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**3. "Reel Around the Fountain" - The Smiths** The opening track of The Smiths' 1984 debut unfurls slowly, a luxurious six-minute swoon that announces the band's romantic-literary aesthetic. Johnny Marr's guitar shimmers in arpeggiated chords, augmented by Paul Carrack's gentle piano and a brushed, jazz-inflected rhythm that gives the song an unusual softness for a band associated with jangle. Morrissey's vocal is plaintive and theatrical, dwelling in a register of bruised tenderness. The lyrics are among his most quietly provocative — addressing a first sexual experience and the loss of innocence with characteristic ambiguity, mingling devotion ("you can pin and mount me like a butterfly") with a wounded, masochistic yearning. There's Wildean wit and genuine vulnerability braided together. The song courted controversy on release over misread lyrics, but its real subject is the ache of being shaped, perhaps damaged, by love and desire. Culturally it crystallized the Smiths' appeal to outsiders, the bookish and the lonely, offering a literate alternative to the synth-pop and bombast of 1984. It's music for solitary bedrooms, for adolescent intensity recollected, for anyone who experienced love as both tender and unbearable. Languid where later Smiths songs would sprint, it remains a hushed, devastating overture.