvin Gaye\u2019s \u201cHitch Hike\u201d via The Velvet Underground\u2019s \u201cThere She Goes Again\u201d, before he admitted it in a Nineties interview, is having you on), the album\u2019s strings-driven showpiece \u2018There Is A Light That Never Goes Out\u2019 is a heartbreakingly romantic statement of devotion. Every romance needs a death, and in \u2018There Is A Light That Never Goes Out\u2019, Morrissey dreams of martyring himself and his loved one in a suicide pact in front of a double-decker bus or ten-ton truck. But it isn\u2019t the wish to die which makes the song so powerful. It\u2019s the urge to live. Once again, his real desire isn\u2019t to stand apart but to participate, nose pressed up against the window of the real world where, through the glass, he can see the people, the lights, the young and the alive.<\/p>\n
And then it all goes tits-up. Literally. One can only imagine Johnny Marr\u2019s face when he first heard the finished \u2018Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others\u2019. At this time, The Smiths\u2019 modus operandi was that the musicians in the band would create a piece of music \u2018blind\u2019, unaware of Morrissey\u2019s planned lyrical theme until he entered the vocal booth and sang it. Taken as an instrumental, the Some Girls\u2019 backing track had the potential to lend itself to lyrical profundity. Instead, Morrissey chose to use it as a vehicle for some half-arsed snarking about lads\u2019 obsession with big breasts, the culture of Page 3 and the celebrity of Samantha Fox and Linda Lusardi (although neither is named). It\u2019s like taking one of Francis Bacon\u2019s screaming popes and \u2018improving\u2019 it with the addition of a Comic Relief furry red nose. No wonder Marr is said to have spent two weeks after the album\u2019s completion locked in a room, sat immobile and depressed in the same chair, eating very little and suffering vomiting fits.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, a ten-track album of which two had already been released and three were utter cack has no place in any all-time greats list. (Had it been condensed down to a five-track 12 inch EP featuring \u2018The Queen Is Dead\u2019, \u2018I Know It\u2019s Over\u2019, \u2018Never Had No-One Ever\u2019, \u2018Cemetry Gates\u2019, \u2018There Is A Light That Never Goes Out\u2019, it could have been devastating.) And it could have been so much better. It isn\u2019t as if The Smiths didn\u2019t have better songs knocking around at the time: in the same year, the astonishing \u2018Asleep\u2019 and \u2018Rubber Ring\u2019 were tossed away as B-sides.<\/p>\n
As another variable instalment of Smiths music, which offered up a handful of their most extraordinary works alongside a number of more negligible efforts, it did its job in 1986 as well as the band\u2019s equally patchy farewell Strangeways Here We Come the following year. But as a carved-in-stone canon-worthy classic, The Queen is dead in the water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s pick up the mallet and the chisel right now, and carve this in white marble right at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-269066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}