I wish I liked Fiona Dodwell better than I do.
Here's the thing with Fiona Dodwell. If you are going to defend Morrissey, you have two lines of attack. You can say...
1. Morrissey is right. Like actually defend the things he said on their merits. "Migrant boats means migrant votes. Where's the lie?"
If you don't want to do that, your other option is to say....
2. Morrissey is just a singer. "C'mon, he doesn't have any real power. He's an artist and artists are supposed to be a little eccentric. He's not hurting anyone. Why don't you get angry at people who actually have real power?"
Those are your two options. Appeals to free speech aren't going to do much because people will respond "Sure, he has the right to say what he want and we have the right to call him an asshole for it". So that line of attack isn't really going to move the ball forward.
The problem with Fiona Dodwell is that she doesn't actually believe the things that Morrissey believes* so she can't do #1. And she is too much of a fangirl to do #2. She doesn't want to diminish the man by saying he's JUST a singer when to her, he is so much more.
So instead of defending what Morrissey's right-wing sentiments, she tries to emphasize his liberal bona fides ("Remember when Morrissey said/did X? Does that sound like something a Nazi would do???"). Which is like whatever. But worse than that, to avoid actually addressing his right-wing statements, Dodwell frequently ends up a) misrepresenting what Morrissey actually said which invariably leads to b) misrepresenting what Morrissey's critics are actually angry about.
It strikes me as extremely disingenuous. Either defend what he said or say he's just a singer.
*If she does believe the things Morrissey believes, she doesn't have the balls to just come out and say so. But my intuition is that she doesn't.
After reading this I read her article in full and she actually does take the second choice. She doesn't say that he is just a singer but she focuses on the musical contributions he has made throughout his career. She's saying that people want to ignore that because they dislike his politics.
To believe this you don't have to agree with his politics, whatever you may believe them to be based on seemingly contradictory public statements he has made over the years.
The point is not to agree with him but to support his right to have opinions, and secondly to say that disagreeing with someone politically doesn't mean you can't support their work.
The fact is though that he can say what he wants and people can respond to it. People can choose to stop supporting his work because of what he has said if they want to. So I don't really agree with what you're saying here.
Do you only listen to music made by people you agree with politically? How would you even know most of the time?
The problem I have with what she's saying, besides the fact that she says it pretty clumsily and it's become a really tired subject, is in a way related to what you're saying.
She doesn't say she agrees with him, but for her point that's not necessary. But she takes it a step further and calls those who disagree with him guilty of "political correctness." This is a way to dismiss someone's ideas without engaging with those ideas.
I personally have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the things Morrissey has said, more than I should have really. There are a lot of better ways to spend my time. And I don't think someone who makes careless or reckless statements or statements designed to gather attention for a cause deserves to have that much time spent on working out what they really meant.
So to have this person say that disagreeing with Morrissey is a mindless act of political correctness is irritating.
I'll give an example. Morrissey said "one can't help bet feel that the Chinese are a subspecies." On one extreme people took the words "the Chinese are a subspecies" as the quote out of context, and used it to say he's a racist.
On the other extreme people made excuses saying that, "one can't help but feel" cancels out the rest of the statement. And some people said that he made this statement deliberately provocatively knowing that "subspecies" is going to echo truly racist ideology and get a lot of attention, and that the whole idea was to get this attention to focus it on the extreme cruelty against animals that had been shown on a television show he'd seen a few days previously.
The point is that you can interpret what he said and his motives for saying it a few different ways, but painting him as a victim of his own words, when he's known for his ability to express himself in language is disingenuous, and calling those who find fault with what he said "politically correct" is just stupid and lazy.
That statement was divisive and while there are many ways to interpret it, I fail to see the justification for requiring people to spend a great deal of time working out the meaning of what he said when it took only a few seconds for him to say it. All interpretations and reactions to the statement are just as justifiable as the statement himself.
That's just one example. It's not like he said that and got #cancelled on twitter the next day and his career ended.
I think he said something that might have been clever and designed to create a certain effect or it might have been said out of anger in a careless moment. But either way to claim that anyone that has a problem with it is either an idiotic victim of political correctness or just had it in for him anyway and was waiting for an excuse is just stupid.
As you said, he can say what he wants to and people can react as they will. That is free speech. Free speech is not the right to say anything you want to and be free from repercussion.
So she comes across as a moron and a person trying to save someone who really doesn't need saving. More importantly, he doesn't want to be saved. He wants to be a martyr. It's his image and he's been doing it a long time. Bigmouth Strikes Again. This is nothing new. Saying something provocative and then playing the martyr when the reaction you get is only what anyone would expect starts to seem kind of deliberate after a while. Those who want to save him have their own issues and I'm sure he's glad to have their help portraying him as a martyr but he probably does't have much respect for them or their intelligence.
www.morrisseycentral.com
katastrofa
clicky riff.
