Was/Is Morrissey Racist?

While it might be easy to accuse a company of racism if it failed to employ people because of their racial origin, and while we might call someone a racist if they expressed the opinion that Chinese were 'inferior', it's difficult to say that a pop song is similar to an employment policy or a personal opinion.

A pop song usually has all the ambiguity of any work of art, and it was this ambiguity that Morrissey had every right to preserve by maintaining his silence in the face of the NME's inquisition.

Mr Morrissey employed characters. Some were Bengali. (This was already more than most songwriters did, and probably laudable). Mr Morrissey employed narrators to tell his stories. His narrators had a position within the song. They were perhaps characters, perhaps proxies for the author. As usual with art, we will never know. The songs contained voices which said things like 'Life is difficult enough when you belong here' or 'Three against one, that can't be fair'. If these were statements made in a fist fight, we would judge them according to context. In a song, we cannot. They are just hanging there: provocative, yes, racist, no.

There's an interesting parallel with an exhibition held in the early 90s by Pruitt and Early called The Black Show. They collected together artifacts of 'blackness'. They made no earnest Adrian Piper-like statements of condemnation, just presented these stereotypes and totems without comment. They were hounded out of the art world in the ensuing controversy. It took Rob Pruitt about eight years to be accepted once again as a serious artist. He now paints pandas.

Keeping our pantomime metaphor, the racism episode was when Morrissey became the pantomime villain and got hissed for reasons as arbitrary as those for which he was applauded when he was the 'famous international playboy' in role as the 'November monster' (one fiction playing another).

The reasons for the press's change in attitude may be many -- sympathy with Marr, a preference for Rough Trade over EMI, a sense of boredom with Morrissey's domination of the music press, an effort to clear the decks for the 90s, the fact that many journalists had been converted by the acid house revolution to the dance music Morrissey so despised, and even, I would suggest, some homophobia, since Morrissey's actual interest in these songs about skinheads and Bengalis may well come from a sexual interest in both (cf Hanif Kureshi's 'My Beautiful Launderette', which I think we can assume kindled M's interest quite a bit, and shows a skin overcoming prejudice by developing a crush on one of his former victims).

Subject: Re: NME disappearing up its own PR [ Previous Message ] Posted By Andrew Collins on Thu Jul 26 15:41:34 BST 2001:

I never said the Morrissey witch-hunt issue was real journalism, Jon. I said it was "real" journalism, ie. closer to journalism than the shit we usually did. I was at Madstock and the crowd were pretty dodgy, some of them - fat, middle-aged skins who looked like they hadn't come out of their North London pub since Madness's heyday. Whether Moz is/was a racist or not was less important than the fact that he was flirting with far right imagery - like a cultural tourist - and not going on record about his reasons, or his real feelings. He could have stopped that cover story with one statement. He chose to remain enigmatic and distant, compounding his error. There was an artificial excitement in the office over those two days (we dropped Kylie from the cover for Moz you know!) At first, as features editor, I refused to get involved, but I was ordered by my boss into the big emergency staff meeting, and once the decision was made, it was up to the senior staff (me, Danny Kelly and Stuart Maconie) to get the copy done, along with an excellent piece by Dele Fadele who is black and could therefore offer a perspective none of us NME white boys could. (Dele was furious about Moz's actions and needed no coercion to write.) All I did was compile Morrissey's faux-racist quotes from every interview he'd ever done, and collate the lyrics. My own personal opinion never appeared, but I was part of the staff and stood by the issue. It asked questions of an increasingly remote but still hugely influential artist who refused to answer them. There are very few issues of NME from that period that anybody remembers let alone still talks about. We did our job.

Then Stuart and I left and "reclaimed" the Union Jack for the Select British issue.

He once WAS that ugly failed adolescent, wasn't he? Perhaps not exactly as described in HSIN, but certainly something similar.

So why not a possibility that the right-wing persona could be *him*.

Actually, now I come to think of it, the song that is most dubious or problematic is 'We'll Let You Know': 'we are the last truly British people you will ever (never want to) know'. It's ambivalent about a kind of rump of Englishness, implying that all that is left are the hateful aspects of English crowd culture. I think it's troublesome nature is kind of interesting, really - much more so than more ideologically clearcut representations.

hmm i don't think i put that very well: i am *so* on deadline and not supposed to be reading ILM

Morrissey, well-known for severing ties with friends over real or imaginary slights, had already decided to cut the NME dead, probably because of editor Danny Kelly's undisguised partisanship for Johnny Marr. Morrissey's failure to speak to them (although, as noted above, he continued speaking volubly to people like Les Inrockuptibles in France) was as big a blow to the NME circa 1990 as it would have been for Oasis to cut them dead in 1997. They could have said lamely 'The biggest star in the music firmament will no longer talk to us.' Instead, they said 'The biggest star in the music firmament is, er, a racist! Down with him! Long live, er, Kingmaker and, er, The Wonder Stuff!'

The most intriguing thing about "We'll Let You Know" for me was the Battle of Hastings / Bayeux Tapestry (what it made *me* think of, anyway, or maybe an old regional TV thing about same) sequence of sounds in the middle of the song: his most self-conscious use of atmospherics rather than lyrics to evoke a certain atmosphere, his equivalent of the Luke Haines / Winchester Cathedral Choir version of "In The Bleak Midwinter". I'm not sure whether I think that bit of "We'll Let You Know" was better and more subtle than the vocal sections of the song, or just pathetically crude attempts to establish certain cultural associations. Put another way, I really can't work out my position on "We'll Let You Know" generally, even after all this time, which you could say is quite possibly what Morrissey intended.

The book "Sounds English" that Mike mentions looks interesting: any details?

Morrissey's mistake was that his flirtation with the far right seemed largely a matter of aesthetics, and a matter of fashion. One could accuse of him "racism" not insofar as there's much evidence that he actually holds such beliefs, but insofar his willingness to flirt with them the way 90s bands flirted with trip-hop -- as if he were completely oblivious to how very important such issues were, and how his actions could very well make it that much more likely for thousands of Asian kids to get beaten bloody -- well, this is not a fine thing to do and not a fine thing to be glib or silent about, because it matters. The artist's God complex is that he is free to pick and choose signifiers from the air and invest them only with whatever meaning he thinks they have to him -- but then it ceases to be art, which is about communication, and becomes either impenetrable solipsism or drunken raving. Momus, you should not give artists a free pass on this any more than you should give it to bank managers or cab drivers: this "don't draw real-world conclusions from anything" is a route to making art either meaningless or completely dull.

anyway, if moz didn't want to play MassKult headgamez with stardom and slebrity, why sign to emi at all? it's a waste of global corporate outreach and he = a ToTaL LaYMuR as a result (cf dave q's only-too exact crit of the actual nme editorial gameplan: this shd have been a manipulative symbol-war of titans, using every field of media; instead SPM went uber-indie on everyone and (implicitly) made it just abt the music maaan... basically nme offered him the chance to be bowie and he fucked out)

"At the heat of the racist debate, the former NME editor Steve Sutherland wondered if Morrissey's alleged racism "might be a gay thing". "

I wonder if that quote is true?

Every single person I knew growing up who was a Smiths fan was Asian (mostly of Chinese descent, over here). I haven't heard any of the Smith's songs in question, but from their titles I'm guessing they portray the same beautiful losers as all the other Smiths' songs I have heard. Anyway, it is impossible for me to fathom that some paki-bashing yob could have been inspired by Morrissey (of all people!) Or was England in the 80's really like this?

Kris, I think you're entirely right -- particularly w/r/t fans and what Smiths fandom actually "meant" in the public sphere. I, anyway, was at no point bothered in any deep sense by listening to the Smiths / Morrissey, and never imagined that Morrissey's flirtations with near-racist symbols actually reflected near-racist ideology on his own part. It did, however, make me like him a lot less as time went on: it is one thing to traffic in such symbols in the process of making a relevant artistic statement, but to toy mutely with them for no massive purpose strikes me as dumb and glib and something of a mockery of how very real and threatening and Actually Quite Serious such symbols are. It made Morrissey look like a decent artist who really needed to stick with his own neuroses and keep his nose out of cultural politics for fear of hugely embarrassing himself.

I wrote in something a while ago that "conservatism" can be a very lovely thing in pop music, when it is only aesthetic and the actual workings of the world are not at stake -- thus Morrissey's paens to vanishing Anglicisms never struck me as actually reactionary. But as he toed lines between aesthetics and cold hard reality he raised the possibility that those paens weren't purely aesthetic or personal/emotional, and I think it made him look both silly and stupid, or in any case completely unaware that Symbols Mean Something beyond what they mean in the very scenic midscape of Stephen Patrick Morrissey.

I do agree that looking at lyrics is unhelpful. "National Front Disco" is loaded with sarcasm from the very title, and anyway assigns plenty of threat to the idea: where has our dear boy gone -- oh dear, he has gone bad, and by that time in the man's career you could tell that he recognized the badness but just had an idiosyncratic attraction to it. "Asian Rut" eulogizes the Asian boy, if patronizingly. "Bengali in Platforms" is basically the height of condescension and exhibits really iffy word choice with the "belong," but it seems less virulent than just sort of solipsistic and dumb, i.e. Morrissey is so blindly English that he never considers that life can be way harder elsewhere even if you do "belong" there, and basically just demonstrates his inability to think properly about anything that doesn't slot nicely into his very English little world.

I'm almost positive that is true, because I recall reading something very similar to this in the NME at the time....iirc Sutherland was editing the letters page and was speculating about it.

You may or may not have noticed that there is a diversity of thought and opinion on this thread.

Reckon it'll sell 38,908 copies.

cf Guess: The chart position that the new Morrissey album "Low in High School" debuts at.

My guess is it'll enter at #6 and drop to #77 the following week.

― Dan Worsley

It's pretty funny to see all these fan-base acts have chart runs like this. My favourites are Shed Seven's comeback album, Instant Pleasures going in at eight (after an initial mid-week where they were number two behind Sam Smith!) and then falling to number 100 the next week. Even better was the last Embrace album which somehow managed a top five placing but was gone from the top 100 the week after. That must have been a pretty awkward call for the label to make to the band in that second week. "It's bad news guys, you're being outsold by three Adele albums and (What's The Story) Morning Glory".

It's pretty funny to see all these fan-base acts have chart runs like this.

This has been a noted feature of Morrissey records since the mid-'90s.

That's true. I think he only briefly avoided that kind of run with You Are The Quarry. I remember being annoyed when Keane beat him to number one (even though I thought the album was disappointing). This time round I'm actually rooting for Capaldi to ruin his week. After his last album under-performed he had a moan about it, predictably blaming the media who are obviously all out to get him.

shared unit of analysis (unperson) at 3:14 15 May 19
Some mod should go ahead and change this thread's title to "How Racist Is Morrissey?"

That's true. I think he only briefly avoided that kind of run with You Are The Quarry. I remember being annoyed when Keane beat him to number one (even though I thought the album was disappointing). This time round I'm actually rooting for Capaldi to ruin his week. After his last album under-performed he had a moan about it, predictably blaming the media who are obviously all out to get him.

― kitchen person, Tuesday, May 28, 2019 11:56 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark

he devotes many pages of his autobiography to how his solo records went number 1 and the smiths records didn't, ergo the solo records are better, he is better and more successful by himself etc. although his ego makes him undercut the argument a bit by blaming the smiths' records not going to number 1 on rough trade not handling distro properly

xp requesting “is Morrissey dead yet?”

We already have that one

Morrissey really seriously ill?

Still ill iirc

It's pretty funny to see all these fan-base acts have chart runs like this. My favourites are Shed Seven's comeback album, Instant Pleasures going in at eight (after an initial mid-week where they were number two behind Sam Smith!) and then falling to number 100 the next week. Even better was the last Embrace album which somehow managed a top five placing but was gone from the top 100 the week after. That must have been a pretty awkward call for the label to make to the band in that second week. "It's bad news guys, you're being outsold by three Adele albums and (What's The Story) Morning Glory".

― kitchen person, Tuesday, May 28, 2019 6:10 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not really. I don't think anyone has really given a shit about the charts for over a decade now.

It would appear Mozzer gives a shit. In the old days, iirc, it used to be Cliff Richard and Status Quo who were forever banging on about chart placings and not getting airplay.

Indeed - and the charts were far more diverse when they were whining about it.

suggest changing thread title to "Morrissey Is Racist", no need for agnotology here

Alternately, "Why Are We Still Talking About Morrissey?"

Not really. I don't think anyone has really given a shit about the charts for over a decade now.

― Le Baton Rose (Turrican)

I'm sure Shed Seven were delighted to make the top 10 that week!

California Son is currently number two in the mid-weeks behind Lewis Capaldi. Album sales really are ridiculously low at the moment huh?
― kitchen person, Tuesday, May 28, 2019 3:55 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bear in mind that some of the "lower-downs" consist of the Elton soundtrack, and a hurtling-upwards Elton Greatesthits, and umm.. Primal Scream? (think he's safe from that one)..

I'm guessing he's dreaming of "5"...

I'm guessing he's dreaming of "5"...

― Mark G

Looks like you could be right. Today's sales

1 Lewis Capaldi - Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent (27.4k)
2 Morrissey - California Son (7.4k) *
3 Billie Eilish - WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? (6.9k)
4 Motion Picture Cast Recording - Rocketman (5.9k) *
5 Motion Picture Cast Recording - The Greatest Showman (5.7k)

great news for those promising up-and-comers motion picture cast recording

you just wait until the morrissey biopic hits the big screen

There's been one already (it wasn't a hit):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_Is_Mine

they need to re-launch it as Racistman

Alternately, "Why Are We Still Talking About Morrissey?"

The More we ignore him...

xp lol

Read an interview and he justifies his stance because that racist party supports some form of animal rights (but they do so for racist reasons). Reminds me of why I got out of extreme environmentalism - some people get so extremely orthodox about their practices that they end up turning fascist and anti-human.

that's a bit unfair. animal rights and environmentalism overlap more commonly with left-wing political ideas and anti-oppressive politics. not that eco-fascism and the unabomber don't exist

Also Morrissey was clearly always a cunt and just happens to use racism and pretending to care about animals as two vehicles for that

wins otm - though there's a history of the far right being concerned with animal rights/environmentalism.

Umblumblum foxhunting bla bla

wins otm - I know Morrissey has talked about factory farming but he seems extra mad about animal cruelty committed by people who aren’t white for some reason.

I hate changing thread titles when it makes all the early posts incoherent. Yes, we all know the answer is yes, but people have phrased things in response to the question all the way through this thread. Start a new one if you hate this title.

it can go in the early-ilx thread title hall of fame along with "Why are Japanese films so terrible?"

Morrissey is a racist

yeah, there should be a function that logs previous thread titles above the first post when they get edited #ideasforilx

I guess with something this short you could always do a (previously 'Was/Is Morrissey Racist?') bit and that would be fine with me, but that doesn't help for threads with longer titles.

emil.y, my counterargument will always be Which animal would you use to crush Scrappy Doo?

Ahahaha, okay, that is brilliant.

Morrissey is in a superposition of racism and non-racism and if we make a measurement we will collapse teh wave function

“That’s the key to modern Britain … only the mentally castrated are eligible for praise and awards. It’s against the law to be intelligent"

https://summit.news/2019/06/24/pop-icon-morrissey-says-diversity-is-not-a-strength/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZG-Ig3M7r4

“Everyone ultimately prefers their own race”

For the last decade, Morrissey has sought to undermine the sacred cows of the progressive left, which is why he is relentlessly attacked by the media.

But he remains one of a rare breed of music industry celebrities who these days is virtually extinct – an authentic individual who refuses to self-censor to please the authoritarian hate mobs that control popular culture.

The interview is bad enough as it is, what's this bollocks doing underneath it?

The author is a psychopath who tweets as @PrisonPlanet. Go ahead and have a look if you like.

this is the incorrect thread to post this in

please use the correct thread

Morrissey is a racist

lol @ Stew illustration, pisces

"If borders are such terrible things then why did they ever exist in the first place?"

This pullquote on the Prison Planet excerpt is barely a hint of the galaxy-brained content in the actual interview

sam:
Why don’t The Guardian just have you killed and put an end to it all?

M:
I think that’s their eventual intention. Be patient!

sam:
Why haven’t any legal moves been made against The Guardian?

If I suffered physical harm as a direct result of the Guardian’s tyranny, you can imagine cheers and champagne exploding through their offices… it chills the blood.

sam:
I can’t think why I would ever buy a newspaper!

unsourced reporting, including personal interpretation of another's actions, is such a scourge:

The so-called Officer (Raffaele Barone) was threatening me with a gun and breathing very heavily …. crazed, darting eyes … which I assumed to be a medical condition.

Are you actually a supporter of UKIP?

M:
No. Never.

sam:
Of Nigel Farage?

M:
No, no, no … but it’s obvious that he would make a good Prime Minister … if any of us can actually remember what a good Prime Minister is.

tbh this would have read as a good joke in Morrissey's pre-1989 intrview persona:

Someone made the point the other day about David Bowie’s famous “England would benefit from a fascist government” comment … and his admiration for Hitler … and how Hitler was as stylish as Jagger … and how the UK needed a “complete right wing leader”. Could you imagine if I’d said THAT! Now, of course, I sat privately with David many times, and he wasn’t remotely fascist… although it has been said that he’d visited Hitler’s bunker.

You also knew Lou Reed for awhile?

M:
Yes. He was a lovely person. He had a great smile which he almost never used.

sam:
I promise this is the last time I’ll mention The Guardian, but I laughed when I read how they criticized you because of your white privilege! Obviously, I know your life, and there’s been no hint of white privilege… white disadvantage, if anything!

Why do you think successive governments support the idea of dead animals as human food?

M:
I think … it’s because … successive governments receive support and cash and sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies and farmers associations, so therefore governments are obliged to repay them. The idea, I think, is to keep people unwell, sick, or dying, and the best way to do this is to convince them that fat slices of sheeps faces are good for you. If the human race looked after itself and didn’t eat pigs’ noses then pharmaceutical companies would perish. In the USA, most people die because of animal consumption, but it doesn’t ever seem to be a concern to the government because of … it’s good for business to keep people on medication. The food industry has destroyed the truth about what food is.

sam:
You also sang with Sameer from Young The Giant … I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce his surname.

...the modern fourth wave feminists… who are too selective about what offends them.

sam:
for example?

M:
well, they ignore FGM in Bradford, for example, yet they make such a fuss about the Hollywood casting couch… which has existed since 1904.

Are you constantly torn between this gemini hard strike and soft stroke?

M:
It’s a good question.

good luck to the guardian's squad of assassins

"It’s against the law to be intelligent"

Which makes Morrissey about as law-abiding a citizen as exists on planet Earth.

I saw the Lou Reed interview on Elvis Costello's chat show, he smiled a lot and was a pussycat. So Morrissey was right for one time.

And this thread should be locked, by the way.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_7midUXUAEpDbw?format=jpg&name=large