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    Morrissey

    Oh well. I don't suppose you can expect everybody to be fan.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-review-autobiography-by-morrissey--droning-narcissism-and-the-whine-of-selfpity-8887301.html

    #2
    Morrissey

    Whilst that review seems to compete with its subject in the bad prose stakes, there's enough there to convince me that Morrissey's autobiography as absolutely as wretched as you'd expect.

    I really want to read it for myself, even though I am sure I will find it a dispiriting and unfulfilling experience.

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      #3
      [URL]https://twitter.com/benjamminash/status/1197396744876761088?s=21[/URL]

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        #5
        I'm not sure if Morrissey had any trajectory. He started as a racist and stayed there.

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          #6
          i don't think the piece disagrees with that. it links the nostalgia of Morrissey and the Smiths with Northern voters' preference for Johnson and Brexit over Corbyn

          On Viva Hate, there was the first of what would be several Morrissey solo songs that had uncomfortable depictions of British Asians – in “Bengali in Platforms”, the eager to please, out-of-place protagonist, trying to fit in with Anglo-American pop culture, is patronisingly told “life is hard enough when you belong here”. This became creepier still with “Asian Rut”, a dispassionate anecdote of a racist attack, and “National Front Disco”, an anthemic portrayal of English 1970s fascists with “England for the English!” as a warbled refrain. When supporting Madness in 1992, Morrissey wrapped himself in a Union Jack, widely seen as a gesture towards the group’s large skinhead fanbase, at least by the music press, at a time when public display of the flag was largely the preserve of the far-right.

          This has passed well beyond plausible deniability in the last couple of years. In a recent interview on his own website he reaffirmed his support for Anne-Marie Walters (elsewhere, he has added his enthusiasm for “Tommy Robinson”), added that he’d like to see Nigel Farage become Prime Minister, reiterated his disdain for “Islam”, and commented on accusations of racism that “everyone ultimately prefers their own race – does this make everyone racist?” On his own Facebook fan page last year he denounced “Soviet Britain”. These are all fairly standard statements of contemporary British conservatism, made strange only by the fact that it’s a queer 1980s pop star who hasn’t lived in the UK in decades saying them rather than a retired Trafford Park engineer.

          The most notable achievement of Morrissey’s career since 1988 has been getting his 2013 autobiography published from day one by Penguin Classics. Reading it is an equally bizarre experience. It begins with a hundred pages on 1960s Manchester, written with the same obsessive longing that pervades the songs of The Smiths, with the same flair and precision, the same impression of an attempt to completely recreate in all its misery and violence a complete society, a world in microcosm – followed by three hundred interminable, tedious and self-important pages about celebrities, record companies and court cases, notable for their breathtaking self-pity.

          It’s too easy to just separate out these two, much as it is to separate out The Smiths and the 61 year old suburban fascist who fronted them. This is because the two are completely linked. It can be difficult to work out quite what exactly it is about the past that so many in Morrissey’s generation long for. It certainly isn’t council housing, full employment, free education, public ownership or social mobility, because if these are noted at all, it’s in the context of decrying the Labour Party’s foolish utopianism in trying to resurrect them.

          What it is, is a nostalgia for misery, a longing for boredom, a relocation of poverty from economics to aesthetics.[5] The belligerent ghouls. The spineless bastards. The beatings. The ignorance. The pollution and the soot. The gay-bashing and the paki-bashing. The murders on the Moors. The young are not only resented for not having suffered these, the obsessive recall of them is a way of constantly re-living an experience of personal struggle and uprooting, an origin story for home ownership and bored affluence, whether that’s the pettier example of the paid-off mortgage or the purchased council house, or in Morrissey’s case, the villa in the hills of LA. And who stands in the way of this self-aggrandisement through re-enactment? The Asians, especially the Muslims. The young. The left. The “woke”. And here, Morrissey is truly the voice of a generation

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            #7
            This thread continues to disappoint.

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              #8
              Originally posted by Toby Gymshorts View Post
              This thread continues to disappoint.
              I know exactly what you mean - problem is that even if he had copped it, some would still try to make a martyr out of the fascist cunt.

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                #9
                I read something that suggested ticket sales for his recent UK dates had been sluggish at best. Hopefully the number of fans prepared to stand by their man will continue to decrease.

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                  #10
                  I've never been a Morrissey fan but 'Everyday Is Like Sunday' has become very apt in recent weeks.

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                    #11
                    First Of The Gang To Die is a more worrying one to think about, mind.


                    As, thinking about it, is The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get.

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                      #12
                      So was 'Margaret on the Guillotine' wishing for her execution because she wasn't right-wing enough?

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                        #13
                        Originally posted by Ray de Galles View Post
                        I've never been a Morrissey fan but 'Everyday Is Like Sunday' has become very apt in recent weeks.
                        The video is awful and I'm no fan either, but it's a great song.

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                          #14
                          Well, she would have been a Remainer.

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                            #15
                            After the mentions here, I wanted to look something up about Viva Hate. I had forgotten that Morrissey, Stephen Street and Vini Reilly all fell out with each other fairly swiftly after it was done. At the time it seemed a shame; Reilly's guitars and Street's production worked really well and it's the only one of Shy Enoch's solo works that I'd want to revisit for the music.

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                              #16
                              Originally posted by Furtho View Post
                              The video is awful and I'm no fan either, but it's a great song.
                              Suedehead, EDILS, Last of the Famous International Playboys and especially Piccadilly Palare were all very decent, IMO.

                              His being a twat doesn't change that.

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                                #17
                                His early solo stuff was generally strong, but then his ego seemed to grow (!) as his talent diminished, and fewer people could kerb his self-indulgent instincts. As I've confessed before, I saw him twice in his early solo days and the shows were laughably bad. Just ego and arrogance.

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                                  #18
                                  Originally posted by Jah Womble View Post
                                  Suedehead, EDILS, Last of the Famous International Playboys and especially Piccadilly Palare were all very decent, IMO.

                                  His being a twat doesn't change that.
                                  National Front Disco is also really catchy - I always assumed it was condemnation rather than glorification, but I've never been one for bothering to listen closely to pop lyrics.

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                                    #19
                                    I think National Front Disco is ambivalent, neither condemnation nor glorification. I do think, however, that Morrissey was a pioneer of the "owning the libs" school of deliberately provoking outraged responses from progressives. He started it in small doses with comments that could be read as merely expressing a musical opinion ("all reggae is vile") or a false statement about musical programming ("you have to be black to get played on Radio 1/TOTP") but then became explicit with saying Bengalis don't "belong here", which should really have been the red flag. I agree he had some glorious musical moments through to Vauxhall and I (1994), which I still find powerful but clearly displaying that ambivalence whereby he empathizes with the hooligan whilst also seeing the futility of it.

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                                      #20
                                      Yes, Vauxhall and I is a strong LP, but I also like some of the tracks on Southpaw Grammar, which got absolutely slated when it came out the year after V&I (I think). I finally stopped habitually buying his new releases about five or six years ago, and his pub-bore fascism has helped confirm that was a good habit to get out of. I can still manage to separate his persona from his early solo material and the eternally life-affirming Smiths material, though.

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                                        #21
                                        Take him back to dear old Blighty
                                        Put him on a train from London town
                                        Lose him any place where he can revel in his race
                                        Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham
                                        Balbriggan or Naas

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                                          #22
                                          I'm sure there's a general Smiths thread but who knows where. Here's a blurb and trailer for a new film that's loosely about the impact of the Smiths on some fans:

                                          https://pitchfork.com/news/watch-the...-of-the-world/

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                                            #23
                                            Good link in that page on the memoirs of Morrissey and Marr:

                                            https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1381-...-marr-memoirs/

                                            On the thread topic, there's not much to add to the above excellent posts. Morrissey solo from Viva Hate to Vauxhalll And I is well worth an investment of time and effort* but after that, surely, he'd exhausted the repertoire artistically and become overtly right-wing in interviews. Infact the interviews get shittier in proportion to how the music and lyrics decline.

                                            *but far from "essential listening" in the sense that The Smiths are if you want a full appreciation of the cultural history and artistic legacy of the period.
                                            Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 08-03-2021, 12:38.

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                                              #24
                                              For anybody who may have missed it.
                                               

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                                                #25
                                                Originally posted by Toby Gymshorts View Post
                                                This thread continues to disappoint.
                                                I stand by this statement.

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