Morrissey as folk devil

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Morrissey's satirical ambivalence is hard to translate into journalese. They need to pin him down to get a news angle.

When he lamented that England was a memory because he couldn't hear a British accent on London's wealthiest street it was conflated with inflammatory tabloid rhetoric instead of his own mutterings that everything good is dead:

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& shouldn't be forgotten:
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& everything bad, including himself, should be dead:
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& if it's not dead, it's terrible:
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(you can see the way the narrative has built itself around the flag fabrication, throwing in Panic & skipping lightly over his actual words straight to the paper's agenda or comparing it to something someone else said or might say).


When he made an ill-advised but figurative barb at China to convey his incredulity at their treatment of animals, he was accused of genocidal racism.

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He didn't grasp he was being accused of genocidal racism so he tried again to explain that China is very cruel to animals.

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China is very cruel to animals, the legacy of a catastrophic famine & an ideological war against bourgeois sentiment,


but really The Guardian knew what he meant & was giving him a kicking for not letting them use their photoshoot pictures, suing a sister publication & the sheer audacity of a cult artist paying no heed to the climate of opinion & being difficult.


Years later he was chided for wanting to play there:
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It's the worst sounding thing he's ever said & gets paraphrased & literalised into 'he said the Chinese are a subspecies'.

In the same vein, a clumsy comment against racism & alluding to in-group bias (group identity couldn't exist without an inclination towards each other, race is another word for group) has been paraphrased into 'he said he prefers his own race'.

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Which, in the context of Morrissey, is ridiculous.

He doesn't feel he belongs anywhere:
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Was intensely isolated:
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Is pessimistic, dislikes authority & thinks people are the same everywhere.

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Mostly suspects heterosexual men & carnivores:
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Morrissey's satirical ambivalence is hard to translate into journalese. They need to pin him down to get a news angle.

When he lamented that England was a memory because he couldn't hear a British accent on London's wealthiest street it was conflated with inflammatory tabloid rhetoric instead of his own mutterings that everything good is dead:

View attachment 66164

& shouldn't be forgotten:
View attachment 66165

& everything bad, including himself, should be dead:
View attachment 66166

& if it's not dead, it's terrible:
View attachment 66167

View attachment 66168

(you can see the way the narrative has built itself around the flag fabrication, throwing in Panic & skipping lightly over his actual words straight to the paper's agenda or comparing it to something someone else said or might say).


When he made an ill-advised but figurative barb at China to convey his incredulity at their treatment of animals, he was accused of genocidal racism.

View attachment 66169

He didn't grasp he was being accused of genocidal racism so he tried again to explain that China is very cruel to animals.

View attachment 66170

China is very cruel to animals, the legacy of a catastrophic famine & an ideological war against bourgeois sentiment,


but really The Guardian knew what he meant & was giving him a kicking for not letting them use their photoshoot pictures, suing a sister publication & the sheer audacity of a cult artist paying no heed to the climate of opinion & being difficult.


Years later he was chided for wanting to play there:
View attachment 66171


It's the worst sounding thing he's ever said & gets paraphrased & literalised into 'he said the Chinese are a subspecies'.

In the same vein, a clumsy comment against racism & alluding to in-group bias (group identity couldn't exist without an inclination towards each other, race is another word for group) has been paraphrased into 'he said he prefers his own race'.

View attachment 66172
View attachment 66174

Which, in the context of Morrissey, is ridiculous.

He doesn't feel he belongs anywhere:
View attachment 66175

Was intensely isolated:
View attachment 66176

Is pessimistic, dislikes authority & thinks people are the same everywhere.

View attachment 66177

View attachment 66179

Mostly suspects heterosexual men & carnivores:
View attachment 66180


I'd forgotten that little interview in Rookie, thanks for sharing it here!

Also: "Self-Disgust Is the Spur" would be a great album title.
 
Morrissey's perspective & image are unstable.

He's haunted by his horrific childhood:
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It means nothing to him:
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He wants it back:
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Marxist magazine Red Pepper sees machismo (?):
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Lynn Barber sees camp:
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Mary Harron (Guardian, 1983), a nerd:
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Even when he was a self-declared socialist in the 1980s there was a concern that his nostalgia was Tory, which seemed to mask a deeper fear that it was peculiar.

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clinging to the past because he fears the future (which brings death):
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& is frightened of the present:
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His vision of England - a place he's attached to & hates - is often normalised into Anglo-Saxon, New Jerusalem, white, Rule Britannia; all Irish immigrant anger, resentment, confusion, distress & paranoia written out.

But he's fascinated by squalor, violence, the outrage of his childhood slum being torn down for inhuman high rises & rural oblivion.

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He's more Glocal than Nationalist, wanting places to have their own character & resources - with some Irish Republicanism.



& his interviews/gigs are laced with unEnglish influences.



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I've not back-checked through this thread, but you should provide dates with these quotes etc. to provide a timeline context.
 
I've not back-checked through this thread, but you should provide dates with these quotes etc. to provide a timeline context.

Yeah, I'll try & sort it out.

If the article is online, I've linked to it in one of the posts that I've used it in.

Otherwise, it's from
3d3740debab3e9fd82643e70a5d225e3.jpg
 
Yeah, I'll try & sort it out.

If the article is online, I've linked to it in one of the posts that I've used it in.

Otherwise, it's from
View attachment 66229
Yes, but what I think I'd be interested in seeing is what he said, and when he said it, and see if anything has changed through the passage of time, i.e. his thoughts, his views, his commentary, etc. Some of the stuff I have read in this thread are very early quotes, some of which you could argue are quite immature, when compared to where he is now in his life.
I'd probably have a spreadsheet of sorts, categorised by 'years', but each to their own. :cool:
 
Yes, but what I think I'd be interested in seeing is what he said, and when he said it, and see if anything has changed through the passage of time, i.e. his thoughts, his views, his commentary, etc. Some of the stuff I have read in this thread are very early quotes, some of which you could argue are quite immature, when compared to where he is now in his life.
I'd probably have a spreadsheet of sorts, categorised by 'years', but each to their own. :cool:

The horror!

I don't think he's changed that much really - still intense & mercurial, just a bit more sarcastic & stoic.
 
It would be useful to at least categorise chronologically by "scandal".
Some posts really seem all over the place.
But I take it this is just some kind of draft for a more cohesive and complete essay?
 
It would be useful to at least categorise chronologically by "scandal".
Some posts really seem all over the place.
But I take it this is just some kind of draft for a more cohesive and complete essay?

A lot of the scandals have the same root, so I put them together... it's all thoughts at the minute.
 
Things I'm mulling over.

Why does he get policed for every tiny thing he says that might be related to race, Englishness or Britishness, but huge things like his problems with sexuality (beyond some gossip), gender, mental health, social isolation, self-loathing & Irish Catholicism get lightly skipped over despite turning up in a huge number of songs & interviews?

He's been accused of being a Tory or being like the BNP several times despite his support of the IRA & relentless dislike of the Royals being incompatible with those parties (aside from anything else). Why would no one ask why an Irish Republican was supposedly waving a Union Jack?

He's strange, asocial & has a deadpan sense of humour, but why does that trigger so much offense? He's easily avoidable. Why report the supposedly terrible things he's said at gigs?

Some quotes that are part of the mulling:

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& the same old, same old - adding that he doesn't deserve a film he didn't want.

 
Things I'm mulling over.

He's been accused of being a Tory or being like the BNP several times despite his support of the IRA & relentless dislike of the Royals being incompatible with those parties (aside from anything else). Why would no one ask why an Irish Republican was supposedly waving a Union Jack?

He's strange, asocial & has a deadpan sense of humour, but why does that trigger so much offense? He's easily avoidable. Why report the supposedly terrible things he's said at gigs?
I know someone else like that, and while dry, or deadpan, humour does have its appeal, it can be misinterpreted by those who don't 'get it'.
It's often delivered without emotion, or any exaggerated gestures (facial or otherwise), so I suspect that in some cases, it's possible this has been a root cause as some might not know if he is actually joking, or being serious.

"Deadpan, dry humour, or dry-wit humour[1] is the deliberate display of emotional neutrality or no emotion, commonly as a form of comedic delivery to contrast with the ridiculousness or absurdity of the subject matter. The delivery is meant to be blunt, ironic, laconic, or apparently unintentional."
 
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I was wondering how Morrissey got to Anne Marie - I think it's probably through the skeptic/atheist online community. His 'religion of war' line at a concert is something they were kicking about. Pat Condell seems to have coined it & Richard Dawkins backed him up.


Morrissey very quickly got embroiled in an argument about promotion with his record company, so he isn't fixated on it, in the way that some artists have ended up making punditry their life eg. Graham Linehan or Laurence Fox, Alyssa Milano or James Woods. (Also he doesn't seem to care that industry dust ups are meant to be hidden to preserve mystique & the halo effect - but that fits his wayward brand, in a way.)


The skeptics are blokish & their Elevatorgate scandal predated Gamergate - so I can't see them really appealing to Morrissey in the way an Irish lesbian who vaguely resembles Jimmy Clitheroe would.




Morrissey has barely said anything about Brexit or Islam (or race or Covid) - when he does it's mainly because he thinks the media & the state are ignoring or mishandling something.

Beyond pointing out that Anne-Marie isn't a good politician & while she does sometimes make a fair point her underlying ideology is nuts - there was no need to drag Morrissey over twitter, demonise him in every review of Dog & create a huge ur-myth spanning his entire career that turns him into Britain's most evil right-wing pop star over a few pull-quotes & 2 fringe politicians (3 if you add George Galloway).

It happened because swathes of the media class are spending all day, every day fighting about this stuff, divided into narrow-minded factions who hate each other.
 
I was wondering how Morrissey got to Anne Marie - I think it's probably through the skeptic/atheist online community. His 'religion of war' line at a concert is something they were kicking about. Pat Condell seems to have coined it & Richard Dawkins backed him up.


Morrissey very quickly got embroiled in an argument about promotion with his record company, so he isn't fixated on it, in the way that some artists have ended up making punditry their life eg. Graham Linehan or Laurence Fox, Alyssa Milano or James Woods. (Also he doesn't seem to care that industry dust ups are meant to be hidden to preserve mystique & the halo effect - but that fits his wayward brand, in a way.)


The skeptics are blokish & their Elevatorgate scandal predated Gamergate - so I can't see them really appealing to Morrissey in the way an Irish lesbian who vaguely resembles Jimmy Clitheroe would.




Morrissey has barely said anything about Brexit or Islam (or race or Covid) - when he does it's mainly because he thinks the media & the state are ignoring or mishandling something.

Beyond pointing out that Anne-Marie isn't a good politician & while she does sometimes make a fair point her underlying ideology is nuts - there was no need to drag Morrissey over twitter, demonise him in every review of Dog & create a huge ur-myth spanning his entire career that turns him into Britain's most evil right-wing pop star over a few pull-quotes & 2 fringe politicians (3 if you add George Galloway).

It happened because swathes of the media class are spending all day, every day fighting about this stuff, divided into narrow-minded factions who hate each other.
It happens because he is a troll and makes comments designed to get attention. Blaming the journalists for quoting him when he knows exactly what he's doing when he makes these comments is pretty dim. He's been doing it his entire career. He knows when he has delivered a line that's going to become the "pull quote."
What else are they going to talk about? He doesn't talk about his private life or his music very much. They need content and it's easy to position him as the racist, far right supporting, bigmouth. His NME interview solidified this image he hasn't tried very hard to make it go away.
 
It happens because he is a troll and makes comments designed to get attention. Blaming the journalists for quoting him when he knows exactly what he's doing when he makes these comments is pretty dim. He's been doing it his entire career. He knows when he has delivered a line that's going to become the "pull quote."
What else are they going to talk about? He doesn't talk about his private life or his music very much. They need content and it's easy to position him as the racist, far right supporting, bigmouth. His NME interview solidified this image he hasn't tried very hard to make it go away.

He isn't a troll & he doesn't say these things for attention - the vast majority of his interviews, songs & gigs haven't yielded a quote for them to add to their list of crimes.

They hunt for it & then repeat it relentlessly.

He'd have to censor himself & second guess the media every second of his public life to avoid it.
 
He isn't a troll & he doesn't say these things for attention - the vast majority of his interviews, songs & gigs haven't yielded a quote for them to add to their list of crimes.

They hunt for it & then repeat it relentlessly.

He'd have to censor himself & second guess the media every second of his public life to avoid it.
If you compare his first quote about subspecies China to the one where he explains it the trolling for attention is pretty clear in the original.
If a person goes to a bank but doesn't rob it the vast majority of the times they visit but then they do rob it 5 - 12 times over the course of a few decades are they not a bank robber?
 
I know someone else like that, and while dry, or deadpan, humour does have its appeal, it can be misinterpreted by those who don't 'get it'.
It's often delivered without emotion, or any exaggerated gestures (facial or otherwise), so I suspect that in some cases, it's possible this has been a root cause as some might not know if he is actually joking, or being serious.

"Deadpan, dry humour, or dry-wit humour[1] is the deliberate display of emotional neutrality or no emotion, commonly as a form of comedic delivery to contrast with the ridiculousness or absurdity of the subject matter. The delivery is meant to be blunt, ironic, laconic, or apparently unintentional."
I agree! Morrissey is a plastic Paddy Brit.
 
I agree! Morrissey is a plastic Paddy Brit.

You might be being mean - but I think that has a lot to do with it.

Growing up all the adults in his family were Irish & frequently went back to Dublin - that's probably too much Irish influence to feel British. But then he's not born in Ireland & wasn't living there, so not Irish either.

Only an Irish Catholic would be so invested in Cromwell that they'd want the English to spit on him.
 
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