Belligerent Ghoul sends the link/excerpt:

SPIN celebrates 20 years of music, pop culture - The Buffalo News

Best-selling author and McSweeney's editor Dave Eggers is a frequent SPIN contributor and offers up a wonderful piece on the Smiths and Morrissey titled, unsurprisingly, "Beautiful Misery." Far less humor-laden than Klosterman's piece, Eggers' is no less artfully constructed, opening with a brief summary of the life of Oscar Wilde, one of many icons (James Dean, Terence Stamp) that Morrissey helped his young devotees discover.

"About a century later, the first that many young people, particularly those living in certain suburbs in Chicago, heard of Oscar Wilde was when a British band called the Smiths mentioned him in a song called "Cemetery Gates' on 1986's "The Queen is Dead,' " writes Eggers. "Like Wilde's, (Morrissey's) writing was full of seemingly innocuous wordplay and bon mots. Like Wilde's, Morrissey's sexuality was a source of much speculation."