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.

And this thread should be locked, by the way.

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

https://www.morrisseycentral.com/messagesfrommorrissey/bmg-dump-morrissey

Don’t know whether to laugh or cry at all that, so I’ll just laugh at his misfortune.

My three albums with BMG have been the best of my career

laugh at this. it's genuinely hilarious.

Oh yeah those three albums, what are they called again? Just For Having an Opinion, SilencedandAn Exile in My Own Land, right?

I'm not sure if the most appropriate reaction to this is "lol" or "fucking lol"

https://media2.giphy.com/media/3o85xIO33l7RlmLR4I/giphy.gif

Just for being English, these days

massive fucking lol

if every label you sign to is an asshole, then maybe you are the asshole.

I think stirmonster may be onto something

#1 Scotland, #3 Britain

LOL, what a fucking idiot.

‘You have given me no choice but to tattoo this giant swastika across my face.’ – Morrissey in a few weeks, probably.

#1 Scotland

Scotland's shame!

lol of course it's gonna be cancel culture that caused it

moz strikes me as the type of guy who absolutely spends a shitload of money wasting time in the studio like it was still 95

Any time Morrissey spends in a studio is waste - of time, money, resources, good will, oxygen etc.

superfluous "in a studio" there

haha yeah i just meant budget-wise he strikes me as a guy that doesn't curtain his plans to reflect sales that are not what they once were so i'm sure BMG is just sick of dumping money into it, but he'll play the "woke culture" joan of arc now

He's bitched before, when between labels, about prospective deals not offering salaries for his band members, and therefore he must spurn their offers until Someone Serious About Music finally Does What's Right.

Years and years ago my sister threatened to get a Morrissey tattoo, and I remember suggesting to her that it would probably be a really, really bad idea.

I'd love to know which American chart he was number 2 in.

piscesx otm, I'm curious too. wiki says it only hit #44 on the independent album chart.

XP Barnes & Noble Heatseekers

Was it this one:

https://www.continence.org.au/bristol-stool-chart

(I know it’s not an American chart, please let me have this)

talk about a heatseeker debut

Seriously Hot Shit

He's also somehow managed to invent an album chart for Scotland, separate from the rest of the UK, to be No. 1 in.

loooool djp

xp. it's possible that they collect that data somewhere though?

No. 1 in the Bristol stool chart and I believe also No. 1 in the Stormfront hot 20.

Scotland does have it's own album chart but i am sceptical he got to No. 1.

Sydney Devine and Fran & Anna kept him off the top spot.

couldn't find the historical data for the scottish chart, but this is the full uk chart history for his last album:

https://i.ibb.co/gSzKVbq/dog.jpg

i.e. 1 week in the top 100

"But officer, you don't understand! 'Morrissey I Am Not A Dog On A Chain Peaking At Number 3 For One Week Only' is the name of my dog!"

xp. if you believe the fake news media, nick

It would seem he was correct and has actually had multiple no. 1s in Scotland.

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

BRUTAL!

release actually coincides with the uk going into full lockdown, the governement didn't actually want you to hear this new record xp

why doesn’t this piece of shit just release his garbage himself, is it because he’s so in love with the 50s or some shit

that would require work

also would oblige him to pay his musicians the salary he insists that they deserve, and would leave him with many fewer scapegoats to write aggrieved posts about having betrayed him and let him down, when the records fail to sell 1,000,000 copies, and nobody to flounce away from.

he would totally be financially better off selling his ill-thought mini-essays (and demos) on Patreon, Am4nda P4lmer style, than trying to get newspaper and radio attention twice a year. (and could probably get a pliant label deal by demonstrating the fervour of that subscription audience, though again would do better selling directly to them. release one live albums on bandcamp each quarter (from different eras), a best-of EP of new & old demos once a year (having already had them to patreons), get a distro deal for studio albums but sell a deluxe version direct; let the label handle the fulfilment on this out of laziness as a gesture of goodwill.

does anyone have Morrissey's manager's phone number

310-962-6700

^ looked up this Beverly Hills number, reached a mansion owned by Ricky Martin 2004-2006, and by Michael & Shakira Caine 1976-87, who installed a pool that extended from the living room to outdoors, but the next owners removed the indoor part, before a later buyer razed the entire house.

phone numbers vaguely related to people who have not figured out how to live

in not-entirely-startling news: armond white is on twitter arguing that the most recent three morrissey LPs are the best of his career

I'm sad to report that…

He's still among us.

Hmph

Saw this thread and immediately thought the worst/best.

considering what this last year has done to loads of previously-seemingly-ok musicians, I dread to think what Morrissey's next pronouncement will be when he emerges again.

Ffs pom