Morrissey: Watchman of the West

by Andrew Petiprin

“I found myself in Paris,” Morrissey sings on the title track of his new album, Make-up is a Lie, his first in six years. And where else would he be these days?

Paris is the burial place of his hero, Oscar Wilde. And in 2009, he declared his self-effacing admiration for the city, singing “I’m throwing my arms around Paris, because only stone and steel accept my love.” But nowadays, Morrissey’s affection for La Ville Lumière may reveal something about his current state of mind with regard to society and culture. There is nowhere that represents the struggle for the soul of the West better than Paris, and Morrissey has increasingly found himself as a combatant in that conflict. On the new album’s most memorable song, he comes right out shooting: “Notre Dame, we know who tried to kill you.”

More on the new record later. But first, some history.

It has become fashionable in recent years among the pop and rock music congnoscenti to disavow their former veneration of Morrissey. Sure, he was the front man of the Smiths, perhaps the most influential British band of the 1980’s. And yes, he possesses a once-in-a-generation baritone and mysterious style that has pleased audiences worldwide during his three decades as a solo artist. And indeed, it has always been hard not to like him for his devil-may-care attitude about most everything, somehow achieving international fame while rejecting the shallow lifestyle of popular entertainers.

He has confounded opinionators on the question of his sexuality, which he eventually described as “not homosexual” but rather “humasexual,” by which he means “attracted to humans, but not many.” He has been relentless in his support of animal rights and his disdain for carnivores. In short, he has always epitomized the tiresome creature which Western culture has until recently been completely unable to resist: a true artist who gains mainstream attention by always swimming against it.

But it has turned out to be precisely Morrissey’s association with Western culture – and preference for it – that has led some high-minded observers to dismiss him as a social pariah.

Way back in the Smiths era, the first hint of trouble appeared in 1986 with the release of the song “Panic,” in which Morrissey’s lyrics criticized the state of modern Britain as experienced through its pop music. His refrain “hang the DJ,” complete with a Pink Floyd-style chorus of children, alarmed some listeners as a hostile statement about disco, house music, or other predominantly black music genres. Some critics perceived further racist motivations in Morrissey’s belligerent line “the music they constantly play says nothing to me about my life.” No matter it was actually hearing a Wham! song that inspired Morrissey’s words, which criticized the rampant meaninglessness not only in cosmopolitan London and Birmingham, but also in then-monochrome Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, and Humberside. He sang, “hopes may rise in the Grasmere,” a quaint northwestern English village where Wordsworth and Coleridge had once retreated, but he warned, “honey pie, you’re not safe here.”

It was at the start of Morrissey’s solo era, however, when the great and the good began to be seriously concerned that he was not one of them. “Suedehead,” the title of his first single from the 1988 record Viva Hate, refers to the sub-group of mostly non-racist skinheads, who represented a stylish populism among the working classes in the 1970’s. On the same album, he included a track called “Bengali in Platforms,” which playfully addressed the difficulty of Asian integration into home-grown British culture. “Shelve your western plans and understand,” Morrissey sings, “that life is hard enough when you belong here.” Reflecting on “Bengali in Platforms” and later developments in Morrissey’s public image, sometime fan Jeevan Vasagar wrote in The Guardian, “there comes a time when you can't listen to music made by someone whose views you find repugnant.”

It was beginning to occur to other people, however, that maybe there was a comparable repugnancy in the abstract idea of multi-culturalism that made both natives and newcomers feel equally like strangers in a strange land. The waters of the West were stirring, and Morrissey was watching closely. In fact, he was splashing about a bit himself.

Morrissey’s exploration of forbidden topics continued on his critically-acclaimed 1992 album Your Arsenal, where his song “National Front Disco” shocked some high-minded critics even more with its fairly sympathetic portraits of a troubled young man who finds a home in jingoist subculture and his concerned mother who laments, “We’ve lost our boy.” The song’s acknowledgement of a downtrodden native population enticed by the promise of “England for the English” was an unwelcome complication for a country that hoped to ignore its malcontents long enough for them to die out. At the Madstock Festival in 1992, Moz poured fuel on the flames by draping himself in the Union Jack during his performance.

Nonetheless, most of Morrissey’s long-standing progressive admirers gave him the benefit of the doubt. And after Your Arsenal, Morrissey largely went quiet on political matters and focused on creating more mature expressions of the same erotic yearning for which he had become famous as leader of the Smiths. Nonetheless, the ideas expressed in his lyrics usually seemed au courant, but there was deeper meaning in them that would soon come into conflict with prevailing ideology. In 1994, he put out his solo masterpiece, Vauxhall and I, which could on the surface be heard as a cri-de-cœur for acceptance of homosexuality.

Instead, Vauxhall and I, along with Southpaw Grammar (1995) and Maladjusted (1997), are the work of a man who was determined not to put any faith in stark definitions about himself or the world. “Now my heart his full,” he sings on Vauxhall’s soaring opening track, “and I just can’t explain, so I won’t even try to.” Paradoxically, it is precisely Morrissey’s reticence about staking claims about his identity that makes him truly one-of-a-kind. Here again we note the obvious influence of Oscar Wilde, whom Morrissey describes in his autobiography as “the world’s first populist figure (pop figure).”

On the 2004 album You Are the Quarry, Morrissey made a magnificent return to form after a seven-year layoff, and he strayed back into politics. First, he gave voice to Old World anguish over the military adventurism of America, where he had by then been living for several years. On “America is not the world,” he sang earnestly, “America, your head’s too big, because, America, your belly’s too big. And I love you, I just wish you’d stay where you belong.” He also asked facetiously, “don’t you wonder why in Estonia they say ‘Hey you, big fat pig?’”

So far, it stands to reason You Are the Quarry would have played well to progressives and globalist elites (I repeat myself). But among those not buying it was The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis, who found Moz’ critique of Bush-era imperialism unremarkable. Indeed, as we now understand, such concerns are in no way the exclusive purview of the Left. And Petridis sniffed out nationalist nostalgia on songs like “Come Back to Camden.” He elaborated in his two-star review: “The lyrics seem trapped in the past…. The urge to hit fast-forward before he mentions bowler hats, Yorkshire pudding or lovable chimney sweeps.” But as Sir Roger Scruton points out in his late work Where We Are: The State of Britain Now, “the accusation of nostalgia is a ready, and often unthinking, response to those who hesitate to turn their backs on what they love.”

The Quarry album, however, provided much more than a critique of neo-conservatism and a sense of longing for an older British homeland. In fact, it significantly complicated the narrative of Morrissey as a bigot, as it capped a years-long period in which he lived in Los Angeles and developed a huge, dedicated base of fans among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. During a 1999 tour called Oye Esteban, he was reported to have said from the stage, “I wish I were Mexican.”

The strongest single off Quarry, “First of the Gang to Die,” with a dynamite lead guitar part from Morrissey’s longtime collaborator Alain Whyte, became an anthem for Morrissey’s amistad with his Latino followers, who adored his glamorous persona and, ironically, his lyrics centered on feeling like an outsider. One catches a glimpse of the enduring admiration of this demographic group in the 2018 Marvel film Ant Man and the Wasp, where one of the main characters, Luis, uses a Morrissey song as his phone ringtone, and he confesses that his grandmother owned a juke box filled only with the artist’s records.

Morrissey’s Mexican and Mexican-American fans also found a strong affinity with the first single from You Are the Quarry, the autobiographical “Irish Blood, English Heart,” in which Morrissey declared “there is no one on earth I’m afraid of.” The song conveys a message of courage, depicting an Irishman who transcends his alienation and loves England, much as many Latinos love the United States. He does not overemphasize the greatness of England’s past, but he does prefer that it continue to be England. He tells us, “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.” He then pours scorn upon both the Tories and Labour, issuing a low-key declaration of independence from a working-class northern upbringing, which for decades assumed an iron-clad allegiance to the Left.

Flashing back to Your Arsenal eight years earlier, Morrissey had sung on the song “Glamorous Glue,” “We won’t vote conservative, because we never have.” And yet, on the same track, he lamented, “London is dead.” Before long, the two realities finally came into conflict, and the old British political arrangements shifted out of concern for the very persistence of the Western society in question. Likewise in the United States, we have seen not only a re-orientation of the Republican party, but also a significant defection from the Democratic party, first by the white working class, and now by Hispanics and other minority groups. In our century, sleeping giants of all ages and races have begun waking up, and new defenders of civilization have been born. Thus, whereas Morrissey’s Guardian critic thought him passé, he was actually on the cutting edge, as always.

Subsequently, Morrissey has become more direct about what his words mean and more defensive about how he is characterized. In a now infamous interview with the music magazine NME in 2007, Morrissey was quoted as saying, “England is a memory now.” He went on:

“Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous. Travel to England and you have no idea where you are. It matters because the British identity is very attractive. I grew up into it and I find it very quaint and amusing. Other countries have held on to their basic identity, yet it seems to me that England was thrown away.”

To NME’s surprise, Morrissey sued the magazine for defamation after the article was published, claiming his comments were taken out of context and edited to make them appear motivated by racism. Morrissey never elaborated publicly on how exactly he was misrepresented, but his final demand in the 2012 settlement was a stroke of genius. No money exchanged hands; rather, a baffled NME editorial board was simply ordered to publish a definitive public apology:

“We do not believe Morrissey is a racist.”

Plenty of ideologues, however, wanted to hang onto the old narrative about Morrissey the deplorable, and their protests now appeared more baldly partisan. For example, in 2019, Billy Bragg declared him “the Oswald Mosley” of pop. He wished, perhaps, that his fellow elder statesman of British music had continued more in the trajectory of his bellicose anti-Thatcher song “Margaret on the Guillotine.” Or maybe nationalism was acceptable if it was still the throwback Irish republicanism of “A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours” from the final Smiths album from 1987.

In 2020, Mina Tavakoli echoed Bragg, describing Morrissey as a “red-pill pharmacist” in her Pitchfork review of his album I Am Not a Dog On a Chain. She then lumped him together with Bret Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq (distinguished company in my view!), blithely dismissing the notion of “just being honest” as an old-man delusion, and the ultimate disingenuous cover for prejudice. Morrissey’s response was already present in the lyrics to the album’s title track: “I do not read newspapers. They are troublemakers.” Then, in a 2022 interview, he savaged the sacred word “diversity,” calling it “just another word for conformity.” He continued, “It doesn’t mean avant-garde, or let’s make really interesting strange art. It means box everybody.”

Subsequently, Morrissey has paid the price for his sustained, unapologetic candor, being dropped from his record label and finding himself unable to release two albums-worth of material.

Until now.

Until Paris.

We return to “Notre Dame,” a catchy, even mesmerizing song, co-written by and featuring the previously-mentioned Alain Whyte, who last collaborated with Morrissey almost two decades ago. Since 2023, Morrissey has been performing it on stage, but with one significantly different verse than what ended up on the album version. He originally sang, “Notre Dame, we will not be silent. Before investigations, they told us this is not terrorism.” On the record, he changed the line to a subtler “they said there’s nothing to see here.” In any case, the song is a shot across the bow of the modern globalist ship of fools who demonize our valid concerns with accusations of “conspiracy theories.”

On the opening number, “You’re Right, It’s Time,” he reminds us of threats not only from Islamists or demons, but from our own addictions that blind us to the pursuit of wisdom. He sings, “I wanna move away from those who stare at screens all day.” The fourth track, “Amazona” is a cover of a Roxy Music’s tongue-in-cheek song about utopianism from their 1973 album Stranded, which itself contains a series of reflections on the state of the West. Morrissey’s version of the song sounds similar to Bryan Ferry’s and Phil Manzanera’s, two more of Moz’ early musical heroes, with a blistering guitar solo by Carmen Vandenberg.

“Headache” is a breathy lament about marriage, with Morrissey’s usual cynical charm, “Man borne of woman has a short time to live, and still it’s too long.” Those of us who are happily married do not quite see it Moz’ way; but still, how many artists are singing even about the challenges of wedlock nowadays? The sixth track, “Boulevard” proposes Paris as a sad, suitable place to belong as a misfit: “Some cradle the bottle as I cradle you.” As everyone from Hugo to Zola to Truffaut have witnessed over the years, Paris itself is a major character in the Western experience, and Morrissey states his case here too.

“Lester Bangs” is a tribute to a famous music critic – not all journalists are bad, or at least not bad in the same predictable ways. “The Monsters of Pig Alley” is a melodic gem that could have been plucked off almost any Morrissey solo album. It is another collaboration between Morrissey and Whyte, featuring warm guitars, a driving synth vibe, and lyrics about youthful ambition and alienation that have been Moz’ bread and butter from the beginning.

“Many Icebergs Ago” is a beautiful, meandering reflection on the passage of time, and its stream-of-consciousness lyrics evoke mid-90’s Michael Stipe, with Gustavo Manzur’s ethereal keyboards and jazzy bass. I find myself haunted by the ultimate purpose of intellectual pursuit in Morrissey’s words, “Many Merlot’s ago, down the White Hart, I lounge, awaiting Rousseau.” He repeats later, “What can anyone know? What can anyone know?”

What we do know is the world is a different place than when Morrissey cut his teeth in dreary post-war Blighty in the 1960’s and 70’s and during his rise to fame in Thatcher’s 80’s. But amid the ongoing reshuffling of ideas, policies, and personalities, Morrissey has not been afraid to suffer the slings and arrows of the establishment to maintain the kind of authenticity he now wishes for our wider culture.

It is time for the West to wash our faces, look in the mirror, and see who we really are. Make-up, Morrissey reminds us on this gift of twelve wonderful new songs, is a lie.