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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
"Which song do you wish you had written?
'Loneliness Remembers What Happiness Forgets' (Bacharach-David).
-- Q, 1995
Of course, Morrissey's wish to be normal can be expressed only because there is no chance of it ever being granted; it is another, equally constant theme of his work that he's glad he isn't normal. For a man who is a collection of celebrated, creative pathologies and dysfunctions, normality/cure would be a kind of erasure. Morrissey is much less interested in being normal than in the gap between himself and "normality," as it is this disunity which makes him special, defines his genius and describes the walls of his confinement (and refuge).
"What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Next door's cat."
-- Kill Uncle Tour Book, 1991
In "I Know It's Over," he goes on to isolate another contradiction of his celibacy: the perverse anti-faith that a cynical person has in the institution of love, rather like the atheist has in God: "Love is Natural and Real/but not for you, my love/not tonight my love."
As the capitalisation of "Natural" and "Real" suggest, there is an irony bordering on sarcasm attached to the delivery of these words, but this is probably just a defence-mechanism; the cynical celibate idealist invests Naturalness and Realness with more substance than anyone else, since his whole sense of self (pity) is defined by his separation from these things. Undoubtedly, Morrissey's appeal to his fans and his repulsiveness to his much larger number of detractors consists of the fact that he has made a home out of his loneliness. It isn't that Morrissey is happy to be alone but that he is ravishingly resigned to it. Worse, he has made a glamorous career out of telling and re-telling the "secret" most people, quite rightly, do anything to avoid admitting to themselves: "This story is old -- I KNOW/but it goes on."
"If I see a beautiful woman I can be attracted like any man. But I find it very embarrassing. It's the same whether it's an attraction to a man or a woman ... Human relations don't work ... If I see someone I find attractive, then I flee in the other direction."
-- Les Inrockuptibles, 1995
Like a latter-day St. Sebastiane, exposing his flesh perhaps a little too eagerly to the cruel arrows of outrageous fortune, Morrissey has chosen to represent in himself an unpalatable truth about the contemporary human condition -- the impossibility of intimacy. Impossible, that is, except through the laughably false medium of pop music. In this way he has become a symbol of the basic paradox of post-modern life and the terrible curse of self-reflexivity; a symbol which most people would rather not read because within Morrissey's own eternally adolescent self-dramatisation is a story of their own unhappiness and separateness -- a teenage unhappiness and separateness only partly submerged beneath their adult busy-ness and sophistication. For such people, understandably -- commendably -- determined to get on with their lives and not acknowledge the sadness in it, Morrissey is an unappealing cross between Coleridge's albatross and A.A. Milne's Eeyore the donkey: "Oh God, Morrissey ... He's soooo depressing. Have you got any Cheeky Girls?"
However, for those damned or foolish enough to read, Morrissey achieves through his art what his lyrics say is unachievable in life: by symbolizing the impossibility of intimacy, he himself becomes the only person that his fans feel a pure and genuine, "natural" and "real" connection with. This is the very heart of pop's evil-beautiful transcendence, how the pop star both rises above and stands in for life and love.
"You broke all our hearts and never said sorry.
That's because I never was sorry.
Are you a bad man?
Only inwardly."
-- Melody Maker, 1997
Morrissey himself has few illusions about his condition. For all his determined avoidance of limiting categories and dodging of discourses, Morrissey, the hypochondriac's hypochondriac, has a keen sense of his own pathologies -- diagnosing oneself is all very well, and can in fact be quite enjoyable, since it's a form of self-obsession; other people thinking they have the right to do so (or worse, write bleedin' "psycho-bios" about you) is quite intolerable. "Southpaw," the last track on "Southpaw Grammar" (1995), a wistful and regretful work even by Morrissey's standards, asserts that a sick boy "should be treated" because he's "so easily defeated" and seems to speculate whether it is an attachment to "Ma," or at least a failure to engage with life, which has cost him the kind of "normal" happiness and companionship that more conventionally robust boys appear to have achieved without even thinking (which is, of course, the only way to achieve anything vital and normal). "So you ran back to Ma" he sings, audibly shaking his head, "which set the pace for the rest of your days." The song ends lingeringly on a closing couplet repeated over and over, like someone murmuring tunefully in their sleep, not sure whether they're having a wet or a bad dream, until it finally dissolves into wordlessness and a neck-hair bristling guitar outro: "And now there's something that you should know/The girl of your dreams is here all alone"
"Have you ever met the girl of your dreams?
No, I've rather met the girls of my nightmares."
-- Les Inrockuptibles, 1995
