Irish blood, Cornish face
A number of clever people have been praising Morrissey recently. Reading some of these excellent pieces, I can almost see it, too:
Its perversity, its Betjeman ‘Slough’-esque rage and disgust (’Come armageddon come….’) tempered by a grim fascination, a Dubliners-like inertial pull; the o-so English attachment towards that which is ostensibly loathed.
I could get behind that, I thought. Then I saw Morrissey on Jonathon Ross, and the reasons to hate him appeared crystal clear again. It’s odd to say this about someone else appearing with Jonathon Ross, but what’s so unpalatable about Morrissey is his smugness. Ross’s smugness is annoying, a character flaw at worst. Morrissey’s smugness is a whole different thing, a complete (and abominable) moral worldview.
The problem is, Morrissey’s attitude isn’t just “ostentatious absenteeism�, but a kind of studied negative self-confidence, if you see what I mean. He defines himself entirely by opposition to mainstream evaluations: ‘You’re standards are dreadful; we are failures by your standards; therefore we are splendid.’ There’s a smugness in the unassailability this gives him (any criticism is ipso facto praise) and worse, it’s a trivial and unjustified smugness. This is perhaps most clearly and nastily manifest in a song mark k-punk praises in the piece linked to above, ‘The more you ignore me’, but it’s there in pretty much everything the Smiths did too, where cheap irony attempts to disguise the banality of Morrissey’s approach. The negativity on which he prides himself is completely sterile, or so it seems to me. It may be my recondite Aristotelianism or incipient Deleuzianism, but I want to insist that bad things are actually bad. Of course we don’t have to accept all, or even any, conventional evaluations; but we can’t resist them by inversion, or we leave ourselves with no way to harness what positivity (however misdirected) there is in the conventional valuations, and so we have no way to go forward.
So it’s curious to praise Morrisey by comparing him to contemporary indie. I don’t suppose we can blame Morrissey personally for the way in which indie music followed him down a dead-end. But on an ideological level, everything that’s wrong with indie today is Morrissey’s fault.
While slightly reconsidering my position in response to the comments below, I downloaded some Smiths stuff. It seems a lot of people are sharing a rare track called ‘I am the sun, in the air’.
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