Morrissey as folk devil

[goinghome]

Folk-devil.com updated 2024

The blog Folk-devil.com focuses on Morrissey in the media.

"This blog is a hostage to fortune – it’s mostly an exploration of how and why the Irish Catholic, second generation immigrant, English, British, Northern, Mancunian, provincial, emigrant, gay, asexual, bisexual, humasexual, fourth gender, transsexual, gender fluid, working-class, autodidact, animal protectionist, anxious-depressive, chronically shy, Indie singer/songwriter Morrissey became a folk devil..."

Between January 2021 and October 2022, it gathered an impressive amount of material. No further entry appeared, until now:
https://folk-devil.com/2024/05/

The many past posts can be viewed by choosing from the month or category box.

 

[Anonymous]

No thank you.

 

[Who Rattled Your Cage]

A folk devil is the personification of evil. They're engaged in wrongdoing. An instantly recognisable unambiguously negative symbol with no favourable characteristics. A threat to society. Their sins must be litanised (there are lists of Moz's crimes!). Good people must identify, denounce and drive them out of public life. The moral boundaries must exclude them. They're toxic. They taint.

To get rid of the folk devil - there is a moral panic. This always involves atrocity tales - false stories endlessly repeated that sum up their badness and cause outrage. It sometimes involves a subversion myth - a story that explains the way in which a member of a social circle has turned out to be a wrong un & has rained evil upon the righteous (this is esp true of Moz & 'indie').

Stanley Cohen's model for moral panics goes roughly like this:


1. Labeling - a threat to the social fabric is detected, labeled & magnified by gossip/media/social media etc.

2. Exaggeration - the narrative is amplified, distorted, fabricated & escalates into a moral panic.

3. Symbolisation - shorthands are used to sum up the threat, often visual: the flag, the pin.

4. Prediction - future evil deeds are expected & confirmation bias, intense scrutiny & myths tends to supply them until the panic is over.

Moz centres himself as deviant, defective, distressed & defiant & ultimately I think that's what's so disturbing about him... & what's so brilliant about him.

This thread is probably, mostly, going to be me hoping some passing hack/academic helps end this madness.


An odd one to start with (since I was reading a sociology book from 1979) - Moz has caused indignation with his occasional assertion that other groups can be racist... but it appears it was a known thing that was acknowledged on the left (unless it came out of Morrissey's mouth).

View attachment 59183

& also - as I suspected - there was some tension between ethnic/religious groups & gay/women's lib.

View attachment 59184

(This in no way makes the far right less rubbish...)

It's from Rastaman by Ernest Cashmore & I didn't realise that in England they were a 1970s youth culture movement like the Skins & Punks (who also feature in the book).

Interesting article about Jewish punks:

Never mind the swastikas: the secret history of the UK's 'punky Jews'

Punk svengalis Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes were Jewish, and the faith had an influence on UK labels and journalists. For Jewish kids, meanwhile, the subculture was an 'inclusionary haven'

www.theguardian.com

And a truly twisty documentary about Idi Amin expelling Asian people from Uganda to the UK in the 1970s - it's a riot of class, religion, ethnicity & anti-colonialism being anti-racist & racist at the same time.