← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Robbie
Thread ID: 14201 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2004-06-15
2004-06-15 21:57 | User Profile
MORRISSEYS AMATEUR NIGHT
The king of teen pop grows up, grows bold.
By Armond White
WHAT DO STING, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne and Bruce Springsteen all have in common? All are famously liberal pop stars that never performed at the Apollo in Harlem. Yet that's where Morrissey chose to launch a concert series to promote his album You Are the Quarry. Another perversely provocative move for the British singer, his five-night Apollo stint obtruded upon the legacy of James Brown and Motown, as if just to complicate our narrow view of pop music. This was, in fact, the ungentrification of popular culture. And that's been Morrissey's method ever since the Smiths reinvigorated British pop in the aftermath of punk.
Few critics have credited Morrrissey for his punk ethic. His elegant, idiosyncratic singing and Johnny Marr's melodic, eclectic guitar confounded most people's notions of what pop music could accomplish. Lyrics such as "England is mine/And it owes me a living" were puzzled at, even overlooked, anything but understood. Protest and distemper, an especially youthful mix, underscored Morrissey's most romantic longings. His songs were distinguished by the adventure of coming to terms with love and sex in thorny political circumstances. He examined the most private traumas in a public arena that punk and folk had reserved for political statement. (Pursuing pop star rather than hero status, Morrissey could sneer at showbiz self-righteousness, as when the Smiths refused to take part in Bob Geldof's "Do They Know It's Christmas?")
Because the expression of lonely romanticism was hardship enough, Morrissey preferred to make lyrical equivalents to the melodramatic social dissent of Britain's 60s Angry Young Man films. Post-punk acts of the late 70s and early 80sfrom the Buzzcocks to the Au Pairs, X-Ray Spex to the Slitsalso used sexual content, but none were as discreet or effectively insinuating as "Hand in Glove," "This Charming Man" or "How Soon Is Now?" That was the unique way Morrissey chose to emerge from specific cultural traditionsOscar Wilde, Graham Greene, Shelagh Delaney, Elizabeth Smart, the Shirelles, the New York Dolls, the Jam, etc. Only the Pet Shop Boys and Public Enemy are comparably erudite and purposeful.
Each Smiths song was an outcrythough not an obvious political remonstration. Morrissey wasn't a teenager when he made those records; it is only an accident of commerce that the pop market was the only place for such freakish expression. It is unfortunate that reviewers and fans still view his work as adolescent petulance. The commonly accepted division between white and black pop was exposed and exacerbated by Morrissey's infamous quote, "Reggae is vile" and the controversial "hang the DJ" refrain of "Panic." Those alarming phrases stand in contradistinction to the dreads-wearing and pot-smoking of now fatuous one-worlders.
The Apollo appearances gesture toward clarifying the pop culture paradoxes with which Morrissey was always in conflict. In his own version of Amateur Night at the Apollo (remember the root word of "amateur" is "love"), Morrissey threw down a practical challenge to those fans who might be content with their elite cult status and to the venues of pop culture that habitually represent mundane restriction. Defying both camps, forcing them together, was a truly bold actthe kind the mainstream press was willing to acclaim when the Clash performed at the Times Square disco Bonds in 1980. Morrissey has never had such mainstream acceptance, which is why his popularity has always seemed so genuine rather than manufactured. He has been almost too successfully subversive. No other pop artist has made charisma and politics so intriguing. His new album You Are the Quarry is the best-yet demonstration of this fact, since its politics are so openlyand yearninglyexpressed. "I've been dreaming of a time when/To be English/Is not to be baneful/To be standing by the flag/not feeling/shameful, racist or partial." This isn't the simple clarion to brotherhood it might seem; it's an ode to personal freedom. But the song's exciting proposition is that Morrissey defines freedom as the ability to balance paradoxes. Now deliberately exiled in Los Angeles, this Manchester-born iconoclast blasts the most timid English social traditionsspecifically those skinheads who pelted him at Glastonbury in '92 when he came on stage wrapped in the Union Jack. (Why couldn't they see the love?) He wishes for a national identity, knowing that such a claim is improbableif not impossiblefor a person of any sensitivity. It's always the sensitivities that catch him up. Snagged by humanism as much as by his own arrogance, Morrissey's new album offers an inspired perspective on modern living. The California experiencewith the dark-eyed allure of Mexicohas opened up the famous Limey hermit. Contemporary politics are so very complicated that Morrissey resurrects punk's great refusal as a way of being unbound by doctrine, dogma or nostalgia. "And I will die with both of my hands untied," goes the most trenchant line of "Irish Blood, English Heart." In that song Morrissey sings, "Spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell/And denounce the royal line that still salute him." It's probably the first pop song since Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army" to refer to Oliver Cromwell, yet the song's ultimate ambivalence isn't likely to appease Costello's Irish pride. Morrissey's vitriol and consciousness reverberate more. Besides, Costello (a soul-music admirer who once had his own race-baiting controversy in 1979) never played the Apollo either.
Socially significant pop typically gets praised if it is banal like Rage Against the Machine. You Are the Quarry risks being misrepresented as personal, whiney pique. In the album's mellowest couplet, "Come Back to Camden" and "I'm Not Sorry," Morrissey lines up apology followed by defiance, summing up "There's a wild man in my head." Fact, the album's power comes from vividly reflecting the romantic and political anxieties the pop audience must face along with Morrissey. The album's title refers to himself (as media victim), but also to his listeners whose emotional lives are often chipped away and mined for commercial pop fodder. Not since the fierce and disturbing Your Arsenal has Morrissey so forcefully illustrated this aspect of the pop condition.
[url]http://www.nypress.com/17/23/news&columns/ArmondWhite.cfm[/url]
2004-06-16 04:05 | User Profile
Robbie, excellent post on Morrissey. I saw Moz at the Apollo on May 6th, my third time seeing Him and it was unbelievable. The best I've seen.
That 1992 show in Glastonbury which Morrissey received so much heat in the press for, was really because the skinheads went crazy for when he sang the infamous "National Front Disco" while draped in the Union Jack. If you don't know, one lyric in "NFD" Moz says "England for the English" and so on and his stage backdrop banner was two skinhead girls at that show. He refers to that "incident" in his new tune "Irish Blood, English Heart" where he sings about "standing next to the flag/not feeling shameful/racist or partial", and also "spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell"....
Morrissey's latest CD "You Are The Quarry" is excellent. He's on tour this summer with Lollapolooza. Check him out.
2004-06-27 06:35 | User Profile
so much for this Great White Hope.
Playing the Apollo is his way of saying: "Look? See? I'm not a [u]racist.[/u] Really, I'm not! I'm not!" Pathetic. I'm also not too crazy about him hanging around LA with mexcrement.
2004-06-27 17:43 | User Profile
Kurt, you're missing the point. Whoever called him "a great white hope"? Also, his appearances at the Apollo spit in the face of the :dung: -brained press who kvetch about the ghosts of James Brown and Motown only to be slammed with the reality of a White musician playing there. Maybe I'm the only one who sees irony here.
2004-06-27 20:23 | User Profile
Whoever called him "a great white hope"?
No one really, but I kind of got that impression after reading this thread: [url]http://forums.originaldissent.com/showthread.php?t=13294[/url]
The Apollo is the center of Negro culture in NYC. A proud, racially aware White man has no business playing there. If he's not a proud, racially aware White, then I don't care where he plays.
And what is someone who proudly proclaims he has "Irish blood and an English heart" doing in LA, anyway? What, the British Isles not good enough for ya anymore, Moz? He could probably buy a pretty nice house in the English countryside (far away from the non-White menance of the cities) , or if the taxes are too steep there, then the Irish countryside.