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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"I've still yet to touch perfection ... I'll know it when I do it, and I think it will be totally enchanting to affect other people's lives with a form of perfection. It will be like marriage!"
-- Morrissey, Blitz, 1988
Crucially, Morrissey's terminal singleness meant that the fans could possess him through his work -- which was full of him and his eroticism in a way that his life wasn't -- reassured in the knowledge that there was no one else, no shameless groupie nor jammy live-in lover who could possess him more fully, more authentically, than they. Morrissey's work and his public performance was, in effect, his "private life." His songs offered an intimacy which most people wouldn't inflict on their life-long lovers. Morrissey was a fan who had crossed the bedsit Rubicon and became a star, but he had somehow retained the fan's greatest defining feature: frustration. He did not act out his fans' unfulfilled fantasies so much as embody them. His famous celibacy told his fans that he was still one of them, still lying alone on the floor of his bedroom listening to records and moaning mother me smother me -- just as they were, even and especially those clever swine who had grown up and got married.
"I'm just simply inches away from a monastery and I feel that perhaps if I wasn't doing this that I probably would be in one ... which of course is a frightening thing to dwell upon."
-- Picture Disk, 1984
Morrissey has no need of sex with people so long as he continues to have it with his audience. Each stage performance is so obviously a sexual release -- one of the things which makes his concerts so memorable and so sublimely, indecently unprofessional. If the yelps and yowls and the desperate, ecstatic falsettos on tracks such as "This Charming Man," "Barbarism Begins at Home" or "Maladjusted" hint powerfully at an orgasmic release, onstage they turn into a form of musical pole dancing -- a protruding, curling fleshy tongue, a salacious smile, a sadistic whipping of his mike cable, a coquettish swing of those magnificently inhibited hips, a tempting spasm of his shiftless body, a golden sparkly shirt torn from his back and flung into an audience which, as one, pounces on it and renders it to the tiniest, dampest, most fragrant fragments, while the curious love-object himself lies on the stage writhing around in ecstasy-agony or on his back, legs akimbo airborne or draped over a monitor in an obliging gesture towards his audience. A Morrissey gig is an extraordinary, epic, religious prick-tease. But then, this is the self-conscious nature of his relationship with his audience: "Tell me tell me that you love me/oh, I know you don't mean it." ("Tomorrow")
"Do you ever go out dancing, stuff like that?
Heavens no! I can only do that in front of four thousand people. It's the answer to everything."
-- Morrissey
Morrissey's celibacy is the symbol of his central contradiction. For all his bravura posturing as the loneliest monk, he can't quite make up his mind whether he is rejected or rejecting, which is itself the basic and irresolvable problem of self-consciousness. He keeps people at a distance because he feels too good for the world and the people in it, and because he feels he isn't nearly good enough for the world or the people in it. "I Know It's Over," an emotionally exhausting, scourging track on "The Queen is Dead," begins with the immortal, self-immolating lines: "Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head/and as I climb into an empty bed/Oh well, Enough said." Climbing into an empty bed is compared, typically, to a kind of burial; at the same time it expresses the worry that he might go from the womb to the tomb without ever encountering any other kind of intimacy.
"Desire is excruciating to me, and as far as I know that's all there is. I can't imagine response, and I can't imagine being loved by somebody whom one loves."
-- Details, 1992
The joke here, of course, is that for Morrissey there never is "enough said" about the matter, as the whingeing title of the track that immediately follows this, "Never Had No One Ever," demonstrates. However, in "I Know It's Over," celibacy is portrayed as essentially a rejection of life -- all his achievements, including his art, are just empty distractions and consolations that, in the end, merely underline even more sharply this basic failure. He taunts himself, asking if you're so terribly good looking and entertaining "then why do you sleep alone tonight?" the answer the voice in his head hisses is, "because tonight is just like any other night." You are on your own, he tells himself, with your "triumphs and your charms/while they are in each other's arms."
The question "why are you on your own tonight?" is the essential problem of loneliness, the question which solitude asks repeatedly of itself, and which can never be satisfactorily answered, even and especially by someone who has actually chosen loneliness, or at least likes to think he has (when it suits him). It is a constant theme of Morrissey's work that he would dearly love to be normal, and sex, after all, is something that we hope will render us human.
