Time and time again the mainstream media lurch from celebration to denegration in respect to Stephen Patrick Morrissey. The boorish, pompous and the envious are given a poorly earned platform to express their love or hate or something irrelevant in between. Having avoided real work for so long they catapult back to the 1970’s and 1980’s like demented timelords only to return to the present with silver streaks and varicose veins. From this derives an odious self pity that they consider excuses them as they set upon actual talent with the talons of a desperate and feverish bird of prey. Only the barely talented survive the scourge as they are satisfied only with celebrity and lucre. All publicity is good eh? Morrissey sums them with the acidic lyric:
‘it’s just more lock jawed pop stars,
Thicker than pig shit,
Nothing to convey
They’re so scared to show intelligence,
It might smear their lovely career’
No, the real quarry are the poetic, intelligent ambiguities who share little but become the fixation. The Dylan’s; the Young’s; the Morrissey’s… are out of reach as they play their own game and leave the void to be filled by the obscure and the desperate. Facts are an inconvenience to the crass as they do not suffer the indignity of change. Give us scurroulos gossip, is the cry, and wake up our tedious lives just for a moment. Supply and demand is administered as the hegemony overwhelms all.
To be a fan or follower of Bob Dylan or Morrissey is to seek so much more than the titilating. To learn the geneaology of the icon’s experiences and understand the raison d’etre of that evolution is as important as the present. To play the chords or assimilate the pain, desire or principle that helps construct the narrative is at the heart of the listening and the seeing. Nothing written by other sentinel beings can begin to offer substance. ‘Autobiography’ will demand attention because it fulfils what the true engager requires: a part of the subject. Annie Lennox says it better than most:
‘Reading the various reviews of Morrissey’s autobiography, the divisive reactions are fascinating…With a life steeped in the acute articulation of what it feels like to be an “outsider’s outsider”… Mr M continues to stir and shake us up.
I’m appreciative and grateful for his extraordinary artistry, artifice and social/personal commentary… and more than anything I wish him the freedom and space to be himself…unencumbered and unhampered by anyone’s “opinion” or projection of who they think he is or should be. He’s made a profound connection and difference to a multitude of lives, which is more than can be said for the belligerent scribers who seem to have a bone to pick with his very existence.
We all have to live with ourselves at the end of the day, till the end of our days…and I think he’s a very elegant survivor.
God bless Morrissey and all who ever dared to sail forth, with or without a compass.’
So to the book itself and the elephant in the room that requires feeding and then shooing out into the backyard. How dare Penguin Classics publish? I challenge the resentful to trawl through the list of their publications and to apply the same critique. A billion to one that there is agreement. Personally I have no issue. ‘Whatever detains the eye is understood by none, least of all me’.
‘C’mon Manchester I thought you were hip?’ (Boy George)
‘No we’re just automation snobs with an excess of intolerance – you really must forgive us’. (Morrissey)
Throughout Morrissey is cryptic, critical, cantankerous, cautious, cuddly, creative, contemplative, curmudgeon but not cursory or cosmetic. He demands insight and expects no less from the reader. He desires our intellect not our crutch. From the ash grey skies to the sunny smiles and from the scribes moment in the light to the precise percussion and taught strings this is a life rarely able to ride a wave. Too many raised banks and dams have been built to prevent the spirit to run free. Constantly on the run or at least maintaining a momentum demanded by the fans and the parasitic professions. The self fulfilling prophecies are backed by untruth as though to do anything else would hold the world aghast.
The most caustic parts are aimed fairly and squarely at Margaret Thatcher; the NME and a certain court case. Selective memories and abuses of power are but the plague of humanity but sometimes they are simply unforgiveable.
‘Dispassionate and obviously mad, Margaret Thatcher is presiding over political England, raging war on the needy and praising the highborn…’ It could be today or any other as ‘every public address … is a swamp of tormented revenge… with never once a gesture of understanding or kindness’. The hatred of the systems losers is exemplified no better than in the description of how Keith Johnson’s bones have been left to Saddleworth Moor. ”Of course had Keith been a child of privileged or moneyed background the search would never have been called off. But he was a poor gawky boy from Manchester’s forgotten side streets, and minus the blonde fantasy-fetish of a cutesy Madeleine McCann’.
Self deprecation and a lack of confidence peel off most pages and the ‘ghost’ outside the bathroom has more than met its match. ‘Air of leaden fatigue hangs outside of the bathroom, as if something is standing there in the hallway. There is also a heavy sense of sadness in the bedroom where I sleep, an atmosphere I am used to leaving behind – but not finding as I arrive.’
’38’ must join the pantheon of unmagic numbers as Morrissey loses friend after friend at this remote and yet still beckoning age. Anger at lazy dyke record companies; celebrity chasers; artistic poisoners and the rest of life’s meteors is swallowed by the wit and hindsight gazing that helps makes these 457 pages prepare us for the death of a disco dancer. Excuse me one excess as I leave the door ajar
And in the darkened underpass
I thought oh God, my chance has come at last
(but then a strange fear gripped me and I
Just couldn’t ask)
Jason Cridland
Buy book from here or any worthwhile book seller 🙂
