Was/Is Morrissey Racist?

Especially if you have a burning cross on your front lawn.

80 million posts back: haha can we cross-reference Moz missing a British cultural identity with "Bengali in Platforms" (who only wants to EMBRACE your culture)? It's kind of a "you're doing it wrong" thing.

Morrissey was surely just looking to provide thematic fodder to his biographers when he decided to move to the most famounsly transient-based, old-culture-lacking city in the world and play to a fanbase of immigrants accused of eroding said non-existent culture.

"Famouns" is LA slang for "famous." We look to Los Angeles for the language we use, London is dead, etc

what would happen if Morrissey recreates Panic to attack Islam-o-fascists like Abu Hamza

Burn down the mosque [only if it is a front to extremists]
Hang the blessed extremist
Because the message that they constantly say
It says nothing to me about my life
Hang the blessed extremist
Because the evil message they constantly play

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/3420334.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=D278A15CF533E62C50C610CEBE39CFE6A55A1E4F32AD3138

i think he moved to los angeles because he liked tanning, & being tan

don't blame me
don't hate me
just because I'm the one to tell you
L.A. is bad enough when you belong there
oh shelve your SoCal plans

today Morrissey was dressed head to toe in denim like a proper lesbian.

-- Curt1s Stephens, Tuesday, November 6, 2007 1:24 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Link

where did you see him?

-- jergïns, Tuesday, November 6, 2007 12:46 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Link

he works with him

-- roxymuzak, Wednesday, November 7, 2007 4:14 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Link

curt1s is talking about what he dressed his homemade morrissey fashion paper doll in this morning.

-- sunny successor, Wednesday, November 7, 2007 4:27 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Link

For a while I thought Geir and Titchy were trying to out-WTF one another but Martian has just stepped up and shown how a real artist does it.

Isn't Knightsbridge, like, the upper upper upper upper upper-class part of Westend London? I mean, isn't the Kensington area exactly where the wealthiest people chose to put their city residence?

I which case I don't quite understand where Moz is coming from. But maybe he heard all the foreigns accents of all the non-English tourists who are usually walking around to visit Harrod's, get a view of Buckingham Palace etc?

Morrissey is basically having a dig at Al-Fayed and trying to shift the blame for Diana's death from Morrissey back onto Al-Fayed who was editor of the NME at the time.

Muslim cunts who have been given the right to live in our country should show some fucking respect. Insted of being cunts and banging on about this ISLAM SHIT - they should look at the country which has given them a second stab in life.

There is no such thing as a a British Muslim.

http://www.nme.com/boards/showthread.php?t=84546&page=2

Hmmm, Johnny Borrell has let himself down, there.

All my life, trouble in Jalalabad.

Haha that guy's sig links to his Leeds Utd fansite

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/5135/545613211a4212508150b60ne5.jpg

you guys!

"i wear black on the outside, cause black is how i feel on the inside" - unloveable

this argle-bargle came up on Question Time last night.

Bad idea having David Gedge on as a guest.

I dunno, he'd be good at questions

"Why are you being so reasonable now?"

Morrissey in 'read my article's comments, I've got more fans than Ron Paul' shocker:

I abhor racism and oppression or cruelty of any kind and will not let this pass without being absolutely clear and emphatic with regard to what my position is.

Racism is beyond common sense and I believe it has no place in our society.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/12/morrissey_responds.html

This whole incident kind of makes me want someone to end music for good.

A supposed music writer who knows nothing about David Bowie is still not worth paying attention to.

I like to think Morrissey did all the HTML bits in that blog post himself

Main points of defence used by Morrissey stans:

1) lol nme more like rubbishy
2) "Send 'em back" is just my opinion, why am I not allowed to voice it?

I see one blog writer makes the same point I did earlier: In Knightsbridge, the main reason for not hearing British accents isn't about immigration, rather about tourism.

3) Aren't policemen getting younger these days?

xpost - see even GEIR is making more sense than Morrissey!

And, surely, "send'em back" is racist, but loving English culture, being nostalgic about British culture, and - not least - sceptical towards American cultural imperialism, is not.

Norwegian Blood, Melodic Heart

If we're lucky this whole Morrissey v NME robot v dinosaur fite will see them both crash into one another and explode.

It was then that I realized the full extent of the setup, and I felt like Bob Hoskins in the final frame of The Long Good Friday

"i'm going into business with the Krauts - yeah, the Krauts!"

liked Sarfraz Manzoor's two pence

When I was a teenager I dismissed Morrissey as a daffodil-waving tosser with a persecution complex. In recent years I have come to appreciate the Smiths' recorded output more and have enjoyed seeing Morrissey a number of times in concert but my defence of him is not based on blind fanaticism

Who the fuck finds themselves liking the Smiths _more_ as they leave their teen years?

"You know, at 17 I never really appreciated 16 Candles as a movie, but entering into my thirties I've begun to love it as a subtle work of mastery"

Because teens are more polar?

The good news here is that Morrissey has just written more words for The Guardian than Dom Passantino ever has and will.

I just read that entire Guardian comments thread and now I hate myself.

I got about halfway down and gave up (on the Manzoor piece's comments) Thought the Manzoor piece was good, but 9/10 comments were pretty brainless/rote.

Worst crime against humanity: ethnic cleansing or not knowing every single track on Aladdin Sane?

Actually the most annoying thing about that Morrissey article *is* the "ZOMG he's never heard of this minor Bowie song that is a cornerstone of my myopic and reductivist view of 'our culture'" nonsense.

Does a German equivalent of East Ham exist, incidentally? I'm pretty sure a French one does. Is it possible that they just don't see it because they NEVER GO THERE, in the same way that hardly anyone goes to East Ham by choice, especially tourists?

(OK the NME has a similarly myopic and reductivist view so maybe Tim Jonze hasn't been doing his homework but still...)

East Berlin?

Jonze is supposed to be an NME writer though? You'd expect him to at least recognise the song title as being one of Bowie's, as in it being indicative of a general interest in/knowledge of music? (lol i am old old old/lol music writing in '07 "who is capt. beefhreat" (c) teh lex etc etc)

I've stayed in the suburbs of Berlin and Stockholm where the majority of people are immigrants, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't correspond to Morrisey's conservative ideals of Germany and Sweden.

Who the fuck finds themselves liking the Smiths _more_ as they leave their teen years?

I didn't like The Smiths at all back then. They were underground rock, and I was exclusively into pop (you know, English synthpop, the kind that was popular back then).
I am no big fan today either (still consider Johnny Marr an overrated composer that relied way too much on improvisation to write good melodies), but like them considerably better now than I did back then. Gene >> The Smiths though. :)

There's an emoticon I think we can all get behind

I'm unpersuaded that pining for a lost England that existed (or perhaps didn't) before mass immigration is necessarily racist.

The Smiths #2 Mar 1984
Hatful Of Hollow #7 Nov 1984
Meat Is Murder #1 Feb 1985
The Queen Is Dead #2 Jun 1986
The World Won't Listen #2 Mar 1987
Strangeways, Here We Come #2 Oct 1987
#2 Sep 1988
Best of The Smiths #1 Aug 1992

Underground.

They weren't that big a deal anywhere outside the UK though.

The assumption that the uk was in fact some kind of whites only zone at any time in living memory is false anyway, see:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=south+shields+race+riot&meta=&btnG=Google+Search