Oh the Smiths....can see a binge coming up around here now. I took the song at face value, a sort of anarchist anthem about 'property is theft.' Never heard the gay theory, interesting post.
I like binging on music in the 21st Century; digital downloads mean I don't have to bother digging out media for which I currently have no player.
I took the song at face value, a sort of anarchist anthem about 'property is theft.'
I've always found Morrissey a bit of an enigma, politically. I mean, there's "Bengali in Platforms" (which was originally intended to be a Smiths song!) and, well, an entire album called Viva Hate. But then there's "Margaret on the Guillotine" (which really needs to be re-released as the B-Side to Costello's "Tramp the Dirt Down" when the Baroness of Evil finally relaxes her iron grip on this mortal coil). The cultural appropriation thing is kinda contradicted in "Cemetery Gates" ("If you must write prose and poems/the words you use should be your own/don't plagiarise or take "on loans"); but then, "Shoplifters" itself quotes James Dean "My only weakness is... well, never mind, never mind" (from an obscure 1953 appearance in a TV show called No Room), and, well,
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He's certainly done his best to confuse his fans over the years :-) I suspect he is someone like Germaine Greer, intelligent and creative but just loves to push buttons. Self contradictory, enjoys playing around the borders of social acceptability - consciously, I think. The vegetarianism/animal rights is genuine, and sadly probably the racism too but I have no idea about the rest. As you say, confused.
Self contradictory, enjoys playing around the borders of social acceptability - consciously, I think.
He may indeed be a more complicated than I'm giving him credit for; maybe everything is an act. The racism thing didn't seem to emerge until after The Smiths; it seems to be part of the "Morrissey, Solo" character. Still, it would be almost be more charitable to suggest that it was there all along, than that he decided to add a dash of racism to his professional persona after some sort of cynical cost-benefit analysis. Who knows, though? I guess there are always the biographies, or the autobiography he's supposed to be publishing this December.
Anyway, I'm still listening to a lot Smiths (interspersed with Underworld, Orbital and, recently, New Order). You?
I've always read him as playing it straight (even in even more egregiously self-absorbed songs like "Unloveable" and "Half a Person"), though there are exceptions ("Girlfriend in a Coma" is either ironic or sung from the perspective of the person who induced the coma in the first place; given "Still Ill" though, I wouldn't necessarily bet on the former). It's possible that the subject of some of these songs isn't in fact Morrissey himself. There's a conversational/storytelling tone to a lot of them (eg. "Half a Person", "How Soon is Now"). Perhaps he's telling the story of other people's lives; at least, as a lyricist.
That said, Morrissey as a performer tends to play it pretty camp - almost self-parodyingly Vaudevillian, even, in his romanticism - and camp is almost necessarily ironic. Perhaps his true identity as a lyricist is the "horrible, stupid, sloppy" Steven Patrick he told The Face in 1984 he decided had to be "locked in a box and put on top of the wardrobe" when Morrissey started singing for The Smiths. It might be that his
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I took the song at face value, a sort of anarchist anthem about 'property is theft.' Never heard the gay theory, interesting post.
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I like binging on music in the 21st Century; digital downloads mean I don't have to bother digging out media for which I currently have no player.
I took the song at face value, a sort of anarchist anthem about 'property is theft.'
I've always found Morrissey a bit of an enigma, politically. I mean, there's "Bengali in Platforms" (which was originally intended to be a Smiths song!) and, well, an entire album called Viva Hate. But then there's "Margaret on the Guillotine" (which really needs to be re-released as the B-Side to Costello's "Tramp the Dirt Down" when the Baroness of Evil finally relaxes her iron grip on this mortal coil). The cultural appropriation thing is kinda contradicted in "Cemetery Gates" ("If you must write prose and poems/the words you use should be your own/don't plagiarise or take "on loans"); but then, "Shoplifters" itself quotes James Dean "My only weakness is... well, never mind, never mind" (from an obscure 1953 appearance in a TV show called No Room), and, well, ( ... )
Reply
I suspect he is someone like Germaine Greer, intelligent and creative but just loves to push buttons. Self contradictory, enjoys playing around the borders of social acceptability - consciously, I think. The vegetarianism/animal rights is genuine, and sadly probably the racism too but I have no idea about the rest. As you say, confused.
Reply
He may indeed be a more complicated than I'm giving him credit for; maybe everything is an act. The racism thing didn't seem to emerge until after The Smiths; it seems to be part of the "Morrissey, Solo" character. Still, it would be almost be more charitable to suggest that it was there all along, than that he decided to add a dash of racism to his professional persona after some sort of cynical cost-benefit analysis. Who knows, though? I guess there are always the biographies, or the autobiography he's supposed to be publishing this December.
Anyway, I'm still listening to a lot Smiths (interspersed with Underworld, Orbital and, recently, New Order). You?
Reply
Reply
That said, Morrissey as a performer tends to play it pretty camp - almost self-parodyingly Vaudevillian, even, in his romanticism - and camp is almost necessarily ironic. Perhaps his true identity as a lyricist is the "horrible, stupid, sloppy" Steven Patrick he told The Face in 1984 he decided had to be "locked in a box and put on top of the wardrobe" when Morrissey started singing for The Smiths. It might be that his ( ... )
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