My Problem with Morrissey and The Smiths

I’ve long had a problem with The Smiths and Morrissey. Seeing as The Smiths haven’t been around for decades, and Morrissey is largely irrelevant post Millennium, I should be able to walk away and leave everyone to it.

But I can’t, so there we are.

My main problem, is with Morrissey himself. Firstly, I don’t care for his music and lyrics. As pop music is subjective, I can let that slide. I don’t have to like all bands, and likewise, the music enjoyed by others doesn’t need to be liked by me.

However, Morrissey’s attitude to a number of things belies the things that fans tell me he supports, and I do have a big problem with that. Morrissey is, by many, seen as a working class champion. He’s seen as a man who sticks up for the bookish and the underdog.

Morrissey is not, as he’s so often lauded, a champion of working class people, and he certainly doesn’t speak about the same North me and my family grew up in. I’m told I should be grateful for Morrissey, but to me, he was always someone who sneered at poor people. He was a hater of pop-music that didn’t fit his narrow, small-C catholic tastes.

His vignettes on Northern working life are filled with dark streets, ghoulish elders in ‘humdrum towns’, purposefully avoiding all the life and vitality that lie in smaller Northern places. Morrissey may coo at his imagined working class battleaxes, but if he had to meet any in the flesh, he’d be too busy sneering at them, because they shared no love of vaguely obscure music from the mid-’70s and they ate meat.

It seems to me that the North that Morrissey talks about is pure fantasy, from a boy who didn’t leave the house enough, hitting out at imagined detractors. It’s easy to say no-one understands you when you don’t make any effort to be understood.

Morrissey separated himself from the community rather than becoming a part of it. He chose to look down on those in his immediate surroundings. He separated himself so much, that he wasn’t willing to find the wonderful things that were on his doorstep — he’d watch a kitchen sink drama instead of mucking around outside.

Working class communities the length and breadth of Britain are filled with warmth, humour, and intelligence — Morrissey chose to avoid it all, instead, writing songs and speaking in interviews like he grew up in some kind of “Kafka-esque” nightmare. The volume of people who grew up on those streets, who became famous themselves, do not share his view.

Morrissey’s condescension gives him a safety net, and handily for him, no-one is as clever as he is, so anyone who is a detractor can be written off as a ‘sheep’ or an unthinking moron. When the press or an interviewer challenges him on this, he wanders off in the middle of a two word answer, and the whole thing is passed off as adorably awkward, or impish.

Give him half an hour though, and he’ll be penning something slack and whiny to a fanzine that is devoted entirely to him. No doubt, you’ll find him complaining that no-one is interested in his music, and we’d rather talk about [insert a celebrity who everyone was talking about 5 years ago], and something about mediocrity, and throw in something about daring to speak up, and you’ve got the classic Morrissey Grumble Cycle.

He said: “As I recently drove through Greece I noticed repeated graffiti seemingly everywhere on every available wall. In large blue letters it said WAKE UP WAKE UP. It could almost have been written with the British public in mind, because although the spirit of 1939 Germany now pervades throughout media-brand Britain, the 2013 grotesque inevitability of Lord and Lady Beckham (with Sir Jamie Horrible close at heel) is, believe me, a fate worse than life. WAKE UP WAKE UP.”

Morrissey there, shouting ‘sheeple’, like a 14 year old who just watched 6 hours of conspiracy videos on YouTube.

Of course, Morrissey has been a celebrity for longer than he’s been anonymous, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s out of touch. He’s split his time between Los Angeles, Switzerland, Italy and the UK, in mansions and nice holiday homes, so he doesn’t really know about Britain anymore. He looks at everything through the wrong end of the telescope, and while attacking the out-of-touch and the greedy, like most self-loathers, he’s attacking himself.

This is all personal taste though, because as we know, there’s bigger problems with Morrissey. Some may have noticed that, these days, he’s prone to sounding like a Drunk Man With A Peerage, and frequently. Or has he always been like that, but no-one noticed?

When the children at Utoya were massacred in Norway in 2011 by Anders Brevik, he offhandedly stated: “That is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Shit every day.”

Angry Vegans are regularly shot down for likening animal slaughter to the Holocaust — however, when Morrissey show a lack of empathy for murdered children in favour of saying something about the meat industry, he gets an eventual pass, because people like listening to ‘Suedehead’ or something.

All the while, he’s dreaming of Olde England, showing admiration for Nigel Farage and UKIP, saying things like: “If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week, you won’t hear an English accent. You’ll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent.” It isn’t true, and the implication is worrying. However, there’s a lot to worry about when Morrissey opens his mouth. Speaking to Die Spiegel, he said that “Berlin has become the rape capital” “because of the open borders.”

It’s okay though, because people liked The Smiths when they were 14, and they can just laugh it all off with another ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ pun.

This isn’t a new development though. In an interview with Loaded (yes, that Loaded), he wanted Britain to stop giving foreign aid and called for a return of old fashioned buses because they’re ‘English’. He’s confessed that he’s not at all bothered about politics because he’s “far too concerned with social injustice”, which is all well and good, were it not for his residing outside the UK for tax purposes.

Even in the ‘80s, Morrissey’s ‘woe betide me’ schtick was already pretty galling. While at his most famous, giving withering looks to everything and everyone, he clearly missed the general public rioting against corruption, and the working classes being eloquently political against Thatcher and the far-right/neo-Nazi groups that sprung up.

He also didn’t notice that an LGBTQ revolution was happening, talking himself up as a lone martyr, and missing the fact that the British public was supportive of gay rights, and fully embracing queer pop from people like Boy George, Erasure, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Communards, Man II Man, Wham!, Soft Cell, and the burgeoning house music scene, which were resolutely working class and definitely not straight, and far from dimwitted.

They didn’t align with Morrissey’s tastes, so he ignored it.

Going further back, we see a classic indie-disco favourite in ‘Panic’ by The Smiths. Sounds harmless enough? Well, scratch the surface and it’s a deeply troubling song. At first glance, it sounds like a Real Music Bore complaining about the Top 40, but consider this: this song was written and released at the same time he was giving interviews about ‘a black pop conspiracy’.

Morrissey told Melody Maker: “Obviously to get on Top Of The Pops these days, one has to be, by law, black. I think something political has occurred among Michael Hurl [note — he was a TV producer] and his friends and there has been a hefty pushing of all these black artists and all this discofied nonsense into the Top 40. I think, as a result, that very aware younger groups that speak for now are being gagged.”

When asked if he believed that there was a black pop conspiracy which was keeping white indie groups down, he stated: “Yes, I really do.”

While Bronksi Beat made the anthemic ‘Small Town Boy’, which chronicled the struggle of coming out with strength and understanding, Morrissey preferred to quietly judge, scoring points against pop in favour of… well… not a great deal.

In ‘The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores’, his attack on pop-music is pretty clear: “It’s just more lock-jawed pop-stars, thicker than pig-shit. Nothing to convey, so scared to show intelligence. It might smear their lovely career”. In this, Morrissey wilfully misses the nuance and the smarts that are found in pop. Like his fans, he’s quick with an opinion without doing the leg work.

Recently, he said: “So, we are now in the era of marketed pop stars, which means that the labels fully control the charts, and consequently the public has lost interest. It’s very rare that a record label does something for the good of music. Thus we are force-fed such as Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith, which at least means that things can’t possibly get any worse.”

In this, you see two things — the first is an old man who still thinks the music charts are an accurate reflection of people’s tastes. The second, and this is the more annoying one, is the idea that people simply buy the music they’re told to buy. Morrissey has long espoused the idea that people don’t know what they like, because they’re too busy mindlessly shovelling whatever The Man tells them to. Pop-fans, like indie rock fans or any other form of music, are as picky, knowledgeable and knowing as you get. If they weren’t, everyone would be gazillion sellers. People are not stupid.

And there’s more, of course. We’ve got him referring to the Chinese as a ‘sub-species’, and more recently, his view that those who were sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey were asking for it.

Re: Spacey: “One wonders if the boy did not know what could happen. I do not know about you, but I’ve never been in situations like this in my youth. Never. I always knew what could happen. When you are in somebody’s bedroom, you have to be aware of where that can lead to. That’s why it does not sound very credible to me. It seems to me Spacey has been unnecessarily attacked.”

And Weinstein: “People know exactly what happens. And they play along. Afterward, they feel embarrassed, or they do not like it. And then they turn it around and say: I was attacked, I was surprised, I was dragged into the room. But if everything had gone well and had it given them a great career, they would not talk about it. I hate rape. I hate attacks. I hate sexual situations that are forced on someone. But in many cases, one looks at the circumstances and thinks that the person referred to as a victim is merely disappointed. Throughout the history of music and rock ’n’ roll there have been musicians who have slept with their groupies. If you go through history, almost everyone is guilty of sleeping with minors.”

In the same interview, it is brought up that David Bowie is alleged to have had sex with a 15 year old girl, Morrissey passes it off as “that was absolutely normal back then…”.

Now, if some lawyers are reading, Morrissey’s words have been quoted accurately, and of course, it is up to an individual to make their mind up about someone’s views, and indeed, whether or not you can separate the art from the artist — everyone has problematic favourites. Morrissey also said: “Why on earth would I be racist, what would I be trying to achieve?”

It’s up to you whether you’re okay singing along to ‘Bengali In Platforms’ and the line “life is hard enough when you belong here”, or being okay with a man who said in 1986, that reggae is “the most racist music in the entire world” because it is “an absolute total glorification of black supremacy.” If you’re alright with ‘National Front Disco’, then you do you.

What I will take issue with, is that this is not a new Morrissey, so if you’re re-evaluating your fandom, then it’s because you’ve changed — not him. He’s been at it since the heyday of The Smiths, and continued pretty much in the same way for three decades now, even though some would argue that he’s only just started sounding like a racist, drunk uncle.

After the Manchester attacks, he said: “In modern Britain everyone seems petrified to officially say what we all say in private”. And what might that be Morrissey? Come out and say it, you coward.

The insidiousness of his words were found when he shrieked ‘FAKE NEWS’, in true Trumpian style. Talking about the far-right in the French election, he said: “Last night Marine Le Pen easily won the French election debate. Today both the BBC and CNN say Macron won the debate. This is precisely why mainstream news media outlets cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Their private agendas are more important than facts, reality, or their duty to the people.”

The comments in the ’80s about ‘black conspiracies’, cack-handed stereotypes of immigrants, dismissing the working classes at almost every turn, sharing views with politicians that make your average Smiths fan feel ill… it’s not tinnitus from listening to ‘How Soon Is Now?’ too loudly for years — it’s the sound of a dog-whistle.

[originally written in 2015, updated in 2017, and will probably be updated again in the future]