Was/Is Morrissey Racist?

If Morrissey is suggesting that ISIS is unlikely to give someone an intimate pat down before sending them through a metal detector/body scanner, he is probably right.

Thom Yorkes comments comparing YouTube to the Nazis was way worse, imo. Don't see many people giving him shit for that though.

The only references I saw to Yorke's comments were Facebook threads giving him tons and tons of shit

fuck the TSA

"Oh.. in America
The land of the free, they said
And of opportunity
In a just and a truthful way
But where the president
Is never black, female or gay
And until that day
You've got nothing to say to me
To help me believe"

Can’t say I’m surprised, but still fucking disappointing.

Just Morrissey there, wearing an actual fucking For Britain badge pic.twitter.com/A33h1GunYq

— Fergal Kinney (@fergal_41) May 8, 2019

that's anne marie waters mob yes?

This isn't news surely, he's been openly supporting AMW for years.

Indeed.

every time he’s in the news these days I always hope the headline includes “found dead” rather than “ranting about Muslims” or whatever he’s decided he does now.

i always hope it will be be 'vocals removed from smiths albums', would love instrumental versions of those tbh

he's been saying massively racist things for the last few years, openly supporting violent far right morons and people still ignore it - was particularly surprised to see people from various american bands on his new covers album. the excuse 'we don't understand british politics - sounds complicated?' doesnt really cut it - it doesn't take long to look this shit up. you wouldn't be working on a new bob mould album if he was a proud boy, so maybe do some research.

yeah no he's always been racist sorry: https://www.patreon.com/posts/other-jacksons-18720007

every time he’s in the news these days I always hope the headline includes “found dead” rather than “ranting about Muslims” or whatever he’s decided he does now.

― gyac, Thursday, May 9, 2019 6:09 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

classy

morrissey is going to live a long and ever-more-vile life

I love how Morrissey has always thrown around the word 'vile' to describe non-white culture, like nobody is allowed to challenge him on any appalling opinion so long as he expresses it in the style of Quentin Crisp.

we got this sorted

"found dead" is a bit harsh, "faces life imprisonment" is better.

"is finally ignored" best

I like the thread title's candid suggestion that Morrissey may once have been racist but is no longer.

can't still be racist when you've been found dead tbf

"is finally ignored" best

― We were never Breeting Borting (President Keyes), Thursday, May 9, 2019 7:28 AM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

death is much more realistic

I know, have you seen his waistline?

was particularly surprised to see people from various american bands on his new covers album

Yep. Interpol touring with him as well. This is one thing I miss now that music journalism has mostly been flushed down the toilet, just having someone ask some of these bands WTF they are doing.

I know, have you seen his waistline?

but it's vegan girth

classy

congrats

https://www.stereogum.com/2043584/morrissey-supports-right-wing-extremist-group-while-performing-on-the-tonight-show/video/

Imagine splintering off from UKIP because they're not racist enough!

This remains relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/08/how-to-treat-morrissey-stop-listening-to-him-stewart-lee

https://www.morrisseycentral.com/messagesfrommorrissey/i-ve-been-dreaming-of-a-time-when-the-english-are-sick-to-death-of-labour-and-tories

he posted this message a year ago endorsing For Britain while denying that they're racist or fascist and proclaiming he 'would do anything for his muslim friends', totally incoherent. can't tell if he's truly deluded enough to believe that or whether he's just a little ashamed of being racist in the sort of way that ones weird vaguely racist uncle who proclaims "i'm not racist but..." is etc.

It seems like he's conquered any feelings of shame.

He's a racist cunt. He's been an openly racist cunt since at least Madstock. LOL at all the apologia that he's coasted on for over a quarter of a century.

the first few posts defending him on this thread look quite silly now

They looked quite silly then.

If you think this is racism, you should probably think about hanging yourself

― PaulTMA, Saturday, 4 September 2010 13:38 (eight years ago) Bookmark

People who think Morrissey is racist are always thick as fuck

― PaulTMA, Tuesday, 24 June 2014 09:58 (four years ago) Bookmark

Paul The Morrissey Admirer there

don't worry, I think the tool has killiefied me!

PaulTMA, classic poster

Some mod should go ahead and change this thread's title to "How Racist Is Morrissey?"

Eight years later, Morrissey did go ahead and call the Chinese a "subspecies":

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.

― Momus, Saturday, February 2, 2002 8:00 PM (seventeen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He now paints pandas

But only the black parts.

Mr Morrissey employed characters. Some were Bengali...The songs contained voices which said things like 'Life is difficult enough when you belong here... If these were statements made in a fist fight, we would judge them according to context. In a song, we cannot.'

was certainly a take. As usual with art, we will never know.

yeah no he's always been racist sorry: https://www.patreon.com/posts/other-jacksons-18720007

― mark s, Thursday, May 9, 2019 5:20 AM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is great writing mark

I haven’t dug it out to reread (I suspect it’s not that great), but sometime in late 87 or 88 I wrote a piece for NME called something like ‘Images of England in Rock and Roll Music’ (an unearned reference to the subtitle of Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train). In it The Smiths and Madness were compared with The Fall and found wanting (for being backward-looking: I too was a futurist). But I also remember that I was very taken by the Smiths title ‘A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours’. There was a revolutionary vigour to it, and I guess it didn’t then occur to me who besides plutocrats Morrissey had a mind to be driving off his lawn and out of his country.

bolded sentence to emphasize me sitting here and realizing how much of a fucking dummy i am...the chorus was right there the whole time

there are just too many things to be able to blithely put it aside.

its not hard to see that when he sings

"At heart, what's left, we sadly know
That we are the last truly British people you'll ever know "

he has a very strong idea of who is "truly british" and who isn't.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/morrissey-blames-immigration-for-disappearance-of-british-identity-760825.html

I remember the NME review where they had had a supplied lyric sheet which purchasers didn't get with the album (for the first time), and the reviewer did point out that that "truly British" lyric was in quotes, which would have been lost on the casual listener..

But then...

i don't think most of us have an issue with lyrics being ambiguous/in character/ironic/provocative.... thats probably why i personally put aside this issue for a long time. but when you start working as a mouthpiece for actual real fascist parties in your interviews, you lose the right to claim your lyrics should be given the benefit of the doubt

i get the impression (being far too young to have been around at the time) that earlier on there was a lot more room for plausible deniability (though certainly enough reason to be suspicious) with him, as mark's piece outlines, but he gradually got increasing blatant and that's culminated in his statements and actions over the past few years

Lol I thought about posting that dumbshit paultma quote as well calz. Tbfttl he does seem recently to have slowly come to the conclusion he couldn’t quite reach after a mere 20 years of morrissey being an obvious racist, and in any road we have a new even worse Paul who’s shocked at the gaucherie of being rude about white supremacists

i don't think most of us have an issue with lyrics being ambiguous/in character/ironic/provocative.

I agree but words still say things and I really don't see a credible non-racist interpretation of "Bengali in Platforms". (And I was enough of a fan when I bought Viva Hate that I tried to but couldn't.) I think the character of the Bengali immigrant is p clearly being mocked, regardless of whose pov you think the speaker is expressing.

yeah as soon as i had put "most of us" i realised how white priviledgey that sounded. to some people it was probably fucking obvious and very hurtful for years, but for a lot of fans myself included it was easier to ignore.