Guardian / Zoe Williams: "A Morrissey tribute band separates the art from the artist – but I still end up feeling queasy" (July 30, 2024)

Today sees a fairly pointless "opinion piece" from dear old Zoe Williams, who'll happily write 400 words about ANYTHING. If you can't be arsed to click through, here's the text of it:

A Morrissey tribute band separates the art from the artist – but I still end up feeling queasy​

On Saturday night, I went to the Dublin Castle, a pub and music venue in Camden, north London, the fabled birthplace of Britpop. I definitely wasn’t there when Blur were born; I feel sure I would have remembered. But I was there the night a guy set his hair on fire because he was trying to make a girl smell his shampoo and he accidentally leaned over someone lighting a cigarette. So that’s going back a few years.

Covers band Viva Morrissey speak straight to the hearts of those of us with an unarguable passion for Morrissey the genre, but an inveterate dislike of Morrissey the man. It’s an ambivalence deeper than the standard question “can you love the art while finding the artist ‘problematic’?”.

Picasso, for instance, was of his time. He died before society figured out that locking women in studios was bad, actually. Who knows, if he hadn’t died, he might have apologised. Morrissey, by contrast, lives his life as a constant provocation, peddling tired far-right tropes (Hitler was leftwing, actually) and dumb, crotchety attacks on Sadiq Khan, which is just not-quite-deniable Islamophobia for the basic.

Want to say something racist, but don’t want to be challenged on it? Say something irrelevant and unkind about the mayor of London. It’s so simple even Donald Trump can do it.

I could never pay to see Morrissey; but I’d still always watch a guy who looks and sounds a bit like him, especially if he didn’t get into the choppier waters of ethno-nationalism, which it’s technically possible to avoid. But Viva Morrissey had elected to play You Are the Quarry in full, so Irish Blood, English Heart couldn’t be skirted. It’s nothing like as nasty as Bengali in Platforms, but listening to the lyrics, live – “I’ve been dreaming of a time when / To be English is not to be baneful / To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful / Racist or partial”, followed by a swipe at mainstream politics – it described, quite economically and, OK, also tunefully, the full political programme of the Reform party. All English politics is rubbish because it’s not proud enough to be English. You can imagine Lee Anderson singing it, with Farage and Tice on guitars, at the karaoke from hell.

Released in 2004, it was a massively leading indicator of how ugly politics would become. While it wouldn’t have been possible, then, for anyone to take Morrissey as seriously as he takes himself, we could have got a heads up for the future if we’d listened a fraction more closely.

A Morrissey tribute band separates the art from the artist – but I still end up feeling queasy | Zoe Williams

His 2004 song Irish Blood, English Heart turns out to have been a massively leading indicator of how ugly politics was going to become, writes Guardian columnist Zoe Williams

www.theguardian.com

 

[goinghome]

The opinion piece grapples with the dichotomy of appreciating Morrissey’s music while rejecting his political views, ultimately painting Morrissey as a provocateur whose recent statements overshadow his artistic contributions. However, this critique oversimplifies the complex interplay between art and artist, reducing a multifaceted issue to a binary choice and failing to engage with the deeper nuances of artistic consumption and historical context.

While the piece dismisses Picasso’s flaws as a product of his time, it neglects to acknowledge that all art, including Morrissey’s, is situated within its cultural and temporal context. Condemning Morrissey without recognizing this continuity risks anachronism and ignores the evolution of societal values.

Furthermore, the critique of Morrissey’s lyrics, particularly “Irish Blood, English Heart,” as emblematic of right-wing nationalism is overly simplistic. The lyrics reflect a complex identity struggle and critique of British politics, not a straightforward endorsement of ethno-nationalism.

Moreover, the piece fails to consider the role of audience interpretation in the consumption of art. Listeners bring their perspectives and contexts to the music, allowing for a plurality of meanings. Dismissing the entire body of Morrissey’s work because of his political statements not only undermines the agency of the audience but also ignores the possibility of engaging with the art critically, separating the personal views of the artist from the thematic richness of the work.

In addition, the assertion that Morrissey’s provocative statements are a continuous provocation lacks nuance. While his comments can be contentious and offensive, they should be analyzed within the broader landscape of public discourse and freedom of expression. The call to completely boycott Morrissey’s music risks fostering an environment where art is policed according to prevailing political sentiments, stifling artistic diversity and dialogue.

The piece’s conclusion, suggesting that the audience should have anticipated future political ugliness by listening more closely to Morrissey, presumes a linearity in cultural and political developments that is rarely so clear-cut.

Art does not predict politics; rather, it reflects and influences it in unpredictable ways. To place such predictive responsibility on music overlooks the complexity of societal changes and the multifaceted influences on political landscapes.

This journalist ultimately reduces a complex issue to a simplistic moral judgment. Engaging with art critically requires a nuanced understanding of historical context, audience interpretation, and the multifaceted nature of artistic expression.

Chiming with that neat post, whether it's from AI or not, Hopps (2009: 142) observes that "like Carnival laughter, innuendo has a democratic foundation: in pointing towards the drives and processes to which all human beings are subject, it involves a “suspension of all hierarchical precedence” and reveals a realm of “purely human relations” (“Vulgar” in its primary etymological sense means “of the common people”).

Such humour would therefore obviously appeal to Morrissey whose work […] – both in its concern for the marginalized, the damaged, the fallen and the “queer”, and in the animosity it evinces towards institutions, nations and individuals that appear to deny the claims of common humanity – is centrally bound up with the defence of the human. Its appeal might also lie in the fact that innuendo is the mirror image and hence perhaps the ideal opponent of hypocrisy in that it intimates behind all fine appearances a […] brotherhood in corporeality."

 

[goinghome]

Britain is a powder keg. Ireland is a powder keg. France is a powder keg, as we saw from the events of last year. No doubt there are similar tensions in countries across Europe, from Portugal to Sweden. And there are clearly tensions in the USA. All caused by uncontrolled mass immigration. People will tolerate and put up with many things. Until they see that their children are at risk. Bonfire of Teenagers, Bonfire of Children.
And people aren't stupid. They can see they are being lied to. 'Diversity is strength' repeated over and over again like some slogan straight out of Orwell's 1984. This is why I quite like Notre Dame as a catchy pop song. Its message is clear - don't believe what they tell you. Especially when they 'rule out terrorism'.

In his essay for the 2011 Morrissey Fandom book, producer-musician Eirik Askerøi wrote about, No Love in Modern Life: Matters of Performance and Production in a Morrissey Song, which includes these thoughts on the song, Something Is Squeezing My Skull:

"the ironic attitude in ‘Something Is Squeezing My Skull’ can be interpreted in relation to two notions that were dominating the socio-political discourse at the time the record was released. The first notion concerns the “war on terror”, and ways in which this might have had a gathering effect through collective fear. According to Baudrillard, our western society is grounded in what he labels a zero-death system: “a system that operates on the exclusion of death” (Baudrillard 2003: 16). Introducing the term as a possible key to explaining the elevated fear of terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, Baudrillard points out how terror has removed this basic premise of this system. And, although perhaps not present at all times, the socially constituted fear of terror in everyday life has still left an irreversible mark of angst in our society.

The second notion rests on the idea that Internet-based media like YouTube... Facebook have become mediators of increased freedom (and alienation) for the subject. If we return to the opening quote of this chapter ["As time speeds up, nothing changes. People become more lonely. And the more they surround themselves by electronic gadgets, they become more isolated and lonely, and I think there’ll be a reaction against that" - Morrissey 2009], Morrissey expresses his concerns about how loneliness and immobilization come as a result of the growing number of electronic gadgets that invade our everyday life. This also comes across as one of the motives for writing this song (Morrissey 2009). Not only are people afraid of the terrorist threat, but they also become increasingly immobilized and lonely through the extended use of electronic gadgets. Together, these socially constructed notions give rise to what Butler refers to as a normative framework (Butler 2009).

The consequence of such a framework would provide an applicable context for reading ‘Something Is Squeezing My Skull’ as an utterance. For, as Butler argues: The consequence is that the normative framework mandates a certain ignorance about the ‘subjects’ at issue, and even rationalizes this ignorance as necessary to the possibility of making strong normative judgements. (Butler 2009: 143) Through the mass media’s coverage of the war on terror, the binary oppositions of good/ evil, right/wrong, East/West and with us/against us have grown stronger.

Supported by a wide range of visual, audible and written material, which proves the cruelty of the Other, these binaries become easier to accept, particularly, as Morrissey suggests, if people become passive and lonely due to increased interaction with new media. In this sense, the notion that a “war against terror” is necessary for protecting democracy gets further reinforcement through the deployment of these media. So-called terrorists have been known to utilize these media as channels of posing their threats against the west, and also, perhaps most potently, the feeling of freedom and democracy becomes embodied through these channels."

Also see Morrissey's 4-part interview from 2009 with Zane Lowe for MTV for these and more points -

 

[goinghome]

There's a lively discussion about this over on the Morrissey reddit sub too:



And from, ‘Vicar In A Tutu’: Dialogism, Iconicity and the Carnivalesque in Morrissey' (2011), Pierpaolo Martino's makes more relevant observations elaborating on Morrissey's refusal of racism in said song:

"In ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ Morrissey focuses on his particular human condition, that of someone inhabiting the borderline between differences, between identities (“Irish Blood, English Heart this I’m made of ”). The first chorus lines in the song “no regime can buy or sell me” make reference to Morrissey’s otherness in relation to any system and regime, and yet they indirectly and ironically refer to his position of artist sold and bought within the capitalist system. However, since his voice is speaking from the very heart of this system, Morrissey’s discourse has a truly deconstructive effect. Morrissey sees his personal condition as a perspective through which to address and analyse the condition of England; Morrissey’s partial Irishness is indeed a sort of blackness (see Simpson 2004: 51), a form of hybridity, a postcolonial perspective through which to question Britain’s identity. In his treatment of both America and Britain Morrissey presents images connected with power; in particular, he concentrates on some signs, or better symbols, associated with the British colonial empire, like for instance the Union Jack (“I’ve been dreaming of a time when / to be English is not to be baneful / to be standing by the flag not feeling / shameful, racist or partial”). Here there is also an indirect reference to the Finsbury Park accident; Morrissey is finally clarifying his political position, openly asserting his rejection of racism.

In the second chorus of the song the references to the colonial empire and to English politics become even more precise (“I’ve been dreaming of a time when / the English are sick to death of Labour / and Tories / and spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell / and denounce this royal line that still / salutes him / and will salute him forever”). Commenting on the song during an interview, Morrissey explained that - it’s a comment on the whole British monarchy. Oliver Cromwell was no more than a general, but he behaved like some of them by slaughtering thousands of Irishmen just to get them out of the way. As for British politics, the only choice you have is between the Tories and Labour, neither of which are spokesmen for the people. It’s an age-old, ridiculous circus. - (in Bret 2004: 257)

It is interesting to note that the publication of the single – two weeks before the album – was accompanied by the release of a video-clip consistently played at MTV, which in this way “promoted”, in visual terms, Morrissey’s counter-discourse on the establishment’s favourite discursive channel (television). The video features Morrissey singing the song with his musicians and a few people as audience in a relatively small (underground) marginal space. The focus of the video’s director is on Morrissey’s voice, on his words and hence on the importance of “listening” to those words. Morrissey is portrayed as a middle-aged singer who asserts his otherness in relation to the “young and beautiful” prototype often reproduced in music television. Dressed in a white jacket – which besides being a pacifist symbol is perfectly in tune with the singer’s choice of wearing extra-elegant (Rat Pack-like) suits during concerts and public appearances from 2002 onwards – Morrissey accompanies his words with a mime, which amplifies the verbal contents, in particular on the words “spit”, “denounce”, “salute”, that is, the expressions more directly related to the ideology of resistance.

In short, in You are the Quarry, and in particular in ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ Morrissey questions the very idea of polarity as a static dimension, as a space of identification and exclusion. Here he seems to inhabit the borderline, the limit, the “coma” which at once joins and specifies his Irish origins and his English sensibility, translating it into a world-view. This is a belated and yet extremely powerful response for those who saw in Morrissey a nationalist and a racist, obsessed with England’s historical and cultural superiority over the rest of the world.

Hopps (2009: 59) defines Morrissey’s in-betweeness in terms of “oxymoronic self ”, something which he explains by making reference to Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s most interesting feature is, indeed, as queer theorists have shown, his liminality, his capacity of never taking sides, of rejecting a fixed, predictable, centralizing frame of mind, and so in his resistance to the irreconcilability of contradictory, even opposite realities. Something similar happens with Morrissey. He is, for example, typically described as an “ordinary working-class ‘antistar’ who nevertheless loves to hog the spotlight, a nice man who says the nastiest things about other people, a shy man who is also an outrageous narcissist” (Hopps 2009: 6). Hopps analyses Morrissey’s elusiveness, his oxymoronic self, in terms of mobility and multiplicity; with the former he implies, among other things, the artist’s capacity of moving from one position to another in few lines of a song (as witnessed in ‘Cemetry Gates’ in which a welll-earned person criticizes a plagiarist to be later criticized himself), with the latter his capacity of being many different things at once, and in particular his capacity of mixing levity and gravity."